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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

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
        autoexec 2y ago
        > Are you familiar with how large the jurisdiction claimed by the CBP is? Yes, and I'm no fan of the so-called constitution free zones and the impositions on our rights that result from them. Thankfully, just as borders don't need to be 100% open or 100% closed, enforcement can also exist on a spectrum and to prevent border crossing most of the focus should be on the border itself and what's happening on the Mexican side (or indeed the Canadian one, but while there are problems with people entering illegal from our northern border it's at nowhere near the scale of the problem the southern border is because Canada is a more developed nation and a lot more careful about enforcing their own borders than Mexico is). Again, there isn't low evidence for the effectiveness of cameras. They are a proven technology. It's primarily been the rest of the systems which failed (non-working camera purchased, bad contracts, bad contractors, lack of staff to respond etc). If you know of a better solution than cameras for monitoring large areas of the border for illegal crossings I'd love to hear your pitch
- throwaway19972 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  Dispatch a drone to follow until agents can respond?
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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-texas-solutions/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-tex...
dfxm12 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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_ 2y ago
    > 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
    - jzackpete 2y ago
      electoral votes and number of representatives are allocated based on census numbers, which have nothing to do with citizenship status /!s
underbiding 2y ago
I think it's "plainly obvious" the the people pushing for this keep repeating the same argument, that is, they have no argument, they just say "duh, obviously watchtowers work!". This isn't evidence-based policy, this is literally the opposite. Can you name one program similar in-scope anywhere that would achieve results in-line with what you could see here? A pilot study in one small area that measured impact and effects? No? Oh well its just "plainly obvious" right so who needs evidence? This is cargo-cult nonsense, through and through. "See if we do the right mystical movements and arrangements then magically things will be fixed". Do we need to bring up that even Israel, one of world's most militarized states, failed to leverage this technology despite arguably far stronger technological knowledge institutionally and far more flexible hand in security spending? No, October 7th showed the same failures as it would for this border program. The problem is and never was about interdiction, the problem is the root-causes of these "threats" having nothing to do with physical human beings crossing a geographical space without being recorded on camera or a sensor.

michaelt 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
      - autoexec 2y ago
        > Are you familiar with how large the jurisdiction claimed by the CBP is? Yes, and I'm no fan of the so-called constitution free zones and the impositions on our rights that result from them. Thankfully, just as borders don't need to be 100% open or 100% closed, enforcement can also exist on a spectrum and to prevent border crossing most of the focus should be on the border itself and what's happening on the Mexican side (or indeed the Canadian one, but while there are problems with people entering illegal from our northern border it's at nowhere near the scale of the problem the southern border is because Canada is a more developed nation and a lot more careful about enforcing their own borders than Mexico is). Again, there isn't low evidence for the effectiveness of cameras. They are a proven technology. It's primarily been the rest of the systems which failed (non-working camera purchased, bad contracts, bad contractors, lack of staff to respond etc). If you know of a better solution than cameras for monitoring large areas of the border for illegal crossings I'd love to hear your pitch
throwaway19972 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
Aloisius 2y ago
Dispatch a drone to follow until agents can respond?
whimsicalism 2y ago
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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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-texas-solutions/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-tex...

dfxm12 2y ago

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 2y ago
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_ 2y ago
  > 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
  - jzackpete 2y ago
    electoral votes and number of representatives are allocated based on census numbers, which have nothing to do with citizenship status /!s

underbiding 2y ago

I think it's "plainly obvious" the the people pushing for this keep repeating the same argument, that is, they have no argument, they just say "duh, obviously watchtowers work!". This isn't evidence-based policy, this is literally the opposite. Can you name one program similar in-scope anywhere that would achieve results in-line with what you could see here? A pilot study in one small area that measured impact and effects? No? Oh well its just "plainly obvious" right so who needs evidence? This is cargo-cult nonsense, through and through. "See if we do the right mystical movements and arrangements then magically things will be fixed". Do we need to bring up that even Israel, one of world's most militarized states, failed to leverage this technology despite arguably far stronger technological knowledge institutionally and far more flexible hand in security spending? No, October 7th showed the same failures as it would for this border program. The problem is and never was about interdiction, the problem is the root-causes of these "threats" having nothing to do with physical human beings crossing a geographical space without being recorded on camera or a sensor.