Border Patrol’s electronic eyes will spot you long before you spot them.
If you walk along the United States border in remote stretches of New Mexico desert, or in the grasslands between North Dakota and Canada, you might not hear the buzz of what could be flying above you: a Predator drone — the same vehicle that has been outfitted to drop bombs over Afghanistan and Iraq. From five miles away, the drone’s cameras can see so well they can tell if you’re wearing a backpack.
If you’re in the Florida Keys, you may be spotted by an altogether different set of eyes in the sky: Up 10,000 feet in the air, a football field-sized zeppelin floats with an array of cameras, sensors, and radar systems so sophisticated that it can track every car and aircraft — let alone boat — within a 200 mile range.
And if you’re near the deserts of southern Arizona, it won’t be hard to notice the 160-foot towers that rise up from the sandy landscape, equipped with advanced thermal imaging that can sense your exact movements from over seven miles away.
Because large portions of the border are so remote, and because U.S. citizens seem more willing to endorse surveillance programs that specifically target non-citizens, the American borderlands have become a testing ground for the cutting edge of surveillance tech.
To call this technology “Orwellian” would be anachronistic. Even George Orwell, for all his dreary imagining, never conceived of an infrared camera that could detect a person’s faintest movements from seven miles away like the ones erected on 160-foot towers in the Arizona desert.
Even as privacy hawks on the left and the right warn about the government’s embrace of new surveillance tech, it’s been impossible to stop the fast-accelerating development of new infrastructure. President Donald Trump and Democrats in Congress might clash over the need for a border wall, but there’s a growing consensus in Washington that the country needs a “virtual wall.” The terms for this concept vary: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls it a “technological wall”; other members of Congress have adopted Silicon Valley lingo and refer to it as a “smart wall.”
Read More...
Government Testing Mass Surveillance on the Border Before Turning It on Americans
Current News
Three House Committees Escalate ActBlue Probe, Contempt Now on the Table
Three House committee chairmen threatened the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue with a contempt citation on Monday, escalating a yearlong congressional investigation into allegations that the organization failed to prevent fraudulent and potentially foreign political donations from flowing through its system. Read more
They’ve Wanted War With Iran for Twenty Years. Now That Trump Is Ending It, They’re Furious.
Here’s something the foreign policy establishment will never say out loud: they don’t actually want peace with Iran. Read more
They Called It Peace. Hezbollah Called It an Opportunity.
Wednesday, President Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran. The entire foreign policy establishment exhaled. “Historic.” “Diplomatic breakthrough.” “A new era.” The words came pouring out of the same people who’ve been wrong about the Middle East for 30 straight years. Read more
The Monument and the Myth: What the Obama Center Tells Us About a Civilization in Decline
On the morning of June 19, 2026 — Juneteenth, the federal holiday commemorating the final emancipation of enslaved Americans at the close of the Civil War — the Obama Presidential Center opened its doors on Chicago’s South Side. The ceremony featured land acknowledgments, celebrity guests, former heads of state, and at least one prominent governor who reportedly “literally teared up” during his private tour. The monument cost $850 million to complete. Read more
Five Suspects Wanted to Bomb Trump’s Backyard. The FBI Stopped Them. Here’s What That Actually Means.
Someone tried to blow up a fight at the White House. Five people. Explosive drones. Snipers. A coordinated plot to kill people attending a UFC event on the South Lawn of the President’s house. And if you’re just hearing about this now, ask yourself why. Read more
What Happened in Belfast Is What Happens to Nations That Lose the Will to Survive
There is a passage in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War that describes the moment when Corcyra descended into civil strife: “Words had to change their ordinary meaning,” the historian wrote, “and to take that which was now given them.” Courage became foolhardiness. Prudent caution became cowardice. The inversion of language preceded — and perhaps caused — the inversion of the moral order. Read more