Some of the most picturesque landscapes in the United States can be found along the border with Mexico. Yet, from San Diego’s beaches to the Sonoran Desert, from Big Bend National Park to the Boca Chica wetlands, we see vistas marred by the sinister spread of surveillance technology, courtesy of the federal government.  

EFF refuses to let this blight grow without documenting it, exposing it, and finding ways to fight back alongside the communities that live in the shadow of this technological threat to human rights.  

Here’s a galley of images representing our work and the new developments we’ve discovered in border surveillance in 2024.  

1. Mapping Border Surveillance  

EFF’s stand-up display of surveillance at the US-Mexico border. Source: EFF

EFF published the first iteration of our map of surveillance towers at the U.S.-Mexico border in Spring 2023, having pinpointed the precise location of 290 towers, a fraction of what we knew might be out there. A year- –and- –a -half later, with the help of local residents, researchers, and search-and-rescue groups, our map now includes more than 500 towers.  

In many cases, the towers are brand new, with some going up as recently as this fall. We’ve also added the location of surveillance aerostats, checkpoint license plate readers, and face recognition at land ports of entry. 

In addition to our online map, we also created a 10’ x 7’ display that we debuted at “Regardless of Frontiers: The First Amendment and the Exchange of Ideas Across Borders,” a symposium held by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in October. If your institution would be interested in hosting it, please email us at aos@eff.org. 

2. Infrastructures of Control

The Infrastructures of Control exhibit at University of Arizona. Source: EFF

Two University of Arizona geographers—Colter Thomas and Dugan Meyer—used our map to explore the border, driving on dirt roads and hiking in the desert, to document the infrastructure that comprises the so-called “virtual wall.” The result: “Infrastructures of Control,” a photography exhibit in April at the University of Arizona that also included a near-actual size replica of an “autonomous surveillance tower.”   

You can read our interview with Thomas and Meyer here.

3. An Old Tower, a New Lease in Calexico 

A remote video surveillance system in Calexico, Calif. Source: EFF

Way back in 2000, the Immigration and Naturalization Service—which oversaw border security prior to the creation of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — leased a small square of land in a public park in Calexico, Calif., where it then installed one of the earliest border surveillance towers. The lease lapsed in 2020 and with plans for a massive surveillance upgrade looming, CBP rushed to try to renew the lease this year. 

This was especially concerning because of CBP’s new strategy of combining artificial intelligence with border camera feeds.  So EFF teamed up with the Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition, American Friends Service Committee, Calexico Needs Change, and Southern Border Communities Coalition to try to convince the Calexico City Council to either reject the lease or demand that CBP enact better privacy protections for residents in the neighboring community and children playing in Nosotros Park. Unfortunately, local politics were not in our favor. However, resisting border surveillance is a long game, and EFF considers it a victory that this tower even got a public debate at all. 

4. Aerostats Up in the Air 

The Tactical Aerostat System at Santa Teresa Station. Source: Battalion Search and Rescue (CC BY)

CBP seems incapable of developing a coherent strategy when it comes to tactical aerostats—tethered blimps equipped with long-range, high-definition cameras. In 2021, the agency said it wanted to cancel the program, which involved four aerostats in the Rio Grande Valley, before reversing itself. Then in 2022, CBP launched new aerostats in Nogales, Ariz. and Columbus, N.M. and announced plans to launch 17 more within a year.  

But by 2023, CBP had left the program out of its proposed budget, saying the aerostats would be decommissioned. 

And yet, in fall 2024, CBP launched a new aerostat at the Santa Teresa Border Patrol Station in New Mexico. Our friends at Battalion Search & Rescue gathered photo evidence for us. Soon after, CBP issued a new solicitation for the aerostat program and a member of Congress told Border Report that the aerostats may be upgraded and as many as 12 new ones may be acquired by CBP via the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, one of CBP’s larger Tethered Aerostats Radar Systems in Eagle Pass, Texas was down for most of the year after deflating in high winds. CBP has reportedly not been interested in paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it up again.   

5. New Surveillance in Southern Arizona

A Buckeye Camera on a pole along the border fence near Sasabe, Ariz. Source: EFF

Buckeye Cameras are motion-triggered cameras that were originally designed for hunters and ranchers to spot wildlife, but border enforcement authorities—both federal and state/local—realized years ago that they could be used to photograph people crossing the border. These cameras are often camouflaged (e.g. hidden in trees, disguised as garbage, or coated in sand).  

Now, CBP is expanding their use of Buckeye Cameras. During a trip to Sasabe, Ariz., we discovered the CBP is now placing Buckeye Cameras in checkpoints, welding them to the border fence, and installing metal poles, wrapped in concertina wire, with Buckeye Cameras at the top.

A surveillance tower along the highway west of Tucson. Source: EFF

On that same trip to Southern Arizona, EFF (along with the Infrastructures of Control geographers) passed through a checkpoint west of Tucson, where previously we had identified a relocatable surveillance tower. But this time it was gone. Why, we wondered? Our question was answered just a minute or two later, when we spotted a new surveillance tower on a nearby hill-top, a new model that we had not previously seen deployed in the wild.  

6. Artificial Intelligence  

A graphic from a January 2024 “Industry Day” event. Source: Custom & Border Protection

CBP and other agencies regularly hold “Industry Days” to brief contractors on the new technology and capabilities the agency may want to buy in the near future. In January, EFF attended one such  “Industry Day” designed to bring tech vendors up-to-speed on the government’s horrific vision of a border secured by artificial intelligence (see the graphic above for an example of that vision). 

A graphic from a January 2024 “Industry Day” event. Source: Custom & Border Protection

At this event, CBP released the convoluted flow chart above as part of slide show. Since it’s so difficult to parse, here’s the best sense we can make out of it:. When someone crosses the border, it triggers an unattended ground sensor (UGS), and then a camera autonomously detects, identifies, classifies and tracks the person, handing them off camera to camera, and the AI system eventually alerts Border Patrol to dispatch someone to intercept them for detention. 

7. Congress in Virtual Reality

Rep. Scott Peters on our VR tour of the border. Source: Peters’ Instagram

We search for surveillance on the ground. We search for it in public records. We search for it in satellite imagery. But we’ve also learned we can use virtual reality in combination with Google Streetview not only to investigate surveillance, but also to introduce policymakers to the realities of the policies they pass. This year, we gave Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego) and his team a tour of surveillance at the border in VR, highlighting the impact on communities.  

“[EFF] reminded me of the importance of considering cost-effectiveness and Americans’ privacy rights,” Peters wrote afterward in a social media. 

We also took members of Rep. Mark Amodei’s (R-Reno) district staff on a similar tour. Other Congressional staffers should contact us at aos@eff.org if you’d like to try it out.  

Learn more about how EFF uses VR to research the border in this interview and this lightning talk.  

8. Indexing Border Tech Companies 

An HDT Global vehicle at the 2024 Border Security Expo. Source: Dugan Meyer (CC0 1.0 Universal)

In partnership with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, EFF and University of Nevada, Reno student journalist Andrew Zuker built a dataset of hundreds of vendors marketing technology to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. As part of this research, Zuker journeyed to El Paso, Texas for the Border Security Expo, where he systematically gathered information from all the companies promoting their surveillance tools. You can read Zuker’s firsthand report here.

9. Plataforma Centinela Inches Skyward 

An Escorpión unit, part of the state of Chihuahua’s Plataforma Centinela project. Source: EFF

In fall 2023, EFF released its report on the Plataforma Centinela, a massive surveillance network being built by the Mexican state of Chihuahua in Ciudad Juarez that will include 10,000+ cameras, face recognition, artificial intelligence, and tablets that police can use to access all this data from the field. At its center is the Torre Centinela, a 20-story headquarters that was supposed to be completed in 2024.  

The site of the Torre Centinela in downtown Ciudad Juarez. Source: EFF

We visited Ciudad Juarez in May 2024 and saw that indeed, new cameras had been installed along roadways, and the government had begun using “Escorpión” mobile surveillance units, but the tower was far from being completed. A reporter who visited in November confirmed that not much more progress had been made, although officials claim that the system will be fully operational in 2025.

10. EFF’s Border Surveillance Zine 

Do you want to review even more photos of surveillance that can be found at the border, whether they’re planted in the ground, installed by the side of the road, or floating in the air? Download EFF’s new zine in English or Spanish—or if you live a work in the border region, email us as aos@eff.org and we’ll mail you hard copies.  

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has failed to address six out of six main privacy protections for three of its border surveillance programs—surveillance towers, aerostats, and unattended ground sensors—according to a new assessment by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

In the report, GAO compared the policies for these technologies against six of the key Fair Information Practice Principles that agencies are supposed to use when evaluating systems and processes that may impact privacy, as dictated by both Office of Management and Budget guidance and the Department of Homeland Security's own rules.

These include:

• Data collection. "DHS should collect only PII [Personally Identifiable Information] that is directly relevant and necessary to accomplish the specified purpose(s)."
• Purpose specification. "DHS should specifically articulate the purpose(s) for which the PII is intended to be used."
• Information sharing. "Sharing PII outside the department should be for a purpose compatible with the purpose for which the information was collected."
• Data security. "DHS should protect PII through appropriate security safeguards against risks such as loss, unauthorized access or use, destruction, modification, or unintended or inappropriate disclosure."
• Data retention. "DHS should only retain PII for as long as is necessary to fulfill the specified purpose(s)."
• Accountability. "DHS should be accountable for complying with these principles, including by auditing the actual use of PII to demonstrate compliance with these principles and all applicable privacy protection requirements."

These baseline privacy elements for the three border surveillance technologies were not addressed in any "technology policies, standard operating procedures, directives, or other documents that direct a user in how they are to use a Technology," according to GAO's review.

CBP operates hundreds of surveillance towers along both the northern and southern borders, some of which are capable of capturing video more than seven miles away. The agency has six large aerostats (essentially tethered blimps) that use radar along the southern border, with others stationed in the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico. The agency also operates a series of smaller aerostats that stream video in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, with the newest one installed this fall in southeastern New Mexico. And the report notes deficiencies with CBP's linear ground detection system, a network of seismic sensors and cameras that are triggered by movement or footsteps.

The GAO report underlines EFF's concerns that the privacy of people who live and work in the borderlands is violated when federal agencies deploy militarized, high-tech programs to confront unauthorized border crossings. The rights of border communities are too often treated as acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of border security.

CBP defended its practices by saying that it does, to some extent, address FIPS in its Privacy Impact Assessments, documents written for public consumption. GAO rejected this claim, saying that these assessments are not adequate in instructing agency staff on how to protect privacy when deploying the technologies and using the data that has been collected.

In its recommendations, the GAO calls on the CBP Commissioner to "require each detection, observation, and monitoring technology policy to address the privacy protections in the Fair Information Practice Principles." But EFF calls on Congress to hold CBP to account and stop approving massive spending on border security technologies that the agency continues to operate irresponsibly.

A new bombshell scoop from NBC News revealed an internal U.S. Border Patrol memo claiming that 30 percent of camera towers that compose the agency's "Remote Video Surveillance System" (RVSS) program are broken. According to the report, the memo describes "several technical problems" affecting approximately 150 towers.

Except, this isn't a bombshell. What should actually be shocking is that Congressional leaders are acting shocked, like those who recently sent a letter about the towers to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. These revelations simply reiterate what people who have been watching border technology have known for decades: Surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border is a wasteful endeavor that is ill-equipped to respond to an ill-defined problem.

Yet, after years of bipartisan recognition that these programs were straight-up boondoggles, there seems to be a competition among political leaders to throw the most money at programs that continue to fail.

Official oversight reports about the failures, repeated breakages, and general ineffectiveness of these camera towers have been public since at least the mid-2000s. So why haven't border security agencies confronted the problem in the last 25 years? One reason is that these cameras are largely political theater; the technology dazzles publicly, then fizzles quietly. Meanwhile, communities that should be thriving at the border are treated like a laboratory for tech companies looking to cash in on often exaggerated—if not fabricated—homeland security threats.

The Acronym Game

EFF is mapping surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico border

In fact, the history of camera towers at the border is an ugly cycle. First, Border Patrol introduces a surveillance program with a catchy name and big promises. Then a few years later, oversight bodies, including Congress, conclude it's an abject mess. But rather than abandon the program once and for all, border security officials come up with a new name, slap on a fresh coat of paint, and continue on. A few years later, history repeats.

In the early 2000s, there was the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System (ISIS), with the installation of RVSS towers in places like Calexico, California and Nogales, Arizona, which was later became the America's Shield Initiative (ASI). After those failures, there was Project 28 (P-28), the first stage of the Secure Border Initiative (SBInet). When that program was canceled, there were various new programs like the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan, which became the Southwest Border Technology Plan. Border Patrol introduced the Integrated Fixed Tower (IFT) program and the RVSS Update program, then the Automated Surveillance Tower (AST) program. And now we've got a whole slew of new acronyms, including the Integrated Surveillance Tower (IST) program and the Consolidated Towers and Surveillance Equipment (CTSE) program.

Feeling overwhelmed by acronyms? Welcome to the shell game of border surveillance. Here's what happens whenever oversight bodies take a closer look.

ISIS and ASI

An RVSS from the early 2000s in Calexico, California.

Let's start with the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System (ISIS), a program comprised of towers, sensors and databases originally launched in 1997 by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. A few years later, INS was reorganized into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and ISIS became part of the newly formed Customs & Border Protection (CBP).

It was only a matter of years before the DHS Inspector General concluded that ISIS was a flop: "ISIS remote surveillance technology yielded few apprehensions as a percentage of detection, resulted in needless investigations of legitimate activity, and consumed valuable staff time to perform video analysis or investigate sensor alerts."

During Senate hearings, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), complained about a "total breakdown in the camera structures," and that the U.S. government "bought cameras that didn't work."

Around 2004, ISIS was folded into the new America's Shield Initiative (ASI), which officials claimed would fix those problems. CBP Commissioner Robert Bonner even promoted ASI as a "critical part of CBP’s strategy to build smarter borders." Yet, less than a year later, Bonner stepped down, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the ASI had numerous unresolved issues necessitating a total reevaluation. CBP disputed none of the findings and explained it was dismantling ASI in order to move onto something new that would solve everything: the Secure Border Initiative (SBI).

Reflecting on the ISIS/ASI programs in 2008, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) said, "What we found was a camera and sensor system that was plagued by mismanagement, operational problems, and financial waste. At that time, we put the Department on notice that mistakes of the past should not be repeated in SBInet." 

You can guess what happened next. 

P-28 and SBInet

The subsequent iteration was called Project 28, which then evolved into the Secure Border Initiative's SBInet, starting in the Arizona desert. 

In 2010, the DHS Chief Information Officer summarized its comprehensive review: "'Project 28,' the initial prototype for the SBInet system, did not perform as planned. Project 28 was not scalable to meet the mission requirements for a national comment [sic] and control system, and experienced significant technical difficulties." 

A DHS graphic illustrating the SBInet concept

Meanwhile, bipartisan consensus had emerged about the failure of the program, due to the technical problems as well as contracting irregularities and cost overruns.

As Rep. Christopher Carney (D-PA) said in his prepared statement during Congressional hearings:

P–28 and the larger SBInet program are supposed to be a model of how the Federal Government is leveraging technology to secure our borders, but Project 28, in my mind, has achieved a dubious distinction as a trifecta of bad Government contracting: Poor contract management; poor contractor performance; and a poor final product.

Rep. Rogers' remarks were even more cutting: "You know the history of ISIS and what a disaster that was, and we had hoped to take the lessons from that and do better on this and, apparently, we haven’t done much better. "

Perhaps most damning of all was yet another GAO report that found, "SBInet defects have been found, with the number of new defects identified generally increasing faster than the number being fixed—a trend that is not indicative of a system that is maturing." 

In January 2011, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano canceled the $3-billion program.

IFTs, RVSSs, and ASTs

Following the termination of SBInet, the Christian Science Monitor ran the naive headline, "US cancels 'virtual fence' along Mexican border. What's Plan B?" Three years later, the newspaper answered its own question with another question, "'Virtual' border fence idea revived. Another 'billion dollar boondoggle'?"

Boeing was the main contractor blamed for SBINet's failure, but Border Patrol ultimately awarded one of the biggest new contracts to Elbit Systems, which had been one of Boeing's subcontractors on SBInet. Elbit began installing IFTs (again, that stands for "Integrated Fixed Towers") in many of the exact same places slated for SBInet. In some cases, the equipment was simply swapped on an existing SBInet tower.

Meanwhile, another contractor, General Dynamics Information Technology, began installing new RVSS towers and upgrading old ones as part of the RVSS-U program. Border Patrol also started installing hundreds of "Autonomous Surveillance Towers" (ASTs) by yet another vendor, Anduril Industries, embracing the new buzz of artificial intelligence.

An Autonomous Surveillance Tower and an RVSS tower along the Rio Grande.

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.

A few years later, the DHS Inspector General issued yet another report indicating not much had improved:

CBP faced additional challenges that reduced the effectiveness of its existing technology. Border Patrol officials stated they had inadequate personnel to fully leverage surveillance technology or maintain current information technology systems and infrastructure on site. Further, we identified security vulnerabilities on some CBP servers and workstations not in compliance due to disagreement about the timeline for implementing DHS configuration management requirements.

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.

Overall, these deficiencies have limited CBP’s ability to detect and prevent the illegal entry of noncitizens who may pose threats to national security.

Around that same time, the 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, and only "weak" and "inconclusive" evidence that the RVSS towers were having any effect on apprehensions.

And yet, border authorities and their supporters in Congress are continuing to promote unproven, AI-driven technologies as the latest remedy for years of failures, including the ones voiced in the memo obtained by NBC News. These systems involve cameras controlled by algorithms that automatically identify and track objects or people of interest. But in an age when algorithmic errors and bias are being identified nearly everyday in every sector including law enforcement, it is unclear how this technology has earned the trust of the government.

History Keeps Repeating

That brings us today, with reportedly 150 or more towers out of service. 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?

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 defense 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.

But perhaps the biggest reason this history keeps repeating itself is that no one is ever really held accountable for wasting potentially billions of dollars on high-tech snake oil.

This post was co-written by EFF research intern Andrew Zuker.

Whenever government officials generate fear about the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration, they also generate dollars–hundreds of millions of dollars–for tech conglomerates and start-ups.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today has released the U.S. Border-Homeland Security Technology Dataset, a multilayered dataset of the vendors who supply or market the technology for the U.S. government’s increasingly AI-powered homeland security efforts, including the so-called “virtual wall” of surveillance along the southern border with Mexico.

The four-part dataset includes a hand-curated directory that profiles more than 230 companies that manufacture, market or sell technology products and services, including DNA-testing, ground sensors, and counter-drone systems, to U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) components engaged in border security and immigration enforcement. Vendors on this list are either verified federal contract holders, or have sought to do business with immigration/border authorities or local law enforcement along the border, through activities such as advertising homeland security products on their websites and exhibiting at border security conferences.

It features companies often in the spotlight, including Elbit Systems and Anduril Industries, but also lesser-known contractors, such as surveillance vendors Will-Burt Company and Benchmark. Many companies also supply the U.S. Department of Defense as part of the pipeline from battlefields to the borderlands.

The spreadsheet includes a separate list of 463 companies that have registered for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement "Industry Day" events and a roster of 134 members of the DHS-founded Homeland Security Technology Consortium. Researchers will also find a compilation of the annual Top 100 contractors to DHS and its components dating back to 2006.

Download the dataset as an XLSX file through this link or access it as a Google Sheet (Google's Privacy Policy applies).

Border security and surveillance is a rapidly growing industry, fueled by the potential of massive congressional appropriations and accelerated by the promise of artificial intelligence. Of the 233 companies included in our initial survey, two-thirds promoted artificial intelligence, machine learning, or autonomous technology in their public-facing materials.

An HDT Global vehicle at the 2024 Border Security Expo. Source: Dugan Meyer (CC0 1.0 Universal)

Federal spending on homeland security has increased year over year, creating a lucrative market which has attracted investment from big tech and venture capital. Just last month, U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei, Chair of the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, defended a funding package that included a "record-level" $300 million in funding for border security technology, including "autonomous surveillance towers; mobile surveillance platforms; counter-tunnel equipment, and a significant investment in counter-drone capability." 

This research project was made possible with internship support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, in collaboration with EFF and the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Drew Mitnick of the Böll Foundation, who was also involved in building a similar data set of European vendors, says mapping the homeland security technology industry is essential to public debate. "We see the value of the project will be to better inform policymakers about the types of technology deployed, the privacy impact, the companies operating the technology, and the nature of their relationships with the agencies that operate the technology," he said.​

Information for this project was aggregated from a number of sources including press releases, business profile databases, vendor websites, social media, flyers and marketing materials, agency websites, defense industry publications, and the work of journalists, advocates, and watchdogs, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the student researchers who contribute to EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance. For our vendor profiles, we verified agency spending with each vendor using financial records available online through both the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS.gov), and USAspending.gov websites.

While many of the companies included have multiple divisions and offer a range of goods and services, this project is focused specifically on vendors who provide and market technology, communications, and IT capabilities for DHSsub-agencies, including CBP, ICE and Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). We have also included companies that sell to other agencies operating at the border, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration and state and local law enforcement agencies engaged in border enforcement.

The data is organized by vendor and includes information on the type of technology or services they offer, the vendor’s participation in specific federal border security initiatives, procurement records, the company's website, parent companies and related subsidiaries, specific surveillance products offered, and which federal agencies they serve. Additional links and supporting documents have been included throughout. We have also provided links to scans of promotional materials distributed at border security conferences.

This dataset serves as a snapshot of the homeland security industry. While we set out to be exhaustive, we discovered the corporate landscape is murky with acquisitions, mergers, holding companies, and sub-sub-contractors that often intentionally obscure the connections between the various enterprises attempting to rake in lucrative government contracts. We hope that by providing a multilayered view, this data will serve as a definitive resource for journalists, academics, advocates of privacy and human rights, and policymakers. 

This work should be the starting point for further investigation—such as Freedom of Information Act requests and political influence analysis—into the companies and agencies rapidly expanding and automating surveillance and immigration enforcement, whether the aim is to challenge a political narrative or to hold authorities and the industry accountable.

If you use this data in your own research or have information that would further enrich the dataset, we'd love to hear from you at aos@eff.org.

Update May 15, 2024: The letter has been updated to include support from the Southern Border Communities Coalition. It was re-sent to the Calexico City Council. 

On the southwest side of Calexico, a border town in California’s Imperial Valley, a surveillance tower casts a shadow over a baseball field and a residential neighborhood. In 2000, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the precursor to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)) leased the corner of Nosotros Park from the city for $1 a year for the tower. But now the lease has expired, and DHS component Customs & Border Protection (CBP) would like the city to re-up the deal.  

But times—and technology—have changed. CBP’s new strategy calls for adopting powerful artificial intelligence technology to not only control the towers, but to scan, track and categorize everything they see.  

Now, privacy and social justice advocates including the Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition, American Friends Service Committee, Calexico Needs Change, and Southern Border Communities Coalition have joined EFF in sending the city council a letter urging them to not sign the lease and either spike the project or renegotiate it to ensure that civil liberties and human rights are protected.  

The groups write:  

The Remote Video Surveillance System (RVSS) tower at Nosotros Park was installed in the early 2000s when video technology was fairly limited and the feeds required real-time monitoring by human personnel. That is not how these cameras will operate under CBP's new AI strategy. Instead, these towers will be controlled by algorithms that will autonomously detect, identify, track and classify objects of interest. This means that everything that falls under the gaze of the cameras will be scanned and categorized. To an extent, the AI will autonomously decide what to monitor and recommend when Border Patrol officers should be dispatched. While a human being may be able to tell the difference between children playing games or residents getting ready for work, AI is prone to mistakes and difficult to hold accountable. 

In an era where the public has grave concerns on the impact of unchecked technology on youth and communities of color, we do not believe enough scrutiny and skepticism has been applied to this agreement and CBP's proposal. For example, the item contains very little in terms of describing what kinds of data will be collected, how long it will be stored, and what measures will be taken to mitigate the potential threats to privacy and human rights. 

The letter also notes that CBP’s tower programs have repeatedly failed to achieve the promised outcomes. In fact, the DHS Inspector General found that the early 2000s program, “yielded few apprehensions as a percentage of detection, resulted in needless investigations of legitimate activity, and consumed valuable staff time to perform video analysis or investigate sensor alerts.”  

The groups are calling for Calexico to press pause on the lease agreement until CBP can answer a list of questions about the impact of the surveillance tower on privacy and human rights. Should the city council insist on going forward, they should at least require regular briefings on any new technologies connected to the tower and the ability to cancel the lease on much shorter notice than the 365 days currently spelled out in the proposed contract.  

A new report from news outlet NOTUS shows that at least two Texas counties along the U.S.-Mexico border have purchased a product that would allow law enforcement to track devices that emit Bluetooth signals, including cell phones, smartwatches, wireless earbuds, and car entertainment systems. This incredibly personal model of tracking is the latest level of surveillance infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico border—where communities are not only exposed to a tremendous amount of constant monitoring, but also serves as a laboratory where law enforcement agencies at all levels of government test new technologies.

The product now being deployed in Texas, called TraffiCatch, can detect wifi and Bluetooth signals in moving cars to track them. Webb County, which includes Laredo, has had TraffiCatch technology since at least 2019, according to GovSpend procurement data. Val Verde County, which includes Del Rio, approved the technology in 2022. 

This data collection is possible because all Bluetooth devices regularly broadcast a Bluetooth Device Address. This address can be either a public address or a random address. Public addresses don’t change for the lifetime of the device, making them the easiest to track. Random addresses are more common and have multiple levels of privacy, but for the most part change regularly (this is the case with most modern smartphones and products like AirTags.) Bluetooth products with random addresses would be hard to track for a device that hasn’t paired with them. But if the tracked person is also carrying a Bluetooth device that has a public address, or if tracking devices are placed close to each other so a device is seen multiple times before it changes its address, random addresses could be correlated with that person over long periods of time.

It is unclear whether TraffiCatch is doing this sort of advanced analysis and correlation, and how effective it would be at tracking most modern Bluetooth devices.

According to TraffiCatch’s manufacturer, Jenoptik, this data derived from Bluetooth is also combined with data collected from automated license plate readers, another form of vehicle tracking technology placed along roads and highways by federal, state, and local law enforcement throughout the Texas border. ALPRs are well understood technology for vehicle tracking, but the addition of Bluetooth tracking may allow law enforcement to track individuals even if they are using different vehicles.

This mirrors what we already know about how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using cell-site simulators (CSSs). Also known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers, CSS are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower. In 2023, the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General released a troubling report detailing how federal agencies like ICE, its subcomponent Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and the Secret Service have conducted surveillance using CSSs without proper authorization and in violation of the law. Specifically, the Inspector General found that these agencies did not adhere to federal privacy policy governing the use of CSS and failed to obtain special orders required before using these types of surveillance devices.

Law enforcement agencies along the border can pour money into overlapping systems of surveillance that monitor entire communities living along the border thanks in part to Operation Stonegarden (OPSG), a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant program, which rewards state and local police for collaborating in border security initiatives. DHS doled out $90 million in OPSG funding in 2023, $37 million of which went to Texas agencies. These programs are especially alarming to human rights advocates due to recent legislation passed in Texas to allow local and state law enforcement to take immigration enforcement into their own hands.

As a ubiquitous wireless interface to many of our personal devices and even our vehicles, Bluetooth is a large and notoriously insecure attack surface for hacks and exploits. And as TraffiCatch demonstrates, even when your device’s Bluetooth tech isn’t being actively hacked, it can broadcast uniquely identifiable information that make you a target for tracking. This is one in the many ways surveillance, and the distrust it breeds in the public over technology and tech companies, hinders progress. Hands-free communication in cars is a fantastic modern innovation. But the fact that it comes at the cost of opening a whole society up to surveillance is a detriment to all.

When EFF set out to map surveillance technology along the U.S.-Mexico border, we weren't exactly sure how to do it. We started with public records—procurement documents, environmental assessments, and the like—which allowed us to find the GPS coordinates of scores of towers. During a series of in-person trips, we were able to find even more. Yet virtual reality ended up being one of the key tools in not only discovering surveillance at the border, but also in educating people about Customs & Border Protection's so-called "virtual wall" through VR tours.

EFF Director of Investigations Dave Maass recently gave a lightning talk at University of Nevada, Reno's annual XR Meetup explaining how virtual reality, perhaps ironically, has allowed us to better understand the reality of border surveillance.

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Guided by EFF's map of Customs & Border Protection surveillance towers, University of Arizona geographers Colter Thomas and Dugan Meyer have been methodologically traversing the U.S.-Mexico border and photographing the infrastructure that comprises the so-called "virtual wall."

Anduril Sentry tower beside the Rio Grande River. Photo by Colter Thomas (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

From April 12-26, their outdoor exhibition "Infrastructures of Control" will be on display on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson, featuring more than 30 photographs of surveillance technology, a replica surveillance tower, and a blow up map based on EFF's data.

Locals can join the researchers and EFF staff for an opening night tour at 5pm on April 12, followed by an EFF Speakeasy/Meetup. There will also be a panel discussion at 5pm on April 19, moderated by journalist Yael Grauer, co-author of EFF's Street-Level Surveillance hub. It will feature a variety of experts on the border, including Isaac Esposto (No More Deaths), Dora Rodriguez (Salvavision), Pedro De Velasco (Kino Border Initiative), Todd Miller (The Border Chronicle), and Daniel Torres (Daniel Torres Reports).

In the meantime, we chatted with Colter and Dugan about what their project means to them.

MAASS: Tell us what you hope people will take away from this project?

MEYER: We think of our work as a way for us to contribute to a broader movement for border justice that has been alive and well in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for decades. Using photography, mapping, and other forms of research, we are trying to make the constantly expanding infrastructure of U.S. border policing and surveillance more visible to public audiences everywhere. Our hope is that doing so will prompt more expansive and critical discussions about the extent to which these infrastructures are reshaping the social and environmental landscapes throughout this region and beyond.

THOMAS: The diversity of landscapes that make up the borderlands can make it hard to see how these parts fit together, but the common thread of surveillance is an ominous sign for the future and we hope that the work we make can encourage people from different places and experiences to find common cause for looking critically at these infrastructures and what they mean for the future of the borderlands.

An Integrated Fixed Tower in Southern Arizona. Photo by Colter Thomas (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

MAASS: So much is written about border surveillance by researchers working off documents, without seeing these towers first hand. How did your real-world exploration affect your understanding of border technology?

THOMAS: Personally I’m left with more questions than answers when doing this fieldwork. We have driven along the border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, and it is surprising just how much variation there is within this broad system of U.S. border security. It can sometimes seem like there isn’t just one border at all, but instead a patchwork of infrastructural parts—technologies, architecture, policy, etc.—that only looks cohesive from a distance.

An Integrated Fixed Tower in Southern Arizona. Photo by Colter Thomas (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

MAASS: That makes me think of Trevor Paglen, an artist known for his work documenting surveillance programs. He often talks about the invisibility of surveillance technology. Is that also what you encountered?

MEYER: The scale and scope of U.S. border policing is dizzying, and much of how this system functions is hidden from view. But we think many viewers of this exhibition might be surprised—as we were when we started doing this work—just how much of this infrastructure is hidden in plain sight, integrated into daily life in communities of all kinds.

This is one of the classic characteristics of infrastructure: when it is working as intended, it often seems to recede into the background of life, taken for granted as though it always existed and couldn’t be otherwise. But these systems, from surveillance programs to the border itself, require tremendous amounts of labor and resources to function, and when you look closely, it is much easier to see the waste and brutality that are their real legacy. As Colter and I do this kind of looking, I often think about a line from the late David Graeber, who wrote that “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

THOMAS: Like Dugan said, infrastructure rarely draws direct attention. As artists and researchers, then, our challenge has been to find a way to disrupt this banality visually, to literally reframe the material landscapes of surveillance in ways that sort of pull this infrastructure back into focus. We aren’t trying to make this infrastructure beautiful, but we are trying to present it in a way that people will look at it more closely. I think this is also what makes Paglen’s work so powerful—it aims for something more than simply documenting or archiving a subject that has thus far escaped scrutiny. Like Paglen, we are trying to present our audiences with images that demand attention, and to contextualize those images in ways that open up opportunities and spaces for viewers to act collectively with their attention. For us, this means collaborating with a range of other people and organizations—like the EFF—to invite viewers into critical conversations that are already happening about what these technologies and infrastructures mean for ourselves and our neighbors, wherever they are coming from.

This interview is crossposted from The Markup, a nonprofit news organization that investigates technology and its impact on society.

By: Monique O. Madan, Investigative Reporter at The Markup

After reading my daily news stories amid his declining health, my grandfather made it a habit of traveling the world—all from his desk and wheelchair. When I went on trips, he always had strong opinions and recommendations for me, as if he’d already been there. “I've traveled to hundreds of countries," he would tell me. "It's called Google Earth. Today, I’m going to Armenia.” My Abuelo’s passion for teleporting via Google Street View has always been one of my fondest memories and has never left me. 

So naturally, when I found out that Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave virtual reality tours of surveillance technology along the U.S.–Mexico border, I had to make it happen. I cover technology at the intersection of immigration, criminal justice, social justice and government accountability, and Maass’ tour aligns with my work as I investigate border surveillance. 

My journey began in a small, quiet, conference room at the Homestead Cybrarium, a hybrid virtual public library where I checked out virtual reality gear. The moment I slid the headset onto my face and the tour started, I was transported to a beach in San Diego. An hour and a half later, I had traveled across 1,500 miles worth of towns and deserts and ended up in Brownsville, Texas.

During that time, we looked at surveillance technology in 27 different cities on both sides of the border. Some of the tech I saw were autonomous towers, aerostat blimps, sky towers, automated license plate readers, and border checkpoints. 

After the excursion, I talked with Maass, a former journalist, about the experience. Our conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Monique O. Madan: You began by dropping me in San Diego, California, and it was intense. Tell me why you chose the location to start this experience.

Dave Maass: So I typically start the tour in San Diego for two reasons. One is because it is the westernmost part of the border, so it's a natural place to start. But more importantly, it is such a stark contrast to be able to jump from one side to the other, from the San Diego side to the Tijuana side.

When you're in San Diego, you're in this very militarized park that's totally empty, with patrol vehicles and this very fierce-looking wall and a giant surveillance tower over your head. You can really get a sense of the scale.

And once you're used to that, I jump you to the other side of the wall. You're able to suddenly see how it's party time in Tijuana, how they painted the wall, and how there are restaurants and food stands and people playing on the beach and there are all these Instagram moments.

Credit: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Yet on the other side is the American militarized border, you know, essentially spying on everybody who's just going about their lives on the Mexican side.

It also serves as a way to show the power of VR. If there were no wall, you could walk that in a minute. But because of the border wall, you've got to go all the way to the border crossing, and then come all the way back. And we're talking, potentially, hours for you to be able to go that distance. 

Madan: I felt like I was in two different places, but it was really the same place, just feet away from each other. We saw remote video surveillance systems, relocatable ones. We saw integrated fixed towers, autonomous surveillance towers, sky towers, aerostat radar systems, and then covert automated license plate readers. How do you get the average person to digest what all these things really mean?

Maass: Me and some colleagues at EFF, we were looking at how we could use virtual reality to help people understand surveillance. We came up with a very basic game called “Spot the Surveillance,” where you could put on a headset and it puts you in one location with a 360-degree camera view. We took a photo of a corner in San Francisco that already had a lot of surveillance, but we also Photoshopped in other pieces of surveillance. The idea was for people to look around and try to find the surveillance.

When they found one, it would ping, and it would tell you what the technology could do. And we found that that helped people learn to look around their environment for these technologies, to understand it. So it gave people a better idea of how we exist in the environment differently than if they were shown a picture or a PowerPoint presentation that was like, “This is what a license plate reader looks like. This is what a drone looks like.”

That is why when we're on the southern border tour, there are certain places where I don't point the technology out to you. I ask you to look around and see if you can find it yourself.

Sometimes I start with one where it's overhead because people are looking around. They're pointing to a radio tower, pointing to something else. It takes them a while before they actually look up in the sky and see there's this giant spy mob over their head. But, yeah, one of the other ones is these license plate readers that are hidden in traffic cones. People don't notice them there because they're just these traffic cones that are so ubiquitous along highways and streets that they don't actually think about it.

Madan: People have the impression that surveillance ops are only in militarized settings. Can you talk to me about whether that’s true?

Maass: Certainly there are towers in the middle of the desert. Certainly there are towers that are in remote or rural areas. But there are just so many that are in urban areas, from big cities to small towns.

Rather than just a close-up picture of a tower, once you actually see one and you're able to look at where the cameras are pointed, you start to see things like towers that are able to look into people's back windows, and towers that are able to look into people's backyards, and whole communities that are going to have glimpses over their neighborhood all the time.

But so rarely in the conversation is the impact on the communities that live on both the U.S. and Mexican side of the border, and who are just there all the time trying to get by and have, you know, the normal dream of prospering and raising a family.

Madan: What does this mean from a privacy, human rights, and civil liberties standpoint? 

Maass: There’s not a lot of transparency around issues of technology. That is one of the major flaws, both for human rights and civil liberties, but it's also a flaw for those who believe that technology is going to address whatever amorphous problem they've identified or failed to identify with border security and migration. So it's hard to know when this is being abused and how.

But what we can say is that as [the government] is applying more artificial intelligence to its camera system, it's able to document the pattern of life of people who live along the border.

It may be capturing people and learning where they work and where they're worshiping or who they are associated with. So you can imagine that if you are somebody who lives in that community and if you're living in that community your whole life, the government may have, by the time you're 31 years old, your entire driving history on file that somebody can access at any time, with who knows what safeguards are in place.

But beyond all that, it really normalizes surveillance for a whole community.

There are a lot of psychological studies out there about how surveillance can affect people over time, affect their behavior, and affect their perceptions of a society. That's one of the other things I worry about: What kind of psychological trauma is surveillance causing for these communities over the long term, in ways that may not be immediately perceptible?

Madan: One of the most interesting uses of experiencing this tour via the VR technology was being able to pause and observe every single detail at the border checkpoint.

Maass: Most people are just rolling through, and so you don't get to notice all of the different elements of a checkpoint. But because the Google Street View car went through, we can roll through it at our leisure and point out different things. I have a series of checkpoints that I go through with people, show them this is where the license plate reader is, this is where the scanner truck is, here's the first surveillance camera, here's the second surveillance camera. We can see the body-worn camera on this particular officer. Here's where people are searched. Here's where they're detained. Here's where their car is rolled through an X-ray machine.

Madan: So your team has been mapping border surveillance for a while. Tell us about that and how it fits into this experience.

Maass: We started mapping out the towers in 2022, but we had started researching and building a database of at least the amount of surveillance towers by district in 2019. 

I don't think it was apparent to anyone until we started mapping these out, how concentrated towers are in populated areas. Maybe if you were in one of those populated areas, you knew about it, or maybe you didn't.

In the long haul, it may start to tell a little bit more about border policy in general and whether any of these are having any kind of impact, and maybe we start to learn more about apprehensions and other kinds of data that we can connect to.

Madan: If someone wanted to take a tour like this, if they wanted to hop on in VR and visit a few of these places, how can they do that? 

Maass: So if they have a VR headset, a Meta Quest 2 or newer, the Wander app is what you're going to use. You can just go into the app and position yourself somewhere in the border. Jump around a little bit, maybe it will be like five feet, and you can start seeing a surveillance tower.

If you don’t have a headset and want to do it in your browser, you can go to EFF’s map and click on a tower. You’ll see a Street View link when you scroll down. Or you can use those tower coordinates and then go to your VR headset and try to find it.

Madan: What are your thoughts about the Meta Quest headset—formerly known as the Oculus Rift—being founded by Palmer Luckey, who also founded the company that made one of the towers on the tour?

Maass: There’s certainly some irony about using a technology that was championed by Palmer Luckey to shine light on another technology championed by Palmer Luckey. That's not the only tech irony, of course: Wander [the app used for the tour] also depends on using products from Google and Meta, both of whom continue to contribute to the rise of surveillance in society, to investigate surveillance.

Madan: What's your biggest takeaway as the person giving this tour?

Maass: I am a researcher and educator, and an activist and communicator. To me, this is one of the most impactful ways that I can reach people and give them a meaningful experience about the border. 

I think that when people are consuming information about the border, they're just getting little snippets from a little particular area. You know, it's always a little place that they're getting a little sliver of what's going on. 

But when we're able to do this with VR, I'm able to take them everywhere. I'm able to take them to both sides of the border. We're able to see a whole lot, and they're able to come away by the end of it, feeling like they were there. Like your brain starts filling in the blanks. People get this experience that they wouldn't be able to get any other way.

Being able to linger over these spaces on my own time showed me just how much surveillance is truly embedded in people's daily lives. When I left the library, I found myself inspecting traffic cones for license plate readers. 

As I continue to investigate border surveillance, this experience really showed me just how educational these tools can be for academics, research and journalism. 

Thanks for reading,
Monique
Investigative Reporter
The Markup

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.