One-Third of Expensive Border Surveillance Towers Don’t Work
Immigration is one of the more hotly debated issues in the U.S. even as the current administration lacks a clear policy of any sort. We have deep disagreements over how tightly entry to the country should be controlled and who should be admitted as new residents and possible future citizens. But what if, no matter what policy politicians finally settle on, it’s implemented with the government’s usual efficiency and fiscal responsibility? What if it looks like the train wreck that is the network of surveillance towers along the southern border, many of them inert at great expense?
A Network of Blind Surveillance Towers
“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,” NBC News reported last week. “The large-scale outage affects roughly 150 of the 500 cameras perched on surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border.”
This is big political news at a time when voters consistently rank immigration among their main concerns.
Part of the problem is that several federal agencies with different priorities have responsibility for these cameras. Border Patrol relies on surveillance technology to cover remote areas where its agents can’t always be present. But the Federal Aviation Administration—yes, really—handles contracts for maintaining and repairing the camera network.
The affected towers are part of the Remote Video Surveillance System, a subset of the full network of border surveillance towers. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) detailed last year, the federal government started installing surveillance towers two decades ago through a series of projects, cancellations, restarts, and mutually incompatible technology.
“Throughout the 2010s, CBP took another run at a tower-based system, resulting in disparate tower systems…provided by different vendors that could not interact with another,” Dave Maass wrote for EFF.
It would be surprising if the federal government did anything on a reasonable budget or schedule, and the surveillance towers don’t break from tradition. For instance, just one program—the Secure Border Initiative Network—took six years to cover just a small stretch of border in Arizona.
High Costs and No Standards
“By 2010, at a cost of about $1 billion, CBP had deployed 15 SBInet tower systems along 53 miles of Arizona’s 387- mile border with Mexico,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted in a 2017 report on flaws
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