Border Patrol Wants Advanced AI to Spy on American Cities
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, flush with billions in new funding, is seeking “advanced AI” technologies to surveil urban residential areas, increasingly sophisticated autonomous systems, and even the ability to see through walls.
A CBP presentation for an “Industry Day” summit with private sector vendors, obtained by The Intercept, lays out a detailed wish list of tech CBP hopes to purchase, like satellite connectivity for surveillance towers along the border and improved radio communications. But it also shows that state-of-the-art, AI-augmented surveillance technologies will be central to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant campaign, which will extend deep into the interior of the North American continent, hundreds of miles from international borders as commonly understood.
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The recent passage of Trump’s sprawling flagship legislation funnels tens of billions of dollars to the Department of Homeland Security. While much of that funding will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bolster the administration’s arrest and deportation operations, a great deal is earmarked to purchase new technology and equipment for federal offices tasked with preventing immigrants from arriving in the first place: Customs and Border Protection, which administers the country’s border surveillance apparatus, and its subsidiary, the U.S. Border Patrol.
One page of the presentation, describing the wishlist of Border Patrol’s Law Enforcement Operations Division, says the agency needs “Advanced AI to identify and track suspicious activity in urban environment [sic],” citing the “challenges” posed by “Dense residential areas.” What’s considered “suspicious activity” is left unmentioned.
Customs and Border Protection did not respond to questions posed about the slides by The Intercept.
A slide from the CBP presentation showing the wishlist for the Coastal Area of Responsibility.Screenshot from CBP PresentationThe reference to AI-aided urban surveillance appears on a page dedicated to the operational needs of Border Patrol’s “Coastal AOR,” or area of responsibility, encompassing the entire southeast of the United States, from Kentucky to Florida. A page describing the “Southern AOR,” which includes all of inland Nevada and Oklahoma, similarly states the need for “Advanced intelligence to identify suspicious patterns” and “Long-range surveillance” because “city environments make it difficult to separate normal activity from suspicious activity.”
© The Intercept
