CBP Is Expanding Its Surveillance Tower Program at the U.S.-Mexico Border–And We're Mapping It
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a comprehensive, openly accessible dataset documenting over five hundred surveillance structures along the U.S.-Mexico border. This resource provides a critical living snapshot of Customs and Border Protection’s expanding "virtual wall," including tower locations, automated license plate readers, and facial recognition systems. By aggregating data from public records, satellite imagery, and virtual exploration, EFF offers the most detailed public view of this infrastructure, which is free to use and remix under a Creative Commons license. This transparency is vital because border surveillance often impacts densely populated urban areas rather than remote zones, challenging the narrative that such technology is confined to uninhabited lands. The data enables independent research into the actual efficacy of these systems in intercepting illicit activities and their humanitarian consequences, such as forcing migrants into more dangerous routes. It also facilitates journalism and advocacy by allowing citizens to identify specific surveillance nodes, thereby exposing the scale of monitoring that previously relied solely on agency-provided information. The project highlights the open data movement’s power to hold powerful institutions accountable through independent verification and public scrutiny. By making granular geospatial data available, EFF empowers researchers, journalists, and activists to evaluate policy impacts that government reports have historically obscured. This initiative demonstrates how crowdsourced and publicly sourced data can correct information asymmetries, ensuring that the societal costs and effectiveness of surveillance technologies are subject to rigorous, democratic oversight rather than internal agency claims.
Source: eff.orgPublished on 2023-03-21