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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.

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.

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.

> an ill-defined problem

The problem is unauthorized border crossings. What about that is ill defined?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.
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."

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Sounds like Palmer Luckey is putting that Oculus money to good use. Article mentions Anduril Industries.
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.

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.
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.
Is there some better way to say "a security theater sculpted out of political pork"?
I dunno. That phrase sounds like poetry to me, why improve it?
Waste.
"Fraud and corruption"
"United States Federal Government"
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.
> 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.

You are under the misapprehension that the US government is held back from tyranny by shitty technology. This is false - you could build a totalitarian dictatorship with near-absolute control with 1940s technology. Other states did.

>Military tech is tech

I want the US military to have the best guns, best tanks, best nukes, best drones, best planes, best satellites, best boats. And spoilers: they do. Yet somehow that has not encroached on our lives. Adding “best surveillance of our foreign borders” does not for a dictatorship make.

>They are not chiming in on ‘immigration policies’

I’m not sure how else you can read this statement in the concluding paragraph: “Well, one reason may be that treating problems at the border as humanitarian crises.” Agree or disagree, this is pure domestic politics.

I donate fairly regularly to EFF but I don’t really have a problem with the government having cameras on the border to spot illegal migrants. That’s the kind of surveillance we actually need rather than combing through gmail and SMS messages between teenagers.
These are selfish self-centered statists who cosplay as libertarians because they just want to buy weed and watch porn without the government knowing.
I'm not American and a bit bemused by the US border but I note that when last year Texas put razor wire on the border to stop people crossing there was outrage from the federal government who sent people to cut it. The issue seems to be politics and policy as to whether you want people crossing or not rather than tech.

I was also surprised to see on 60 Minutes coach loads of middle class Chinese crossing the Mex/US border who'd bought some fly to the border and claim asylum in the US package. Immigration can be an odd business.

Immigration and abortion are favored as political wedge issues because the targets of the policy don't get a say in elections, and unlike veterans, can't speak out against the politicians who use them as political props.
> Boeing was the main contractor blamed for SBINet's failure

Why is this not surprising anymore?

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.

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.

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.

In the photos, are those normal people's homes around those dystopian towers?

Or are they government-owned buildings, like on a military base?

A lot of people live on the borders. On both sides.
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.

> 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...

> 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.

> 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.