While early iterations of the virtual wall relied largely on human operators monitoring cameras, companies like Anduril and Google have reaped major government paydays by promising to automate the border-watching process with migrant-detecting artificial intelligence.
While Maass notes the map is incomplete and remains a work in progress, it already contains nearly 300 current tower locations and nearly 50 more planned for the near future.Īs border surveillance towers have multiplied across the southern border, so too have they become increasingly sophisticated, packing a panoply of powerful cameras, microphones, lasers, radar antennae, and other sensors designed to zero in on humans. The surveillance tower map is the result of a year’s work steered by EFF Director of Investigations Dave Maass, who pieced together the constellation of surveillance towers through a combination of public procurement documents, satellite photographs, in-person trips to the border, and even virtual reality-enabled wandering through Google Street View imagery. and Mexico is a matter of public record, the government does not disclose where these towers are located, despite privacy concerns of residents of both countries - and the fact that individual towers are plainly visible to observers. While the Department of Homeland Security’s investment of more than a billion dollars into a so-called virtual wall between the U.S. government’s high-tech surveillance towers along the U.S-Mexico border are being made public for the first time as part of a mapping project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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