This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Todd Miller has been writing for TD on borders and the money to be made off them since June 2012. Now, he's produced his first book, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, the story of how this country's borders are being transformed into up-armored, heavily militarized zones run by a border-industrial complex. It's an achievement and we're proud to let TD readers know about it with a remarkable piece by Miller today. We have an offer to make as well: for a $100 contribution to this website, he'll sign a personalized book to you -- and you, in turn, will ensure that TomDispatch authors like Nick Turse, doing unique reporting, can get a little extra support from this site. If you can afford it, we need your money. It's as simple as that. Check out the offer and the other signed, personalized books available at our donation page. Tom]
Sometimes you really do need a map if you want to know where you are. In 2008, the ACLU issued just such a map of this country and it's like nothing ever seen before. Titled "the Constitution-Free Zone of the United States," it traces our country's borders. Maybe you're already tuning out. After all, you probably don't think you live on or near such a border. Well, think again. As it happens, in our brave, new, post-9/11 world, as long as we're talking "homeland security" or "war on terror," anything can be redefined. So why not a border?
Our borders have, conveniently enough, long been Constitution-free zones where more or less anything goes, including warrantless searches of various sorts. In the twenty-first century, however, the border itself, north as well as south, has not only been increasingly up-armored, but redefined as a 100-mile-wide strip around the United States (and Alaska). In other words -- check that map again -- our "borders" now cover an expanse in which nearly 200 million Americans, or two-thirds of the U.S. population, live. Included are nine of the 10 largest metropolitan areas. If you live in Florida, Maine, or Michigan, for example, no matter how far inland you may be, you are "on the border."
Imagine that. And then imagine what it means. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as Todd Miller points out today, is not only the largest law enforcement agency in the country you know next to nothing about, but the largest, flat and simple. Now, its agents can act as if the Constitution has been put to bed up to 100 miles inland anywhere. This, in turn, means -- as the ACLU has written -- that at new checkpoints and elsewhere in areas no American would once have considered borderlands, you can be stopped, interrogated, and searched "on an everyday basis with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing."
Under the circumstances, it's startling that, since the ACLU made its case back in 2008, this new American reality has gotten remarkably little attention. So it's lucky that TomDispatch regular Miller's invaluable and gripping book, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, has just been published. It's an eye opener, and it's about time that "border" issues stopped being left to those on the old-fashioned version of the border and immigration mavens. It's a subject that, by definition, now concerns at least two-thirds of us in a big way. Tom
They Are Watching You
The National Security State and the U.S.-Mexican Border
By Todd MillerWith the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, "You can't go in there, give me back your badges."
The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it.
The students from Northeastern Illinois University didn't happen to fall into that category. An earnest manager at a nearby registration table insisted that, as they were not studying "border security," they weren't to be admitted. I asked him how he knew just what they were studying. His only answer was to assure me that next year no students would be allowed in at all.
Among the wonders those students would miss was a fake barrel cactus with a hollow interior (for the southern border) and similarly hollow tree stumps (for the northern border), all capable of being outfitted with surveillance cameras. "Anything that grows or exists in nature," Kurt Lugwisen of TimberSpy told a local Phoenix television station, "we build it."
Nor would those students get to see the miniature drone -- "eyes in the sky" for Border Patrol agents -- that fits conveniently into a backpack and can be deployed at will; nor would they be able to check out the "technology that might," as one local Phoenix reporter warned, "freak you out." She was talking about facial recognition systems, which in a border scenario would work this way: a person enters a border-crossing gate, where an image of his or her face is instantly checked against a massive facial image database (or the biometric data contained on a passport)."If we need to target on any specific gender or race because we're trying to find a subject, we can set the parameters and the threshold to find that person," Kevin Haskins of Cognitec ("the face recognition company") proudly claimed.
Nor would they be able to observe the strange, two day-long convention hall dance between homeland security, its pockets bursting with their parents' tax dollars, and private industry intent on creating the most massive apparatus of exclusion and surveillance that has ever existed along U.S. borders.
Border Security Expo 2014 catches in one confined space the expansiveness of a "booming" border market. If you include "cross-border terrorism, cyber crime, piracy, [the] drug trade, human trafficking, internal dissent, and separatist movements," all "driving factor[s] for the homeland security market," by 2018 it could reach $544 billion globally. It is here that U.S. Homeland Security officials, local law enforcement, and border forces from all over the world talk contracts with private industry representatives, exhibit their techno-optimism, and begin to hammer out a future of ever more hardened, up-armored national and international boundaries.
The global video surveillance market alone is expected to be a $40 billion industry by 2020, almost three times its $13.5 billion value in 2013. According to projections, 2020 border surveillance cameras will be capturing 3.4 trillion video hours globally. In case you were wondering, that's more than 340 million years of video footage if you were watching 24 hours a day.
But those students, like most of the rest of us, haven't been invited to this high energy, dystopian conversation about our future.
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