Whitney Webb

The political response to the crisis at the southern border continues to advance the bipartisan “smart wall,” having been backed by Trump and Biden alike. This bipartisan consensus reaches far beyond the US, as much of the world is similarly speeding along in implementing “digital borders.”

The disastrous situation at the US-Mexico border is, and has been, intentionally produced. Throughout the last several administrations, regardless of campaign and other public rhetoric, the porous nature of the border has remained unresolved. On several occasions, the situation as it has developed has been blamed largely on incompetence and government inefficiency. Though some administrations have been tougher than others in regards to terrestrial migration (under some metrics), the US-Mexico border has not been sealed off so to force entrants to cross through officially recognized and managed ports of entry.

Under the current administration, it has been pointedly obvious that even the sections of the border that do contain physical barriers are being dismantled on purpose, all the while illegal crossings have risen to unprecedented levels. Whatever the motives for this deliberate policy on the part of the Biden administration, the end result has been the widespread characterization of the crisis as an “invasion,” priming the voter bloc usually most concerned with border security – the American Right – for military-style “solutions.”

While the justifications for the frenzied media coverage are based on the actual reality that the border is indeed highly insecure (and has been for some time), the policy responses from American politicians reveal that there is a bipartisan consensus about what must be done. Tellingly, the same “solution” is also being quietly rolled out at all American ports of entry that are not currently being “overrun”, such as airports. That solution, of course, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous devices.

This “solution” is not just being implemented throughout the United States as an alleged means of thwarting migrants, it is also being rapidly implemented throughout the world in apparent lockstep. The reasons for the unspoken, but obvious, global consistency in implementing invasive, biometric surveillance is due to the fulfillment of global policy agendas, ratified by nearly every country in the world, that seek both to restrict the extent of people’s freedom of movement and to surveil people’s movements (and much, much more) through the global implementation of digital identity. Those policy agendas include mainly the UN’s Agenda 2030 or Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG 16, as well as Interpol’s Global Policing Goals.

While the American Right has been rather outspoken in its rejection of the UN’s Agenda 2030, and the digital ID project at large, the distress over the border situation is being used to manufacture consent among this specific group for “solutions” that are focused on expanding surveillance and biometric collection as opposed to the implementation of physical barriers.

The Virtual Wall

The Hawaiian shirt-wearing inventor of the VR headset Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, has become the face of America’s “virtual border wall.” Luckey, the brain behind the defense tech firm Anduril, is a long-time associate of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, with Luckey having met Thiel at 19 when Luckey presided over his first company Oculus Rift, which was later sold to Facebook. Thiel was then on Facebook’s board and was also instrumental in the rise of the social media company. Luckey’s Anduril is also backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is also an Anduril investor.

Anduril is one of the main beneficiaries of government contracts to build autonomous surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border, which are now also being rolled out along the US-Canada border. As a consequence, they are likely to be among the beneficiaries of the Senate’s current proposal for “border security,” which sets aside $170 million for additional towers to be build.

Under the Trump and now Biden administrations, Luckey has been vocal about how Anduril will create “a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees.” As noted by WIRED in 2018, Luckey and Anduril has long been pitching its technology “as a complement to – or substitute for – much of [then] President Trump’s promised physical wall.”and detect illegal border crossings, but also automatically designate those illegal crossers a “threat level” as well as predict “illegal border activities” before they occur. Like Anduril, it relied on surveillance towers and a litany of sensors spread throughout the environment. The program, though shuttered by DHS in 2011, never actually ended, as the DHS report announcing the “end” of SBInet stated the following:

DHS is currently developing a comprehensive border technology deployment plan that will build upon successful technology currently deployed and provide the optimum mix of proven surveillance technologies by sector. Where appropriate, this technology plan will also include elements of the former SBInet program that have proven successful.

Just like Anduril’s marketing strategy, SBInet was pitched as a cheaper, more cost-effective and “faster” means of securing the border than the construction of physical barriers. Anduril has openly laid out its strategy to avoid the pitfalls of SBInet; whereas SBInet was doomed to fail by hiring incompetent contractors to build and sell the system to the government, Anduril plans to own the system it builds and lease it to the government, which – according to Trae Stephens – “creates an incentive to keep development costs low.” Despite claims it is “low” cost, since 2017, massive DHS contracts have been given to Anduril to fulfill many of the original ambitions of the SBInet project and, despite the construction of hundreds of towers and millions spent, the border remains more insecure than ever.

One of Anduril’s earliest advocates was Congressman Will Hurd, a former officer in the CIA’s clandestine operations division who now represents Texas in the House of Representatives. With Hurd’s help, Anduril was able to place their first prototypes for the “virtual wall” on the border-adjacent private property of an anonymous rancher. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) then conducted their first official pilot of Anduril towers in 2018, leading to the Trump administration’s approval to deploy Anduril’s towers along the entirety of the south-western border in 2020. That approval saw Anduril awarded a five-year and still-ongoing contract and also saw the contract designated a “program of record,” meaning it is deemed essential enough to be a dedicated item in the DHS budget.

Trump, in the latter years of his presidential term, began to embrace the type of virtual wall that Anduril would enable even more so than the physical barrier he had campaigned on. In January 2019, for example, Trump stated “The walls we are building are not medieval walls. They are smart walls designed to meet the needs of frontline border agents.” The “smart walls”, Trump went on to say, would include “sensors, monitors and cutting-edge technology.”

Under the Biden administration, Anduril’s star has continued to rise. This is partially due to the millions the company has spent lobbying Congress, but also facilitated by the long-standing bipartisan love affair with building a “smart wall” on the Southern border. CBP was given millions for autonomous surveillance towers along the border in the 2021 US Citizenship Act and then again in the 2022 omnibus bill, with millions more granted last year. The lion-share of that money is destined for Anduril’s coffers. This year, if the Senate’s bipartisan “border security” efforts are any indication, Anduril stands to gain even more contracts to build ever more autonomous towers, which are now accompanied by autonomous drones and other connected devices. Luckey, despite Anduril’s claims that there will always be human oversight of its products, has stated that his vision for the future of warfare that Anduril is helping to build will soon result in humans playing ever more insignificant roles.

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Via https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/02/investigative-reports/manufacturing-consent-the-border-fiasco-and-the-smart-wall/