[HN Gopher] U.S. border surveillance towers have always been broken
___________________________________________________________________
U.S. border surveillance towers have always been broken
Author : gslin
Score : 118 points
Date : 2024-10-21 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Is there some better way to say "a security theater sculpted out
| of political pork"?
| djbusby wrote:
| Waste.
| thfuran wrote:
| "Fraud and corruption"
| marcusverus wrote:
| "United States Federal Government"
| bregma wrote:
| I dunno. That phrase sounds like poetry to me, why improve it?
| neilv wrote:
| In the photos, are those normal people's homes around those
| dystopian towers?
|
| Or are they government-owned buildings, like on a military base?
| wordofx wrote:
| A lot of people live on the borders. On both sides.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Sounds like Palmer Luckey is putting that Oculus money to good
| use. Article mentions Anduril Industries.
| advisedwang wrote:
| I wonder whether they are simply having cables cut, getting
| painted over, shot at or any of the other obvious ways to disable
| an unguarded camera.
| throwme2024 wrote:
| This article complains a lot about previous-generation, cancelled
| projects, but doesn't really investigate what's going on with the
| current surveillance towers or investigate anything at all,
| really. The linked NBC article explains that the FAA (WTF... yes,
| the airplane FAA) administer some surveillance towers, and that
| border patrol agents are mad that there's a big ticket backlog of
| broken ones to fix. That's pretty much it.
|
| Nobody investigated enough to figure out things like:
|
| * Why the FAA administer the towers and what the actual hold-up
| is towards getting a fix? Certainly at least the backstory should
| be public information.
|
| * Why the towers are broken. This is probably sensitive
| information but I'm sure some of the disgruntled border patrol
| agents would be willing to have a chat about it.
|
| * Is it a specific generation of tower that's broken? Is it some
| kind of backend issue, or just rot from deploying electronics
| into a hostile desert environment full of people trying to
| destroy them?
|
| * How do the new "AI" towers work? They're probably just drawing
| boxes around people and items, no?
|
| This is a disappointing and silly article, in my opinion. It
| doesn't convince me at all that border surveillance overall is a
| bad idea or a waste of money, just that some old programs turned
| into pork-barrel debacles. There's no fresh information or
| anything that would convince me either way on this issue.
| modeless wrote:
| This article is a little schizophrenic. It calls the cameras
| "wasteful" and "snake oil", yet the referenced NBC article calls
| them "a crucial tool". It quotes reports about failures of old
| systems from Boeing and General Dynamics, then implies without
| evidence that the same criticisms apply to the newer Anduril
| "AST" systems. There is no allegation that the AST systems are
| broken at all.
| refulgentis wrote:
| In the NBC article, "crucial tool" is a non-technical phrase by
| the article writer, it is not the memo. [1]
|
| The EFF article's expressed intent is first, that there's a
| history that goes beyond the NBC report. Then, that the history
| shows reports written by various governmental & non-
| governmental entities that the tools are not effective.
|
| I'm genuinely curious why that felt schizophrenic. ex. to me,
| even if "crucial tool" was in a government memo, I'm not sure
| why the EFF would be schizophrenic for disputing that.
|
| [1] "Nearly one-third of the cameras in the Border Patrol's
| primary surveillance system along the southern U.S. border are
| not working, according to an internal agency memo sent in early
| October, depriving border agents of a crucial tool in combating
| illegal migrant crossings."
| vkou wrote:
| One third of cameras not working might mean that there is no
| camera coverage (because the only working cameras are all
| pointed at a single storage shed), or it might mean that
| there is 100% coverage (because of redundancies in coverage.)
|
| Its a data point, but without further context, you can't draw
| meaningful conclusions.
|
| If I were to take a wild guess, one third of all security
| cameras in the world are probably not fit for purpose, and
| yet, the world keeps adding more and more of them. Smile,
| comrade.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm replying to reinforce that I'm curious about the
| schizophrenic interpretation.
|
| I don't think working through this further conversations or
| sheds light.
|
| IMHO it creates the same problem as the initial comment,
| though the avenue is different ("its too confusing to
| discuss because the EFF says they're ineffective, but the
| NBC article contains 'crucial tool" vs. "its not worth
| discussing because the memo in the NBC article can't be
| trusted, broken could mean anything")
| vkou wrote:
| I think you just have to accept that without an actual
| deep dive into this, you're not going to get the
| information necessary to have anything more than a vague
| 'someone told me something about something once' opinion.
|
| It's one thing to argue about results, it's another thing
| to argue about the minutia of the process that _gets_
| those results, and who 's at fault for what, and which
| parts of it need to be fixed up, and which are just not a
| large priority.
|
| You don't need to be a subject matter expert to know that
| your city had a power outage, and be pissed about it.
|
| You do need to be one, in order to have an informed
| opinion on _how_ to best prevent the next one.
| throwme2024 wrote:
| > I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for
| disputing that.
|
| They don't dispute that. That's what's so weird. The argument
| boils down to "historic border surveillance tools have been
| pork-barrel debacles, therefore all border surveillance tools
| are bad," but the article doesn't even manage to draw a line
| from the past, cancelled programs to the current program.
| refulgentis wrote:
| (labelling people A and B, because 1) there'd be layers of
| >, 2) I want to signal I'm not curious about you and me or
| a verbal battle, just how someone else reads the article in
| a way where EFF does not discuss if they are crucial tools)
|
| A: "I'm not sure why the EFF would be schizophrenic for
| disputing [that the program is a crucial tool]"
|
| B: "They don't dispute that"..."the argument boils down to
| "historic border surveillance tools have been pork-barrel
| debacles"
|
| B's two clauses seemed to me to be in direct contradiction
| at first blush. Ex. "debacles", seems to indicate awareness
| that they were not "crucial tools"
|
| My steelmanning is that debacle is only meant to cover they
| were costly. There's numerous bits of the article that go
| beyond cost. The EFF article cites, inter alia, GAO[1],
| DHS[2], and RAND[3] saying it wasn't shown to be effective.
|
| [1] In 2017, the GAO complained the Border Patrol's poor
| data quality made the agency "limited in its ability to
| determine the mission benefits of its surveillance
| technologies. In one case, Border Patrol stations in the
| Rio Grande Valley claimed IFTs assisted in 500 cases in
| just six months. The problem with that assertion was there
| are no IFTs in Texas or, in fact, anywhere outside
| Arizona." [2] CBP is not well-equipped to assess its
| technology effectiveness to respond to these deficiencies.
| CBP has been aware of this challenge since at least 2017
| but lacks a standard process and accurate data to overcome
| it. [3] RAND Corporation published a study funded by DHS
| that found "strong evidence" the IFT program was having no
| impact on apprehension levels at the border
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > So why does Washington keep supporting surveillance at the
| border? Why are they proposing record-level funding for a system
| that seems irreparable? Why have they abandoned their duty to
| scrutinize federal programs?
|
| This is a problem with all government programs. Not just federal.
| And not just border programs. The spending involved here is
| relatively small, and I don't understand why anyone would focus
| here instead of numerous bigger programs that are wasteful.
|
| > Well, one reason may be that treating problems at the border as
| humanitarian crises or pursuing foreign policy or immigration
| reform measures isn't as politically useful as promoting a
| phantom "invasion" that requires a military-style response.
|
| It's out of character for the EFF to make empty political
| statements like this. Obviously there is an invasion at the
| border. There are thousands of videos of people just streaming
| across land and river crossings, because of poor policing,
| surveillance, consequences, and yes, the lack of a wall (which
| many countries have). Addressing this requires a robust wall with
| surveillance and patrols along its length. In other words, more
| spending not less.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Many countries don't have 2000 mile long borders.
| runjake wrote:
| Many don't but _many_ countries _do_. Take a look at a world
| map and then note how many other countries have such long
| borders with countries with whom they have some sort of
| adversarial risk with.
|
| I took a very quick look and stopped after a couple dozen and
| still had plenty to go. This is a problem not remotely unique
| to the US.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The only land borders longer than the US-Mexico border are:
| US-Canada, Russia-Kazakhstan, Russia-Mongolia, Mongolia-
| China, Russia-China, Chile-Argentina, Bolivia-Brazil,
| India-China, and India-Bangladesh.
|
| Furthermore, the disparity between the US and Mexico in GDP
| per capita is pretty stark--over a 3x difference, far more
| than any other pair of countries with such a long land
| border. The next largest difference is India-China, and
| that's not a pairing that's conducive to economic
| migration, unlike the US-Mexico border.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Are you looking at single country pairings for the border
| size?
|
| The closest comparison, both in border length and
| economic gap is EU/non-EU, when you look at the size of
| the border along the Mediterranean and the Balkans.
|
| Another close comparison is South Africa, 4,862 km border
| (compared to US-Mexico at 3,145 km). Huge economic gap
| and even larger migration numbers.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Here's an example I've seen with my own eyes.
|
| An onsite oil rig chemical engineer for
| https://www.slb.com/ starts at $17k/year in Mexico but
| $150k in USA for the same job doing one month on, two
| week off land rig rotations.
|
| You make more money in the US working minimum wage than
| you do in most jobs in Mexico as a high skilled graduate
| of a good university like https://tec.mx.
| runjake wrote:
| I'm counting long borders as borders between country A
| and multiple other countries, with a focus on notable
| security issues[1] related to borders.
|
| One timely example might be Ukraine, with the
| Belarus/Russia border, where Belarus is a proxy for
| Russia.
|
| 1. Contraband, espionage, aggression, anti-proliferation,
| proxy attacks, etc etc.
| benopal64 wrote:
| Is the border an actual problem though? Specifically
| speaking to the US border.
|
| Is migration the number one problem that Americans struggle
| with? Or even in the top ten concerns, your average
| American holds?
|
| I have not had a single issue with migration or an
| immigrant, ever. I've never met a single person, in the US,
| with a material issue related to migration or immigration.
| I have never felt worried about being near a
| migrant/immigrant based on who they are or their behavior.
| i80and wrote:
| Makes for an excellent easy-to-sell bogeyman, though.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I guess you could guage how necessary it is based on your
| opinion of how useful you find customs, import/export
| restrictions, etc.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Is migration the number one problem that Americans
| struggle with? Or even in the top ten concerns, your
| average American holds?
|
| Per recent polling [1], it's the sixth most important
| issue. It's consistently been raised as one of the top
| concerns in polling data going back as far as I have
| political consciousness, although a decent part of the
| existence of that concern is effectively a dog whistle
| for racism.
|
| > Is the border an actual problem though?
|
| The border itself isn't the problem; the actual problem
| lays in the extremely fucked-up nature of the US
| immigration system (and the actual problems are almost
| nothing like what people are complaining about). Even for
| as long as immigration has been a major political concern
| in the US, the border "solutions" have for as long been
| lampooned for the fact that they are doing absolutely
| nothing to actually fix the problem, even as politicians
| double down on proposing harsher solutions to fix the
| thing that isn't the problem.
|
| [1]
| https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-
| and-t...
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| It is a problem if you want welfare and government health
| care programs. An influx of unskilled hungry huddled
| masses that don't even pay into the tax system will drag
| everyone's living standards down.
|
| Even if they DO pay taxes it is likely that on average
| illegal immigration would burden the social safety net.
|
| And none of this gets into the second order effects of
| immigrants increasing the supply of labor.
| consteval wrote:
| I don't follow this. I would imagine an influx of
| extremely cheap labor would raise everyone else's living
| standards, not lower them. Because everything is cheaper
| to produce. That's why Dubai has extremely extravagant
| places put right next to pseudo-slave's shanties.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Everyone? You can't imagine a situation where the surplus
| from the cheap labor is captured by a few capitalists
| while the rest suffer?
|
| I'm not saying that is happening but it doesn't take much
| imagination to see it could happen.
|
| Also if you actually have to interface with clearly
| illegal cheap labor (landscaping, construction, low
| quality catering) you'll see the pattern: a kingpin
| immigrant who only hires other immigrants with little to
| no English and a preference for being paid in cash.
| consteval wrote:
| There's a very simple and effective way to completely stop the
| immigration "crisis". The root cause is immigrating coming here
| for jobs.
|
| Okay, now if you're an American company and you hire illegal
| immigrants, everyone goes to jail. Within a year, the problem
| will disappear.
|
| Nobody would actually suggest this though, let alone the right.
| It's politically advantageous to keep around cheap pseudo-slave
| labor while simultaneously espousing semi-fascist narratives
| about "an enemy inside" (spooky!)
| doe_eyes wrote:
| I generally side with the EFF, but I find the article weirdly
| duplicitous. It's framed as a criticism of government waste, but
| would the EFF be happy if the government built a more effective
| surveillance system at the border? Of course not.
|
| If they wanted to make some sort of a precise argument against
| border surveillance, they failed to do so in this write-up.
| "Public contracts are rife with grift, so the government
| shouldn't be doing stuff" isn't likely to change too many minds.
| Animats wrote:
| > I generally side with the EFF, but I find the article weirdly
| duplicitous. It's framed as a criticism of government waste,
| but would the EFF be happy if the government built a more
| effective surveillance system at the border? Of course not.
|
| Right. Israel has towers like this. But theirs have guns.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-remote-occupation-
| wome...
| jncfhnb wrote:
| > Well, one reason may be that treating problems at the border
| as humanitarian crises or pursuing foreign policy or
| immigration reform measures isn't as politically useful as
| promoting a phantom "invasion" that requires a military-style
| response. Another reason may be that tech companies and
| military contractors wield immense amounts of influence and
| stand to make millions, if not billions, profiting off border
| surveillance. The price is paid by taxpayers, but also in the
| civil liberties of border communities and the human rights of
| asylum seekers and migrants.
|
| They are claiming it is an ineffective solution to the problem,
| conceptually, that is perpetuated by bad political and lobbyist
| incentives.
|
| The position is not that it does not work well enough. The
| position is that it would not be a viable solution regardless
| of the quality of execution. Therefore we should stop allowing
| corrupt and fear mongering politicians from manipulating public
| optics to support these surveillance companies.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| > The position is not that it does not work well enough. The
| position is that it would not be a viable solution regardless
| of the quality of execution.
|
| That's definitely the implication, but it doesn't really
| substantiate this, as far as I can tell.
|
| "Past iterations were filled with pork, therefore future ones
| must be as well, therefore this conceptually cannot work."
|
| For example, the RAND study that they said showed "strong
| evidence" that IFTs were having no effect actually... doesn't
| say that at all.
|
| IFTs actually _lowered_ apprehension levels, to which RAND
| says, "we conclude that there is strong evidence for the
| presence of a _deterrent effect_ as migrants choose to avoid
| areas surveilled by IFTs--a proposition for which there is
| also qualitative evidence outside the data. "
|
| Then it goes onto say that for every other technology type,
| they _increased_ apprehension levels, i.e. they worked. They
| didn 't seem clear on why IFTs behave differently.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the EFF but this article basically comes down to
| "X Y and Z were designed to solve problem A and they were
| implemented poorly therefore problem A is unsolvable and no one
| should even try to address problem A"
|
| This is especially ridiculous when the failures of X Y and Z came
| from administration issues (failures of oversight), picking
| shitty contractors, buying faulty equipment, etc. all of which
| are solvable/preventable.
|
| The takeaway of these past failures shouldn't be that securing
| the border is impossible and not worth even attempting. The
| takeaway should be that programs need to be meaningfully and
| intelligently invested in (maybe going with the lowest bidder or
| your personal friends/donors isn't always a good idea), and that
| there needs to be oversight and accountability to make sure that
| those funds aren't being wasted or pocketed by corrupt public
| servants and private contractors to ensure that systems are
| implemented correctly and maintained.
|
| Of course it's going to take "record-level funding" to implement
| a massive solution when previous attempts were entirely half-
| assed, designed to attract and allow for corruption, and then
| neglected. Congressional leaders and the American public should
| be shocked and outraged at the money that's been wasted and they
| should be working to design a system that avoids those pitfalls
| and actually does the job right. Ideally we should also be
| tracking down the people responsible for those past failures and
| holding them accountable too where it's possible.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| The thesis of the article is:
|
| > Surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border is a wasteful endeavor
| that is ill-equipped to respond to an ill-defined problem.
|
| This article cites efforts of doing this all the way back to
| 1997. The critical problem is not that the cameras are
| literally broken, although they seem to have struggled with
| this, but the fact that the cameras have not shown to improve
| operational results.
|
| An intelligently designed program would try to learn from these
| decades of trying the same thing unsuccessfully and try
| something else.
|
| Before confidently claiming that the problem was the quality of
| the execution, you should try to present some evidence that
| this solution is a sensible one. Claiming it would work if it
| was better is something you can do indefinitely with no
| evidence.
| autoexec wrote:
| The fact that past programs failed to collect good data or
| failed to make good use of the data they were getting does
| not imply that having data is unlikely to improve operational
| results.
|
| I think it's plainly obvious that if your goal is to stop
| people from illegally crossing the border, then monitoring
| that border is a necessity. We could hire humans to stand all
| day in watchtowers and scan for people sneaking in with just
| their human eyes, but (working) cameras have a lot of obvious
| advantages.
|
| There is plenty of evidence and data showing that cameras can
| be a highly effective part of solutions to the problem of
| monitoring. There are countless companies, governments, and
| individuals using cameras right now with great success.
| Cameras are not an unproven technology and their usefulness
| is not theoretical.
|
| I don't think that anyone would be opposed to a better option
| that would eliminate the need for cameras and sensors, but if
| one exists I've never heard of it. Cameras and sensors seem
| to be the best options we have. The cameras and sensors (when
| they were functioning) were never the problem with past
| systems. Those past problems were more like "We paid for a
| bunch of cameras but we never budgeted for anyone to respond
| to them, or to maintain them, or to maintain the systems we
| need to collect data from them". Those are all very solvable
| problems which shouldn't have happened in the first place.
| michaelt wrote:
| Seems to me if you see someone crossing the border
| illegally that's only really useful if you can apprehend
| them before you lose track of them.
|
| How would you propose to respond to detections, if the
| cameras all worked?
| autoexec wrote:
| By sending border patrol out to collect them.
|
| As much as people hate the idea of a wall, and the entire
| concept has become politicized, it would make that
| process a lot easier, but the truth is that if you're
| going to monitor a border and prevent people from
| illegally crossing it, that will involve humans having to
| drive/fly out to wherever there are people who are
| illegally crossing in order to turn them away or
| arrest/process/deport them.
| michaelt wrote:
| What would that mean in terms of camera coverage, and
| border patrol coverage?
|
| Will the border patrol get there in, say, 20 minutes? And
| we have cameras covering all the land within 20 minutes
| of the border, so we don't lose them in that time?
| autoexec wrote:
| Yeah, it'd mean you need enough camera to cover the area
| and you need to have enough people on the ground to reach
| the people crossing within a reasonable amount of time.
| There are somethings you can do to slow them down (walls
| for one) and things you can do keep an eye on them while
| people are being sent out to make contact (cameras,
| drones, planes, helicopters, satellites, etc.).
|
| More people on the ground does cost money, but the good
| news is that those government jobs would be a real boon
| for people living near the border.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Are you familiar with how large the jurisdiction claimed
| by the CBP is? It's 100 miles from any border of the
| country [1]. What exactly counts as enough camera
| coverage? Should we just cover one border? Do we need to
| expand this to the Canadian border as illegal crossings
| increase up there as well? Should we blanket the majority
| of the population in these cameras now that we've
| established how big their jurisdiction is despite low
| evidence of their usefulness for their actual job?
|
| [1] https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
| throwaway19972 wrote:
| > Seems to me if you see someone crossing the border
| illegally that's only really useful if you can apprehend
| them before you lose track of them.
|
| Will nobody acknowledge how ridiculous a concept absolute
| security of a border is? Nobody would want what this
| would actual look like--extremely violent and expensive
| with little benefit to anyone.
| autoexec wrote:
| You think it would be better to have an open boarder? No
| other country seems to think that's a good idea.
|
| What do you think the ideal solution should look like?
| Keep in mind that you'll have to defend against or allow
| into the country economic migrants looking for higher
| wages, millions of truly desperate climate refugees who
| don't have homes to go back to, as well as terrorists and
| criminals.
| artimaeis wrote:
| Consider the spectrum:
|
| Absolute border security - it is literally impossible by
| land/sea/air/tunnel to cross into the US territory from
| Mexico without rapid detection and response.
|
| ...
|
| Open border - the US does not impede general traffic from
| Mexico, bringing certain goods remains illegal but
| enforcement of this is limited to additional penalties
| after apprehension.
|
| We are pretty far from both of those right now. I don't
| think the person you initially replied to was arguing for
| an open border. But surely it's not an ideal use of
| resources to stop all of these border based crimes in
| real time?
|
| Most people are not crossing illegally. Those that do are
| going to have to actively evade those consequences as
| long as they continue an unpermitted stay. How much of
| our GDP should we spend to move "up" that spectrum? What
| benefits are we gaining by doing so? What consequences do
| we face?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly. Once "the border" became politicized, very few
| people allow themselves to think in terms of a spectrum.
| They just stand up a straw man on either extreme end and
| argue against it.
|
| Almost nobody is arguing for absolute open borders or
| absolute closed borders.
| autoexec wrote:
| > What benefits are we gaining by doing so? What
| consequences do we face?
|
| Just ask any city that has had to deal with a massive
| unexpected influx of people. Try NYC for example: https:/
| /www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...
|
| Hospitals, schools, infrastructure, social services,
| housing, they all depend on planning for funding and to
| keep pace with population avoid being overrun. Things are
| bad enough right now with the massive numbers of economic
| migrants coming into the country, but once there are
| literal billions of climate refugees things will be much
| worse unless we are prepared.
|
| Now is the time to invest in the regulation of
| immigration and defense of our borders so that we can
| safely accommodate as many of the people climate change
| displaces as we can. We also need to be thinking about
| what climate change will do to populations within the US.
|
| See for example:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/c
| lim...
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-
| america-3-millio...
|
| If you think it isn't worth the investment, even in low
| cost expenses like cameras, I can only imagine you aren't
| living near the boarder or aren't considering the refugee
| crisis that is coming.
| smegger001 wrote:
| No one? the EU seems to have done well with all of their
| member states opening boarders to theirs neighboring
| members.
| autoexec wrote:
| No one in the EU has open borders. They have agreements
| with neighbors, much in the same way you can drive to a
| neighboring state in the US without much restriction, but
| interstate travel in the US and citizens of the EU going
| over the border for a holiday are very different from the
| situation we have with our southern border (and even with
| our northern border).
| krisoft wrote:
| > No one in the EU has open borders.
|
| The relevant border policies inside the EU are literally
| called open borders. I don't know what would you call
| open borders if not what we have between EU countries.
|
| > interstate travel in the US and citizens of the EU
| going over the border for a holiday are very different
| from the situation we have with our southern border
|
| This is undeniable.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| EU internal migration is _relatively_ non-controversial,
| at least after the UK left the bloc and people realized
| how much of a trainwreck leaving the EU would be. Brexit
| happened mainly because English speakers are painfully
| stubborn monolingualists.
|
| On the other hand, EU external immigration is _extremely_
| controversial. Huge parts of the EU have an extreme far-
| right that 's polling _extremely well_ , and the
| liberal/centrist parties are all bowing to them by
| basically copypasting their entire external immigration
| playbook. The two major fronts in the EU immigration
| debate boil down to "do we _just_ turn away all asylum
| seekers or do we start deporting citizens we don 't like
| too?"
|
| The reason why this happened is that the EU _suuuuucks_
| at integrating external migrants, especially from poorer
| countries. I think I saw a statistic which was that,
| like, Turks that move to the US hate the shit out of
| Erdogan as much as native-born Americans do, but those
| that move to Germany wind up loving him more than those
| that didn 't emigrate[0]. Or something like that. The US
| at least has family migration, which means we've spent
| the last 50 years learning how to integrate basically
| everyone, which is the kind of institutional experience
| the EU's member states lack.
|
| [0] Like to the point of joining hilariously (and
| illegally) far-right biker gangs
| wyldberry wrote:
| Patiently waiting for the list of successful countries
| that don't control access to their resources via borders.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Dispatch a drone to follow until agents can respond?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| this is a sociopolitical problem, not a technical one.
|
| for instance, face recognition works, especially if we
| are tolerant of a very small % of false positives.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How would you propose to respond to detections, if the
| cameras all worked?_
|
| Facial-recognition scan plus rudimentary SIGINT to
| identify any _e.g._ cell phones or devices broadcasting a
| MAC address. I don 't like it, less because of what it
| means at the border and more in that it requires, for
| step two, doing the same surveillance across the country.
| But it's not unsolveable. We just don't particularly have
| consensus it should be solved.
| autoexec wrote:
| > We just don't particularly have consensus it should be
| solved.
|
| I think that is going to change as increasingly people
| see for themselves the negative impacts of unchecked
| immigration. I fear that most people won't be personally
| impacted until the worst of it hits (due to climate
| change) and by then it'll be too late to make the
| sensible preparations needed to offset the coming refugee
| crisis.
|
| I'm not a fan of domestic surveillance either, and
| hopefully we can place limits on its use internally to
| minimize the impacts to citizens within the US.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _think that is going to change as increasingly people
| see for themselves the negative impacts of unchecked
| immigration_
|
| Doubtful. Wealthy communities profit from the wage
| disparity and can afford to insulate themselves from the
| problem. And the voters most animated by this remain
| hyper-responsive to performative solutions.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If you take a step back, cameras merely recording when
| and where people cross the border can still be very
| useful.
|
| That way you can move your enforcement crews to where
| most people enter. That won't catch all, of course, but
| should be more performant than guessing.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| It's not plainly obvious at all. Because the border is
| fucking huge, surrounded by a vast, inhospitable desert. It
| can be tunneled under and/or more simply just trafficked
| through the formal crossings.
|
| There are some areas where cameras make sense. There are
| some areas where guards make sense. There are vast tracts
| where it's an idiotic idea.
|
| The bigger question though is whether other approaches
| besides just trying to catch and stop people could be
| better.
| autoexec wrote:
| The fact that the boarder is huge does not mean that
| monitoring it is not necessary or that it is impossible.
| The fact that tunnels exist doesn't either. We have the
| technology to detect tunnels and tunneling. The fact that
| people sneak past at busy check points doesn't make the
| situation not worth trying to address.
|
| Every area where a person could cross can and should be
| monitored. Walls, cameras, drones, satellites, sensors,
| and guards are all valid tools for border protection. The
| question just comes down to where and how they are
| deployed and maintained.
|
| > The bigger question though is whether other approaches
| besides just trying to catch and stop people could be
| better.
|
| No one so far has managed to come up with an anything
| better. Have you?
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| I've always thought the real answer was to stop the
| businesses from hiring people. Make an actually useful
| national ID system that employers can use to identify if
| someone is allowed to work in the US, and then come down
| like the hammer of god on anyone found to be employing
| people under the table.
|
| People come here for economic opportunity. Remove the
| opportunity for people who enter without permission, and
| they stop coming. And that sort of solution deals with
| more than just border crossings.
| jkestner wrote:
| Yes, you could stop it at the point of demand. I remember
| AZ implemented eVerify or some such, don't know what
| effect or loopholes it had. In Texas:
| Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that
| would make it harder for businesses to employ
| undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start
| ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that
| they're cracking down on migrants, politicians, including
| Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up
| their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid
| stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants
| and jobs in the state's interior.
|
| https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-
| tex...
| autoexec wrote:
| I agree that that would stop a lot of the people crossing
| illegally today. It's a great idea! I wouldn't help with
| people crossing for criminal activity and it ignores the
| looming threat of billions of climate refugees coming
| because their survival depends on gaining entrance into
| another country.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| There is actually a large volume of research on what
| would work better than walls and surveillance systems.
| Scaremongering politicians don't care to mention it.
|
| The number one observation is that ports of entries are
| the largest area for illegal entry and violence and drug
| smuggling. Expediting bureaucracy there and improving the
| staffing of these areas would be far more effective than
| cameras watching the desert or god forbid some idiot's
| delusion of "walls"
|
| I'm not even arguing the politics of this. Focus the
| efforts on areas that are actual sources of problems.
| Stop appealing to idiots who want imagery of guns and
| fortifications. That's not effective operations. The
| southern border patrol is underfunded. Adding more people
| to help manage the hotspots is more effective than
| cameras in cold spots.
| thechao wrote:
| I had a great-grandfather that was sent along the
| Southern border to try to map it -- he was a surveyor. A
| lot of times he'd be at the top of a canyon, and the next
| place to drop the pin would be at the bottom. He'd just
| chuck the pin into the canyon and mark the point as
| "passable by neither man nor mule".
|
| People who've never visited the border -- especially in
| the western bits of it -- have very little idea how
| absolutely inhospitable it is.
| autoexec wrote:
| The good news is that there aren't a lot of illegal
| crossings to worry about at those absolutely inhospitable
| "passable by neither man nor mule" locations. That means
| that they can be electronically monitored but otherwise
| more or less left alone while the focus can be on those
| areas where people absolutely can and regularly do cross.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Or they could be ignored entirely and resources could be
| diverted into more effective measures
|
| Do you see the nonsense of your own argument? You're
| advocating for surveillance installations into a place
| that you think is easily ignored
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| This is a bigger part of the answer than most realize.
|
| The border is some of the most rugged and remote terrain
| on Earth. A lot (most?) of it is in country not well
| served by paved roads, cell service, electricity, etc.
| Even if you could have some sort of magic sensor network
| that alerted you with perfect accuracy every time someone
| crossed the border, the logistics of responding to every
| single crossing are incredibly hard. There are plenty of
| sections where there isn't even a road on the border.
|
| How are you going to respond to a border crossing alert
| 10+ miles from the nearest agent, in terrain where it
| will take hours to get there by land?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _I think it 's plainly obvious that if your goal is to stop
| people from illegally crossing the border, then monitoring
| that border is a necessity._
|
| This is the goal of fewer people in power than you think,
| and keep in mind there is more border than the one between
| Mexico and the US. Most undocumented people have flown here
| and simply overstayed their visa. On the other hand,
| congress has been saber rattling about the southern border
| my entire life and has done little about it. It's useful as
| a wedge issue though, so from time to time, you'll see some
| spending a lot of money on walls and towers that just
| aren't very effective (and maybe callously separate some
| kids form their families).
|
| On the other hand, undocumented people pay billions in
| taxes, work for cheap and make services (like dining,
| construction, landscaping, cosmetology, etc.) cheaper. The
| monied and political classes want to keep this status quo.
| kurthr wrote:
| How can you make political hay out of a solved problem?
|
| Solving it, now that would be a BIG PROBLEM! If it's not
| immigrants then you would have to blame someone else
| and/or more explicitly cite race/ethnicity/religion.
|
| Seriously, when you have a significant group of people
| regularly claiming on TV that 20million people have
| illegally entered the country in the last 4 years, that's
| both hilarious and dangerous.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > a significant group of people regularly claiming on TV
| that 20million people have illegally entered the country
| in the last 4 years,
|
| Plus all of them _somehow_ managing to cast totally-
| undetectable votes in elections, traveling to specific
| swing states, for no direct gain to themselves even
| though getting caught would mean deportation, while
| uniformly maintaining superhuman levels of discipline and
| secrecy. /s
| autoexec wrote:
| It's true that government has been willing to be lax in
| terms of border security because they want to exploit
| illegal immigrants as basically slave labor. Personally I
| think having a large underclass of easily exploitable
| poor people who don't have the rights and protections the
| rest of us enjoy is abhorrent and morally unjustifiable.
|
| It has led to this situation where token gestures are
| made, largely to appease the Americans living in/near
| border towns and suffering under the weight of the
| negative consequences.
|
| I don't know how long they'll be able to pay lip service
| to the problem though. There will be literal billions of
| climate refugees coming in the near future and they won't
| be economic migrants looking for higher wages. They will
| be genuinely desperate and for them getting past the
| border of another country will be a matter of survival.
| With a well secured border and carefully regulated
| immigration the US should be able to take a lot of those
| refugees in without being overwhelmed by them. If we're
| not prepared for it in advance, what we'll be left with
| will be far from the status quo the shortsighted have
| been trying so hard to preserve.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _an ill-defined problem_
|
| The problem is unauthorized border crossings. What about that
| is ill defined?
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Well, you've presented an elementary level view of the
| problem. The issue is that solving a problem effectively
| often requires defining the problem and its mechanics and
| drivers in greater detail to identify solutions that are to
| fit to address the nuances of the issue.
|
| Otherwise you end up with billions of dollars spent on a
| useless wall.
| ajross wrote:
| In the interests of optimization: maybe we could just not?
| Seems like the Occam solution here would just be to (1)
| rigorously enforce employment eligibility for all employers
| (not employees!), something that is done routinely at the
| salaried level already and has an existing bureaucracy in place
| and (2) hand out green cards like candy for people working
| positions for which there are openings. Problem solved, QED. No
| border towers needed, and "illegal" migration stops at exactly
| the level where it's required, because migrants obviously won't
| come in excess of the jobs available.
|
| Obviously that's not the actual problem you're trying to solve,
| because the actual problem is political and ethnographic (c.f.
| Musk's thread that this will be the "last election" because of
| something to do with demographic change). But this is HN, and
| it seems like it's worth discussing actual solutions.
| autoexec wrote:
| The illegal immigration problem can't be solved purely by
| making sure that anyone coming into the country illegally
| cannot be employed. Too many jobs are paid under the table
| and while almost all of the people entering illegally today
| are economic migrants looking for higher paying jobs, in the
| very near future we'll be looking at floods of climate
| refugees who literally won't have homes to go back to. Having
| otherwise open borders or just handing out green cards to
| anyone who asks also fails to address security concerns. No
| matter what, we need to be able to monitor and regulate who
| is coming in to the country and what they are bringing in
| with them (drugs, weapons, human trafficking victims, etc).
|
| I agree that we should be strongly enforcing employment
| eligibility as well and that it would do a lot of good, but
| doing that won't mean that we can just leave our borders open
| and unmonitored.
| ajross wrote:
| > The immigration problem can't be solved
|
| Seems, again, like you need to first define what "the
| immigration problem" really is. I mean, if you mean it like
| I think you mean it, the truth is a lot of us don't think
| that's a problem worth solving at all. This isn't the
| forum, obviously, but maybe step back and have some
| discussions across the aisle before planning out policy.
| autoexec wrote:
| It seems like the people who don't think illegal
| immigration is a problem in the first place are living
| very far from the border and don't see the impacts, or
| are unaware of the impending crisis of billions of
| extremely desperate climate refugees, or don't consider
| the risks or criminals and terrorists entering and
| leaving the country without any record to be a legitimate
| concern.
| ajross wrote:
| With all respect, that sounds like a campaign speech, so
| I'm almost guaranteed to tune it out. Do you have links
| that quantify all that stuff to demonstrate why it's a
| problem?
| autoexec wrote:
| Massive numbers of people suddenly showing up in your
| town is a real problem:
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632902/major-cities-
| are-s...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc
| -ma...
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/denver-struggles-
| cope-4...
|
| Climate refugees are coming and it's a problem:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/world/climate-global-
| displace...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/c
| lim...
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/migration-climate-
| environment-re...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the people who don 't think illegal immigration is a
| problem in the first place are living very far from the
| border_
|
| I used to live in New York. It didn't hit home until we
| had our own refugee crisis. This is absolutely something
| you don't get a handle on until you've seen it in person.
| (We also have a bad habit of conflating legal high-
| skilled immigration, legal low-skilled immigration,
| refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants.)
| HaZeust wrote:
| While I get where you're coming from, I think there's a
| middle ground that isn't just "let everyone in" or "shut
| it all down." One idea is a market-based immigration
| system--basically, you pay an entry fee to immigrate,
| which adjusts based on things like age. So younger people
| who have their whole working lives ahead of them would
| pay less, older folks would pay more.
|
| This could replace the broken discretionary system we
| have now, where it's all about family ties and not what
| we need economically. Plus, it would cut down on
| smuggling, raise a ton of revenue, and make immigration
| more efficient. It's a practical way to let people in,
| without completely open borders, and would bring in the
| workers we actually need.
|
| It's not about scrapping border security--just rethinking
| how we approach immigration to make it work better for
| everyone.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Sounds like a job for the NSA. With their surveillance apparatus,
| data lake, and analysis tools, they'd be able to make quick work
| of tracking and apprehending illegal border entries...
|
| That would be a much better way to spend their time and money
| than invading the privacy of actual US citizens.
| smittywerben wrote:
| The EFF has yearly events celebrating the life of Aaron Swartz.
| I'm afraid to state a theory of what happened. I don't know what
| to think. Is that what happened?
| bitcurious wrote:
| It's incredibly frustrating that at a certain size non-profits
| seemingly loose the ability to focus on the issues that built
| them. The EFF no business chiming in on immigration policies -
| sick to tech and information freedom.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > sick to tech and information freedom
|
| Do you not understand that the tools the government uses to
| control non-citizens are turned inward all the time? Military
| tech is tech, surveillance tech is tech. They are not chiming
| in on 'immigration policies', they are chiming in on technology
| used to actually implement those policies. If all you care
| about is not having tracking pixels in your personal consumer
| browser you're going to miss the most dangerous encroachments
| on your freedom.
| tw04 wrote:
| The whole thing is kind of silly IMO, and all political theater.
|
| What is the problem statement? If the problem statement is:
| people are coming into this country illegally, and we need to
| stop that, then the next question is: why are they coming here?
|
| If the answer is: to find work because there are no opportunities
| at home - that's easy to solve. Anyone caught employing illegal
| immigrants gets mandatory prison time. You would find the work
| would very, very quickly dry up removing the basic reason for
| coming here.
|
| Folks fleeing political violence aren't illegal, they have a
| valid political asylum claim and will be processed much quicker
| when the illegal folks are no longer flooding the border.
| Yeul wrote:
| You can have a undocumented immigrant from Nicaragua mow you
| lawn or hire a fully compliant landscaping company- who will
| probably still employ an undocumented migrant.
|
| I myself have paid handymen under the table.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| I think the OP's point was that you are part of the problem,
| and that the landscaping CEO should go to jail.
|
| I'm an American who has lived and worked in Mexico. I found
| it quite funny that the Mexicans i worked with always
| complained about the Guatemalans coming over the border and
| how they needed better border security.
|
| i'm of the opinion that freedom and abortion rights are more
| important to Americans than being at population replacement
| rates so our only hope of surviving as a nation is with a
| huge influx of legal immigrants.
|
| We need to build a border & make it much easier to become a
| US citizen while making it a felony for hiring an
| undocumented immigrant.
| 1024core wrote:
| They (Congress? GAO? DHS? ) should have a separate department
| certify and monitor these sensors. Make it this department's sole
| job to keep this sensor network running properly.
| tcdent wrote:
| > Boeing was the main contractor blamed for SBINet's failure
|
| Why is this not surprising anymore?
| Zigurd wrote:
| Net migration between the US and Mexico is small. Pew research
| numbers:
|
| _An estimated 870,000 Mexican migrants came to the U.S. between
| 2013 and 2018, while an estimated 710,000 left the U.S. for
| Mexico during that period. That translates to net migration of
| about 160,000 people from Mexico to the U.S., according to
| government data from both countries._
|
| That's 160,000 net in-migration from Mexico over 5 years. How
| much would you spend to bring that to zero?
|
| You might think a bunch of tech people would profile performance
| before deciding what to optimize.
| mhuffman wrote:
| If you mean people that lived in Mexico, that may be. If you
| mean people that crossed from Mexico into the US across the
| Southern Border, those numbers are dwarfed. These are just the
| numbers that we know for sure from observation or
| interaction[0]
|
| [0]https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-
| enc...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-21 23:01 UTC)