by Greg Beato
In America today, an expanding network of surveillance cameras
tracks our bank deposits, our shopping expeditions, and our
workplace trysts in the supply closet. When we venture online,
hundreds of companies diligently note the websites we consume, the
files we download, and the comments we make. Our smartphones are
even worse stool pigeons than our computers, constantly keeping
tabs on our precise geographic coordinates. If you grow weary of
such oppressive attention, if you long for a little Waldenesque
solitude outside the crosshairs of our panoptic culture, there is
still one place you can go to get away from it all: the borderlands
of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
That situation is ironic, of course. Long before Google Street
View existed, long before we started sending out alerts every time
we breached the perimeter of Starbucks, the U.S. government
embarked on an epic quest to establish a “virtual” fence along the
Mexican border. The year was 1997. And while the U.S. Border
Patrol’s surveillance technology then consisted primarily of
sunglasses, border hawks and bureaucrats dreamed of a thin
technological line of motion sensors, infrared cameras, and
video-driven command centers producing the same sort of omniscience
we now exert over 7-Eleven parking lots. To realize this bold but
improbable vision, Congress approved funds for a pilot project
called the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System, or
ISIS.
Thus began a long stretch of failure: cameras that wilted from
the heat when thermometers hit a relatively temperate 70 degrees,
ground sensors that could not tell a native cactus from an illegal
intruder, inept project management, insinuations of fraud and
corruption. Periodically, the quest would be canceled and then
revived under a different brand name. ISIS begat America’s Shield
Initiative, which begat the Secure Border Initiative Network, or
SBINet...
Now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ready to give
the virtual fence still another go. According to the trade
publication Defense News, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol
(CBP), a division of DHS, has earmarked $91.8 million in its fiscal
2013 budget for the construction of what it calls “integrated fixed
towers.”
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