How far technology have come since the last ‘smart border’ failed?

Whether existing surveillance technologies are advanced enough to create a “smart border” remains an open question, even though a spending bill recently presented to President Donald Trump allocates $100 million for its construction. The smart border is an updated version of an old idea: a virtual fence of cameras and sensors along the line between the United States and Mexico. As soon as the suggestion gained traction, activists quickly, and rightly, pointed out that the idea violates the civil liberties of people near the border by essentially keeping them under constant surveillance. But another question is important, too: is this technology even advanced enough to work, or is it all just vaporware?

REALLY GOOD AT DETECTING LOST COWS AND JACKRABBITS AND EVEN IN SOME CASES TUMBLEWEED 

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer, given that Customs and Border Protection itself doesn’t have good metrics for what “works” or not. A March 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office concluded that CBP has not adequately developed metrics to determine whether the data it collects from surveillance is helpful. (At the time, CBP agreed with the GAO conclusion and said it planned to develop metrics by January 2019, but so far has not released them.) “I’ve been told that the technologies are not effective, but it’s a little bit like gossip,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies border security. “There’s no official way to assess the effectiveness of the technology. There’s no transparency.”

Though CBP itself doesn’t have a clear system for measuring effectiveness, other sources suggest that the promised surveillance tech was mostly vaporware back in 2006, when then-President George W. Bush ordered the construction of a smart border called Security Border Initiative Network (SBINet). SBINet was supposed to consist of cameras, radar towers, ground sensors, and drones along 2,000 miles of the southern border. (All this data would be monitored at a command center.) Five years and $1 billion later, the never-completed project was killed due to high costs, bad management, and ineffectiveness.