read articles provided and watch videos provided then do 2 writing assignments

follow instructions and provide relevant work papers will be placed in turnitin

PAD4932: CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN PUBLIC SAFETY

Mod 1 reading assignment there are 2 assignments attached to all the readings

Video Assignment watch these 3 videos:

Read these 2 assignments I have attached the pdf of them

Beware the Eye Spies. (2014). Scientific American, 310(1), 10.

http://db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=93322272&site=ehost-live (Links to an external site.)

HODGE, R. D. (2012). Borderworld. Popular Science, 280(1), 56-81.

http://db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=69913779&site=ehost-live (Links to an external site.)

Assignment 1 Locate and summarize one additional article tell how the formulation of a public policy (proposal) could be developed to respond to the selected issue. Discuss your article in relation to the reading (in 100-word s) and cite the source of your article using APA format.

Assignment 2 PLACE ALL ANSWERS IN THIS ASSIGNMENT ON ONE WORD DOCUMENT ONLY, IDENTIFYING EACH ACCORDINGLY. Prepare a 100-word response to each of the articles, summarizing them, and identifying specific concerns and strategies for response. Are there any multi-disciplinary approaches that could be implemented or are useful to consider?

PAD4932: CONTEMPORARY I
SSUES IN PUB
LIC
SAFETY

Mod

1 readin
g
assignment

there are 2
assignments

attached to all the readings

Video Assignment

watch these 3 videos:

Read these 2

assignments

I have attached the pdf of them

Beware the Eye Spies. (2014). Scientific American, 310(1), 10.

http://db
07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=93322272&site=
ehost
–
live (Links to an external site.)

HODGE, R. D. (2012). Borderworld. Popular Science, 280(1), 56
–
81.

http://db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search
.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=69913779&site=
ehost
–
live (Links to an external site.)

Assignment

1

Locate and summarize one additional article
tell

how the formulation of a public policy (proposal) could be
developed to resp
ond to the selected issue. Discuss your article in relation to the reading (in 100
–
word s) and cite the
source of your article using APA format.

Assignment

2

PLACE ALL ANSWERS IN THIS ASSIGNMENT ON ONE WORD DOCUMENT ONLY, IDENTIFYING EACH
ACCORDINGLY.

Prepare a 100
–
word response to each of the articles, summarizing them, and identifying specific
concerns and strategies for response. Are there any multi
–
disciplinary approaches that could be implemented or are
useful to consider?

PAD4932: CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN PUBLIC SAFETY
Mod 1 reading assignment there are 2 assignments attached to all the readings
Video Assignment watch these 3 videos:


Read these 2 assignments I have attached the pdf of them
Beware the Eye Spies. (2014). Scientific American, 310(1), 10.
http://db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=93322272&site=
ehost-live (Links to an external site.)
HODGE, R. D. (2012). Borderworld. Popular Science, 280(1), 56-81.
http://db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=69913779&site=
ehost-live (Links to an external site.)
Assignment 1 Locate and summarize one additional article tell how the formulation of a public policy (proposal) could be
developed to respond to the selected issue. Discuss your article in relation to the reading (in 100-word s) and cite the
source of your article using APA format.
Assignment 2 PLACE ALL ANSWERS IN THIS ASSIGNMENT ON ONE WORD DOCUMENT ONLY, IDENTIFYING EACH
ACCORDINGLY. Prepare a 100-word response to each of the articles, summarizing them, and identifying specific
concerns and strategies for response. Are there any multi-disciplinary approaches that could be implemented or are
useful to consider?

Title:
Source:

Document Type:
Subject Terms:

Company/Entity:

NAICS/Industry Codes:
Abstract:

Full Text Word Count:
ISSN:

Accession Number:
Database:

Section:

Record: 1

Beware the Eye Spies.

Scientific American. Jan2014, Vol. 310 Issue 1, p10-10. 1p. 1 Color
Photograph.

Opinion

*BIOMETRIC identification
*RIGHT of privacy
*MASS surveillance
UNITED States

UNITED States. Federal Bureau of Investigation
UNITED States. Dept. of Homeland Security

922120 Police Protection

The article discusses privacy issues of biometric databases, arguing
that technology under development as of January 2014 has the potential
to invade personal privacy and rules of their use need to be established.
Topics include systems such as the Mobile Offender Recognition and
Information System (MORIS), the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s
(FBI) New Generation Identification database, and the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security’s Biometric Optical Surveillance System (BOSS).

709

0036-8733

93322272

Academic Search Complete

Science Agenda
Opinion and analysis from Scientific American’s Board of Editors

Beware the Eye Spies

Without explicit safeguards, your personal biometric data are destined for a government database
Security through biology is an enticing idea. Since 2011, police departments across the U.S. have been
scanning biometric data in the field using devices such as the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information
System (MORIS), an iPhone attachment that checks fingerprints and iris scans. The FBI is currently building its
Next Generation Identification database, which will contain fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, voice data and
photographs of faces. Before long, even your cell phone will be secured by information that resides in a distant
biometric database.

Unfortunately, this shift to biometric-enabled security creates profound threats to commonly accepted notions
of privacy and security. It makes possible privacy violations that would make the National Security Agency’s
data sweeps seem superficial by comparison.

Biometrics could turn existing surveillance systems into something categorically new — something more
powerful and much more invasive. Consider the so-called Domain Awareness System, a network of 3,000
surveillance cameras in New York City. Currently if someone commits a crime, cops can go back and review
sections of video. Equip the system with facial-recognition technology, however, and the people behind the
controls can actively track you throughout your daily life. “A person who lives and works in lower Manhattan

would be under constant surveillance,” says Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
a nonprofit group. Face-in-a-crowd detection is a formidable technical problem, but researchers working on
projects such as the Department of Homeland Security’s Biometric Optical Surveillance System (BOSS) are
making rapid progress.

In addition, once your face, iris or DNA profile becomes a digital file, that file will be difficult to protect. As the
recent NSA revelations have made clear, the boundary between commercial and government data is porous at
best. Biometric identifiers could also be stolen. It’s easy to replace a swiped credit card, but good luck
changing the patterns on your iris.

These days gathering biometric data generally requires the cooperation (or coercion) of the subject: for your
iris to get into a database, you have to let someone take a close-up photograph of your eyeball. That will not be
the case for long. Department of Defense-funded researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are perfecting a
camera that can take rapid-fire, database-quality iris scans of every person in a crowd from a distance of 10
meters.

New technologies will also make it possible to extract far more information from the biometrics we are already
collecting. While most law-enforcement DNA databases contain only snippets of the genome, agencies can
keep the physical DNA samples in perpetuity, raising the question of what future genetic-analysis tools will be
able to discern. “Once you have somebody’s DNA, you have all sorts of very personal info,” Lynch says.
“There is a lot of fear that people are going to start testing samples to look for a link between genes and
propensity for crime.”

Current law is not even remotely prepared to handle these developments. The legal status of most types of
biometric data is unclear. No court has addressed whether law enforcement can collect biometric data without
a person’s knowledge, and case law says nothing about facial recognition.

It is unfortunate that the only body capable of enacting broad and lasting protections against the misuse of
biometric data is the U.S. Congress. Yet perhaps legislators can agree that the law needs to catch up with
technology. If so, they should start with principles that Lynch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have
proposed. Among other things, such legislation should limit the amount and type of data that the government
can store and where they can be stored. It should restrict the collation of different types of biometric data into a
single database. And it should certainly require that all biometric data be stored in the most secure manner
possible.

Identity theft, fraud and terrorism are real problems. Used properly, biometrics could help protect against them.
But the potential for misuse is glaringly obvious. We must begin setting rules to govern the use of these
technologies now.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Comment on this article at ScientiflcAmerican.com/jan2014

PHOTO (COLOR)

~~~~~~~~
By the Editors

Scientific American is a registered trademark of Nature America, Inc. and its content may not be copied or
emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder’s express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

56 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E JA N UA R Y 2012

Borderworld

How the U.S. is reengineering homeland security

B Y R O G E R D. H O D G E

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 56 11/15/11 11:38 AM

JA N UA R Y 2012 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E 57

THE CROSSING

The Zaragoza-Ysleta Inter-

national Bridge in El Paso,

Texas, is one of the 330 ports

of entry where customs offi-

cials inspect the more than

350 million travelers and

100 million vehicles, trains

and aircraft entering and

exiting the U.S. every year.

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 57 11/15/11 11:38 AM

58 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E JA N UA R Y 2012

As a lone male in a rented minivan headed south on a remote

stretch of border highway, I almost certainly fit some kind of pro-

file. I passed several white pickups bearing the distinctive green

stripe of the U.S. Border Patrol, but my first direct encounter with

the authorities did not come until I pulled off the road to study

with my binoculars a white speck that I had spotted high in the

cloudless sky. It was not a Predator or any other UAV that I had

ever seen or read about. It looked like a blimp. I put down my bin-

oculars just as another of the green-and-white trucks pulled up.

We both lowered our windows and I asked, in my best Texan, what

that thing was floating up there in the sky. “It’s a weather bal-

loon,” the officer said with a smile. I thanked him, and we both

waved as I drove off, still headed south.

In El Indio, I stopped to buy a Dr Pepper and asked the old lady

behind the counter, in my best Spanish, whether she knew any-

thing about that white thing up in the sky. She did not. I decided

to inquire at the post office, but it was closed. I was wondering

what to do next when a minivan pulled up. I asked the driver if she

knew what that white thing was up in the sky.

“It’s a satellite for the drugs,” she said. “My brother-in-law works

for it.” A boy chimed in from the backseat that if I kept driving

south I’d see “the building that controls it.” I thanked the woman

and her boy and continued on my way. Border Patrol vehicles con-

tinued to pass me coming and going, and, as I neared the base of

what I could now see was in fact a tethered blimp, one of those

trucks quickly pulled up right behind me and showed no sign of

passing. Although I was doing nothing illegal, I began to sweat.

Soon I drove by a couple of white buildings, in front of which was

a sign: united states air force tethered aerostat radar site.

That settled the question. The tethered radar blimp (I have since

learned) is a relatively old surveillance device, part of a system

deployed decades ago when drug smugglers were having a grand

time flying over the border with their cargo. I’ve seen another aero-

stat on the ground in West Texas, near Marfa. Rumor has it that one

of them got loose in a high wind and was blown almost to Oklahoma.

Having attained my goal, I was now confronted with the more

urgent question of what to do about the Border Patrol vehicle that

was so determinedly following me. I had never driven this stretch

of highway before, and I feared I might drive for hours before

reaching another human settlement. I spotted a place to pull over

and decided to turn around. That’s when the flashing lights went

on behind me. I stopped, several more trucks pulled up, and soon E
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of Del Rio, Texas, when my grandmother told

me she had seen a drone flying over El Indio,

a tiny village just east of the Mexican border,

about 75 miles down the river. Te newspapers

that summer were filled with stories about the

Predator drones poised to patrol the skies above

the Rio Grande, but the date of deployment

was not yet at hand, and in any case Predators

ordinarily fly far too high to be seen fom the

ground, so I decided to take the afernoon to

drive down to El Indio and investigate.

1. “YOU TURNED AROUND”

I was visiting
my hometown

Borderworld

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 58 11/15/11 11:39 AM

JA N UA R Y 2012 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E 59

men in green uniforms were peering through all the windows of

my vehicle. “What seems to be the trouble, officer?” I asked. “You

turned around,” came the reply.

The lead agent was friendly enough, but he was insistent in his

inquiries. He wanted to know what I was doing out there on a remote

stretch of highway not far from Mexico. My explanation, that I had

driven south from Del Rio because I was curious about the secu-

rity infrastructure that had materialized along the border in the 25

years since I loaded up my car and drove off to college, struck him

as implausible and weird. I fought the urge to become indignant, to

assert my right as an American citizen to go where I pleased on a pub-

lic highway. Instead I explained again that I

was curious about that blimp up there, the

aerostat. Eventually, after much discussion,

it was determined that I had not committed

a detainable offense, and I was permitted to

continue on my way, at liberty.

2. “A VIRTUAL FENCE”
DRIVInG BAck UP the line to my grand-

mother’s house, as I passed one curiously

discontinuous segment of 18-foot-tall border fence after another, I

brooded over the larger meaning of my encounter with the authori-

ties. I had long nursed the belief that the borderlands where I came

of age, in which my neighbors and my family and I had crossed the

river to Mexico weekly if not daily with a minimum of inconve-

nience, had ceased to exist. But on that bright summer day in 2010,

I realized that I did not yet comprehend what was taking its place.

I had only begun to understand the complexities of the modern

border and its intricate economies of authority and surveillance.

So I decided to investigate, to experience the border complex as a

sympathetic journalist rather than a suspect tourist.

My initial question was relatively simple:

How does the border work? What devices

and systems have we invented to secure a

1,954-mile international boundary—of river

valleys and canyons, mountains, deserts and

vibrant communities straddling both sides of

the line—that people have crossed more or

less freely for hundreds of years? What I dis-

covered, over weeks and months of reporting,

is that no real agreement exists among poli-

The borderlands where
I came of age had ceased to

exist. But I did not yet
comprehend what was

taking its place.

EYE IN THE SKY

Since 1980, military

and border authorities

have been deploying

radar blimps in Texas

and elsewhere to

monitor low-altitude

aircraft penetrating

U.S. airspace.

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 59 11/15/11 11:40 AM

60 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E JA N UA R Y 2012

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 60 11/15/11 11:41 AM

JA N UA R Y 2012 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E 61

cymakers about how to define the border itself. Is

it an obstruction or a conduit? A military domain

or a civil and commercial one? Is it meant to join

communities or keep them apart? I searched in

vain among the pronouncements of our political

leaders for clarification of such questions.

Despite this ambiguity—or perhaps as a result

of it—the federal government has since 2003

doubled the flow of funds to Customs and Bor-

der Protection, the division of the Department of

Homeland Security with primary responsibility

for policing the border. CBP, which encompasses

the Border Patrol, has in turn deployed increas-

ingly advanced means not only to scrutinize,

search out, and seize an immense stream of drugs

and bodies (to use CBP parlance), but also to channel a concomitant

river of data—electronic manifests, lists of travelers’ names, dates of

entry, and untold terabytes of video footage—all of which must be

analyzed, quantified, indexed, and stored.

Technologies of surveillance and control all aim to achieve a

perspectival advantage over some adversary, but the vast quanti-

ties of data produced by these devices threaten to overload the

system, thus defeating the original goal. Fusing those rivers of

data into a comprehensive and intuitively manageable real-time

graphical interface, for instance, had been one of the foremost

aims of the Secure Border Initiative Network, or SBInet, the fed-

eral government’s doomed mega-contract with Boeing to build a

“virtual fence” along the nation’s borders. In January 2011, after

five years of effort and more than $1 billion had yielded a mere

53 miles of partially operative tactical infrastructure in southern

Arizona, the Department of Homeland Security canceled SBInet.

It was not yet clear what would take its place.

Despite the failure of SBInet, the border is increasingly defined

not by geography or war or acts of Congress, but innovation.

Border-control assets—from radar blimps to Predator drones to

virtual fences and other military-grade surveillance machines—

are evolving rapidly, if imperfectly, and with them so is the border

itself. What was once little more than a line on a map has become

a theater

of operations.

3. “I NEED TO TALK TO YOU”

my INveSTIgATIoN BegAN in Brownsville, Texas, on the front

line of what some have taken to calling a border war. Brownsville

lies just above the mouth of the Rio grande, at the southern tip

of the largely Spanish-speaking urban sprawl of 1.2 million peo-

ple that fills the lower Rio grande valley. my initial destination

was a Border Patrol station, where I would visit a state-of-the-art

command-and-control center. When I arrived at the station, just

in time for the 4-p.m.-to-midnight shift, I was immediately con-

fronted with one of the reasons they call it a war.

At the daily muster, where Border Patrol agents get their march-

ing orders for the day, much of the talk was about Jaime Zapata,

a special agent with Immigration and Customs enforcement who

had been shot dead six days earlier by members of Los Zetas, a
mexican drug cartel, at a roadblock several hundred miles south
of the border. Zapata was both a Brownsville native and a former

Border Patrol agent, so his murder was a major event. After his

funeral, hundreds of law-enforcement vehicles, sirens wailing,

would pass through the city as residents lined

the streets waving American flags. Some of the

agents I spoke to attributed the relative quiet

along the border that week to the Zapata kill-

ing—the bad guys were waiting to see what the

American response would be. The gulf Cartel,

a rival organization whose own war with the

Zetas for control of transborder commerce had

resulted in more than 1,000 deaths over the

past year, denounced Zapata’s killing. “It’s clear

that the federal government should act without

delay against these assassins,” the cartel said in

a statement. “Because the spilling of blood in

the country is now drowning society.”

I was unable to attend the Zapata funeral,

but I would eventually see high-definition video footage of the

burial ceremony taken from a CBP helicopter. The video was shot

from about three miles out; the mourners were probably not even

aware that a helicopter was in the area. I watched playback of that

video feed on the Web portal of a system called the Big Pipe, a

surveillance network developed by Kenneth Knight, the deputy

executive director of national air-security operations for the office

of Air and marine (oAm), a lesser-known division of CBP that

operates the largest law-enforcement air force in the world.

Knight is a physically imposing, ruddy man with a disarming

midwestern accent. When we met in Brownsville, he was dressed

in the khaki jumpsuit that all oAm pilots wear, and it turned

out that he was a helicopter pilot himself. I had no idea who he

was, but he already knew about me. “I need to talk to you,” he

said, decisively hijacking my tour of the station. Knight was in

town to coordinate air support for the Zapata funeral, and he

didn’t have much time for me right then, but he gave me a quick

briefing on the Big Pipe and then invited me to Washington,

where he promised to give a more detailed demonstration of his

project’s capabilities.

What was the Big Pipe? The answer wasn’t clear at first, but

Knight emphasized the concept of “total domain awareness” and

strongly suggested that he possessed the means of attaining that

state. Based on the briefing I received in Brownsville, the Big Pipe

sounded like it might be the framework for the elusive “common

operating picture” that would integrate and rationalize the increas-

ingly unwieldy data streams generated by our high-definition

surveillance systems. Perhaps the Big Pipe could succeed where

SBInet had failed.

4. “THE MIKE SIDE”

LATe THAT AFTeRNooN, when the low angle of the sun was

beginning to lengthen the shadows, agent Dan milian took me

down to the Rio grande to get a closer look at the border itself.

Weedy, fast-growing brush often chokes the meandering banks of

the Rio grande as well as the no-man’s-land between the river and

the border fence. Carrizo river cane, an invasive species that aids

and abets the passage of other such species, grows everywhere.

Narrow trails snake through the tall grass.

The Brownsville & matamoros Bridge, the oldest crossing in

Brownsville, loomed behind us as we walked along the river. Broken

shards of glass twinkled in the dense ground cover, and thick veg-

etation did a good job of hiding the ubiquitous debris of human

MILES AND MILES Helicopter-borne cameras near

Laredo, Texas, offer a heightened perspective to U.S.

Border Patrol agents tracking any undocumented

migrants who might attempt to cross the Rio Grande.

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What was once little
more than a line

on a map has
become a theater

of operations.
Borderworld

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 61 11/15/11 11:41 AM

62 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E JA N UA R Y 2012

civilization: cast-off soft-drink bottles and

small articles of clothing, socks, T-shirts,

a sneaker. Torn black plastic trash bags

rustled in the light breeze, especially

along the landing spots worn slick from

the passage of illegal bodies who slip out

of the oily black nighttime river, briefly

pause, quickly pull dry clothing and sup-

plies from the trash bags, and then dress

themselves and furtively crawl, scramble,

or run toward the black steel pickets. The

fence can be climbed, and so they climb.

In 2006, Congress mandated the construction of a new barrier

along the southwest border, and since then contractors have built

just under 700 miles of such fencing, at an average cost of $2.8

million per mile. Environmentalists and cynical bystanders in the

border communities hate it. Farmers who are cut off from their

fields resent the inconvenience. People whose homes ended up on

the wrong side of the fence feel sacrificed and abandoned. Ocelots

and other lovely wild creatures are said to be experiencing disrup-

tions of their migratory wanderings. Smugglers, meanwhile, have

used a catapult to hurl drugs into Arizona, as well as a portable

ramp that permits vehicles to drive right over the fence.

It’s easy to laugh at fencing that abruptly ends in a tangle of

brush. But agents here say they love even the intermittent version

because it gives them a bit more time to respond to border-crossing

attempts, which in Brownsville must be measured in seconds. The

fence adds perhaps a minute to the equation, Milian told me, and it

also channels the flow of aliens away from populated areas out into

the brush, where the response time is measured in hours and days.

A heavily trafficked and well-maintained dirt road ran along-

side the border fence. Dust lay thick on the ground and offered up a

rich testimony to a tracker versed in the art of sign cutting. Agents

drag bundles of tires behind their vehicles along such roads, both

here on the line and out in the brush country far from the river,

and check back periodically to see if any signs have appeared. The

best trackers can tell from a footprint whether the body in ques-

tion is heavy or light, fit or exhausted, his approximate age and

height, how fast he is moving, whether he is carrying a load, and

how heavy that load is likely to be. I’ve been told that at least one

agent can cut sign from horseback at a gallop.

We were in the middle of town, right next to a port of entry.

The river was perhaps 10 yards across, and the railroad bridge of

the port not more than 50 yards away. Even here, they cross. We

walked down a trail looking for fresh signs of traffic, and I noticed

how much thicker the brush was on the other side. We observed

no signs of human activity, but such appearances were deceptive.

Matamoros was right there; people lived and worked and per-

formed their daily routines just a few hundred yards away. Down

here, the cartels often employ spotters to watch the river. Some-

times they fish, but often they just sit and watch from the bank,

staring with impunity and insolence or maybe just boredom. The

cartels choose when and where to cross; they control the other

side, the “Mike side.” They own the monopoly on human traffic

just as they do the traffic in drugs. No one freelances anymore.

On our side, a Border Patrol camera tower looked almost pretty

against the evening sky as it peered, from a height of 60 feet, up

and down this broad bend in the river.

5. “BUGS”

BACk AT ThE COMMAND-AND-CONTrOl CENTEr a few hours

later, I found myself on the other side of that camera, studying

the same stretch of the river. The shift in perspective was dizzying.

Twenty large screens lined the front wall of the control room and

flickered from one surveillance camera to another; a television in

the middle of the wall had been tuned to Fox News. Agents sat

behind desks, scanning the monitors and occasionally speaking

on the radio with agents in the field.

The rio Grande Valley sector employs dozens of remote Video

Surveillance Systems, most of which are on fixed towers. Each

rVSS is made up of four cameras, two of which are infrared for

night duty. The agents who are assigned to camera duty in the

control room zoom and pan the cameras as needed. At night they

can manipulate the contrast of the infrared video, shifting from

“black hot” to “white hot,” rewinding and forwarding through

the digital file as needed to identify what is often merely a fleet-

SCANNERS Border

Patrol agents employ

backscatter x-rays to

detect cash, drugs,

firearms, humans and

other contraband, but

nothing is more effec-

tive than a dog’s nose.

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HEAVY TRAFFIC

The Falfurrias Traffic

Checkpoint, 70 miles

north of the

border, maintains the

highest seizure rate

of any checkpoint in

the country.

Borderworld

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 62 11/15/11 11:41 AM

JA N UA R Y 2012 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E 63

ing glimpse of an unidentified animal, possibly human. Sources

of thermal energy abound. rocks, concrete blocks and even the

plants radiate heat, but warm-blooded animals stand out most

vividly, and they move.

A seismic sensor buried alongside an active trail detects foot

traffic and transmits its radio signal to the command center. Such

unmanned ground sensors have been used for decades, but engi-

neers continue to reduce their size and increase their sensitivity.

Border Patrol agents have placed some 11,000 sensors along the

U.S. border, and they move them constantly in an effort to keep up

with the ever-shifting traffic patterns along the infinitely forking

paths that radiate outward from the line.

Agent Jose Mancillas demonstrated what happens when he receives

a signal from a ground sensor. he glanced left to a small screen dis-

playing the current locations of his “bugs” and quickly typed a few

keystrokes. One of three large flat-screen monitors at his desk instantly

displayed a river camera’s infrared image. Using a joystick controller,

he panned the camera and zoomed in. There wasn’t much to see just

then, so he pulled up a file of a recent incursion. Eight ghostly white

bodies sprang out of the brush and sprinted in an awkward hunkered-

down posture toward the steel pickets of the border fence. They had

activated the sensor about 50 yards south of the

levee, three miles away from the rio Grande. As

soon as he had confirmed that there was traffic

on the move, Mancillas had hit the radio, alerting

a unit he knew was standing by just around the

bend. We watched several members of the group

perch on the fence; then the agents came into view

and the aliens retreated. One leaped all the way

from the top of the fence and hit the ground hard.

We all winced. But he got up and ran south, back

toward Mexico, with the rest of his group.

Suddenly all motion stopped. The file ran backward as Man-

cillas worked the controls of the NetGuard-EVS video client. he

wanted to show me additional footage of recent traffic. Often you

get just a flash of white, and it takes an experienced eye to deter-

mine whether to respond. The cameras are a good tool, but they

can’t see everything, and the harsh South Texas weather degrades

their performance. In January, during a severe cold snap, the cam-

eras simply froze in place.

6. “A HUGE DIFFERENCE”

UPrIVEr FrOM BrOWNSVIllE lies McAllen, a more affluent

community where local conditions, both natural (thick brush) and

political (height restrictions), have prevented the deployment of

remote video surveillance towers. here the Border Patrol employs

mobile surveillance systems that can be moved to hotspots as

needed. Agent Jaime Medina joined us in McAllen and led an

excursion into the broad fields that run alongside the levees that

crisscross the fertile floodplain next to the rio Grande.

Driving along a levee in the dark is a disconcerting experience.

The land drops away sharply into an abyss of chirping crickets,

singing frogs and other loud, gregarious creatures of the subtropi-

cal darkness. As I traveled with agents Milian

and Medina through a night in which all fields

were black, I had to strain my eyes to find some

landmark. I tried to imagine what it was like

patrolling out here with nothing but flash-

lights and a good sense of direction. We finally

came to a “scope truck,” a pickup with a 20-foot

retractable camera tower mounted on its bed.

As with the stationary tower systems, the scope

truck can shift between daylight and infrared

viewing. We were parked on a kind of promon-

THE WEIGHT

Last year along the

Mexican border, U.S.

authorities seized 2.4

million pounds of mari-

juana, 10,182 pounds

of cocaine, 4,576

pounds of heroin and

933 pounds of

methamphetamine.

Customs and Border

Patrol does not expect,

or want, to stop
everything that

crosses the border.

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 63 11/15/11 11:42 AM

64 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E JA N UA R Y 2012

tory or juncture in the levee. In daylight

we no doubt would have been treated to

a spectacular view of South Texas’s agri-

cultural production. Historically, most

of these vast fields have been worked by

Mexican migrant workers, many of them

undocumented.

Border Patrol officers monitor this area

day and night, using scope trucks and also personal night-vision

equipment such as the TAM-14, a short-range thermal monocular,

and the Recon III Lite, a heavy thermal binocular, often mounted

on a tripod, that includes a laser targeting system. The laser can

guide agents wearing night-vision goggles to a group by fixing

them with a beam invisible to the naked eye but brightly appar-

ent to anyone wearing the proper eyewear. Such equipment,

which was in short supply in previous years, is now widely used.

After an impressive demonstration of the scope truck’s long-range

thermal camera, the agents offered to show me the laser; wearing

night-vision goggles, I was able to clearly see the red beam as it

targeted a spot near the river.

Airplanes, helicopters and drones can highlight targets using

similar devices to even greater effect. I later rode in a helicopter

equipped with a FLIR Star Safire HD camera that was sensitive

enough to detect the heat signature left by a body in high grass

long after the body itself had moved on. The Star Safire comes

equipped with a laser targeting system and a powerful infrared

spotlight that can be slaved to the camera, and thereby bathe

groups of aliens in a light they cannot see. As Mancillas had told

me in the Brownsville control room, “it makes a huge difference

when you can see in the dark.”

7. “WE SEE IT”

cBP DoeS noT exPecT, or want, to stop everything that crosses the

border. Facilitating the flow of commerce is central to its mission,

and as a result Laredo is, on a given day, the busiest commercial

“land port” in the U.S. When I visited the World Trade Bridge there,

the facility was nearing the end of an expansion project that would

double the number of primary lanes used to help process the 1.5

million trucks that pass through the port every year.

Jose Uribe, the port’s amiable and efficient assistant director,

described his operation as he drove us across and against oncom-

ing truck traffic, dodging and weaving like a veteran player of

Grand Theft Auto. To my inexpert eye, the scene was a chaotic riot of

monstrous trucks and looming, barn-like scanners. Five thousand

trucks a day on average, laden with every conceivable commodity—

blue jeans, auto parts destined for just-in-time delivery to a factory

in Tennessee—pass through this facility. “I’ve been in Laredo for 34

years,” Uribe told me. “I can remember back in the late ’70s we had

mostly curios, some heavy steel.” Then came nafta. “now, you name

it and we see it. everything from laptops to three-piece suits.”

As Uribe’s tour progressed, patterns began to emerge before

my untrained eyes, and I could see that the operation here was a

miracle of logistics. each vehicle, as it passed through the layered

enforcement process that began with the submission of an elec-

tronic manifest at least one hour prior to its actual arrival, was

tracked from station to station. At any point, a customs officer

could create an “issue”: tagging the shipment for more-intensive

scrutiny, which might mean submitting to a higher-resolution

x-ray scan or offloading the complete contents of a shipment.

Inspectors at the World Trade Bridge deploy an impressive

array of scanning devices, from old-fashioned low-energy x-ray

machines to backscatter and high-energy x-ray and gamma-ray

scanners. The high-energy x-rays, which inspectors used to scan

the most visually challenging commodities, produce marvelous,

almost gallery-quality images. one can see the internal structure

of a large tractor-trailer rig with hallucinatory clarity—the gears

inside a transmission, the pushrods in the engine. Uribe showed

me scans of a road roller, the kind used to compress hot asphalt,

and inside the large, dense roller wheel were packages of drugs. A

load of gypsum board was laden with marijuana, the voids inside

the pallets revealed by the scan. Scans of a southbound truck car-

rying rolls of fabric revealed suspicious areas of density; using

software-enhancement tools, the scanning technician was able

to detect the presence of $1.2 million in cash, a small fraction of

the estimated $18 billion to $39 billion that the cartels smuggle

across the border every year (of which $147 million was seized in

2010). Another scan showed packages of cocaine stamped with

the logo of the Gulf cartel.

Smugglers are often stupid, and sometimes they are greedy,

as when they attempt to cram one or two more packages into a

well-concealed cavity in a vehicle. They are just as frequently inge-

nious, however, as when they hid a load of drugs inside a large

tank of used oil, which scanners can’t penetrate. These smugglers

were perfectly aware of the limits of the technology. What they

were unable to defeat, in that case, was the power of a dog’s nose.

Dogs, at border checkpoints as well as traffic checkpoints 70 miles

from the line, have found people hidden in the engine compart-

ments of trucks, sewn sitting upright into the backseats of cars,

and in one case wedged into a modified console such that when

customs officers opened the hatch between the front seats, they

saw a man’s face staring up. JO
h

N
B
.
C
A
R
N
E
t
t

DOWN BY THE RIVER

A “sky box” mobile

surveillance platform

near McAllen, Texas,

gives agents an excel-

lent perspective, but

its mere presence also

deters smugglers from

crossing the line.

Borderworld

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 64 11/15/11 11:43 AM

JA N UA R Y 2012 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E 65

8. “PASSIVE SECURITY”

AT PoRTS SeRvInG the general public, such as the much smaller

but extremely modern crossing in Del Rio, security measures are

directed not only at the endless stream of commodities that pass

through these facilities, but at the bodies of the individual people

presenting themselves for entry: their facial expressions, postures,

affect, clothing and emotional dispositions.

Sharon Ansick, a tactical logistics officer who went to high

school with my sister, gave me the grand tour of the Del Rio facil-

ity. video cameras were everywhere, 150 in all. Doors and windows

were secured, and passage in and out of facilities, as well as from

one area to another within a compound or building, was tightly

controlled. Ansick explained that this was called passive security.

everyone who entered this facility, whether they knew it or not, had

entered a panopticon. Their every move was registered, recorded,

observed, and controlled. no one could leave without permission.

Border runners would be met with road spikes that jut up from the

pavement at the push of a distress button. Few would ever realize

the degree to which their liberty had been constrained.

All incoming and outgoing license plates are photographed, and all

drivers too. All recently issued passports, green cards and day-entry cards

contain radio-frequency ID chips that broadcast the identify of a traveler

at the primary checkpoint, and the Del Rio port is

the first to deploy a special RFID lane to speed pro-

cessing. When I was there, traffic was light and lines

were short, but there was a sense of high alertness

throughout the facility. Immigration and customs

enforcement agents armed with M-4 rifles loitered

near the secondary station. Supervisory agents, in

a glass-encased control room overlooking the

traffic lanes, kept watch over the whole proceeding,

monitored the video feeds, and maintained radio

contact with personnel all over the port.

The port’s noncommercial traffic—about two million vehicu-

lar travelers and 50,000 pedestrians annually—is not routinely

scanned. Instead, cBP officers interview drivers in a primary lane

and use special angled mirrors to inspect the underside of all vehi-

cles, and if a dog sniffs something suspicious or something about

the car seems unusual, or if the driver seems nervous or simply

came from an area of interest, the officer will call for a secondary

inspection. At that point, density meters, mirrors, x-ray scanners

and the whole repertoire of what cBP terms non-intrusive inspec-

tion techniques come into play. nowadays few cars are dismantled

or drilled without evidence derived from one of these methods.

one recent seizure came about because an officer manning the

primary lane noticed that a vehicle, driven by a lone male, was

uncommonly clean. A trip to the vAcIS x-ray scanner settled the

matter. After some probing and chipping, agents discovered sev-

eral pounds of heroin and methamphetamine.

As we passed through the port, the routine business of inspection

and seizure continued all around us, and it was that routine of pas-

sive and all-encompassing surveillance that seemed to offer the most

plausible model for what Kenneth Knight’s total domain awareness

might look like. The primary question taking shape in my mind was:

Where and how would the limits of the border domain be set?

As if in answer to my silent wonderment, Ansick pointed out

that cBP enforces regulations on behalf of 44 other governmental

agencies, including the FDA, the ePA and the USDA. Inspectors go

through agricultural loads by hand, searching for tiny insects, egg

casings under leaves, and other stowaways on legitimate imports.

Palo verde wood borers show up in stacks of firewood. cattle must

be examined for Rocky Mountain spotted fever ticks. In Del Rio,

people arrive with juicy, stinky fermenting cheeses, deer heads,

oranges, cowboy boots made from endangered species like sea

turtles. The guy with the sea-turtle boots was a recent case, a

native of San Luis Potosí, the state where Jaime Zapata was mur-

dered, and the officer interviewing him just happened to notice

the boots. The boots went into a freezer, and the poor man, who

naively admitted what they were, left in his socks.

9. “DIFFERENT PURPOSE. DIFFERENT MISSION.”

eveRyWHeRe I TRAveLeD along the Rio Grande, when I asked

questions about the different devices being used on the border, my

companions invoked the name Borkowski—as in, “you’d better ask

Borkowski about that.” They were talking about Mark Borkowski,

cBP’s assistant commissioner for the office of Technology Innova-

tion and Acquisition. All the most advanced equipment, and all

the new contracts, flowed through him. So I went to the source, to

Washington, D.c. I had many questions. The week before I arrived,

Borkowski had testified before congress about the failure of SBI-

net, the infamous virtual fence, so I asked him

to elaborate. In long, well-punctuated para-

graphs, he told me the story of the program’s

genesis and its fall.

In his view, the original sin of SBInet was

a pervasive naiveté—among the general pub-

lic, the media and the government—about the

ability of technology to solve a vexing political

problem. In the years after 9/11, when the bor-

der began to be regarded with a new sense of

urgency, there was a strong feeling that some-

Smugglers are often
stupid, and sometimes
they are greedy. They
are just as frequently
ingenious, however.

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 65 11/15/11 11:43 AM

66 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E JA N UA R Y 2012

thing dramatic needed to be done

and that technology, which every-

one agreed was a good thing, would

somehow provide an answer. Unfor-

tunately, Borkowski told me, no one

had a clear theory of what exactly

technology was supposed to accom-

plish. That rush to find a universal

technological solution contributed

to the failure of SBInet, which was

plagued from the very beginning

by cost overruns, delays and poor

design on the part of Boeing and

bad program management on the

part of Homeland Security. Looking

forward, the immediate goal was to

find specific technological solutions

that fit the particular challenges

of different stretches of the border.

Policy changes, such as comprehen-

sive immigration reform—which,

Borkowski hastened to point out,

was not the same thing as amnesty—

could make a huge difference as well.

If Congress would create a rational

and orderly system to match immi-

grants with jobs in a legal manner,

and if the laws against hiring undoc-

umented aliens were consistently enforced, “that would cut off a

lot of the traffic between the points of entry. In fact, at a certain

point, you would only have the really bad people left, the drug

smugglers and the terrorists.”

At that point, though, technology would continue to play a

major role. Indeed, it would most likely be every bit as transfor-

mative for border operations as air power was in military affairs.

Borkowski singled out the domestic use of unmanned aerial sys-

tems as having the most potential for radical operational change.

SBInet might have failed, but the idea behind it was sound: watch-

ing as much of the border as possible, all the time. A drone has

a different, but complementary, mission: targeted surveillance.

“A UAV can get somewhere fast, and can stay there,” he said—far

longer than a conventional aircraft—“but it looks through a soda

straw. Different purpose. Different mission.”

Leaning forward on his desk, Borkowski was quick to credit

his fellow assistant commissioner Michael Kostelnik, the retired

Air Force general who runs OAM, for pushing the deployment of

drones along the border and elsewhere. OAM

has been operating Predators in domestic air-

space for six years now and is using them in

many situations that have little or nothing to

do with border security, notably in disaster-

recovery missions after hurricanes, fires and

floods, but also in what Kostelnik (at a border

summit I later attended in El Paso) called “pop

up” missions responding to contingent home-

land-security situations. For routine border

missions, OAM operates its unmanned aircraft

with a certificate of authorization from the FAA

that permits it to fly them over the entire southwestern border, as

well as the Gulf Coast as far east as New Orleans and the northern

border from Spokane, Washington, to the western end of the Great

Lakes. The agency also has transit certificates that allow it to fly

drones across the country from one area of operations to another.

The FAA will not yet permit OAM drones to fly over large met-

ropolitan areas on a routine basis, but Kostelnik said his agency

can now secure an emergency authorization and within a day put

a Predator drone in the sky anywhere in the country.

10. “THEY CAN’T DO WHAT WE DO”

WHEN KENNETH KNIGHT was in Brownsville to coordinate air

support for the Zapata funeral, one of his prime objectives had been

to set up the helicopter video feed, which was transmitted by direct

downlink to a microwave antenna he had installed on the roof of

the Border Patrol station. While I was there, Knight had pulled up

the Big Pipe portal on a Border Patrol PC, logged in, and within a few

mouse clicks we had that helicopter feed on the screen. The same

feed could be pushed out through the Big Pipe

to a local sheriff, the FBI, or any one of the hun-

dreds of other local, state and federal “customers”

with whom Knight works regularly. “We’re doing

some really cool shit,” he had explained.

Several weeks later at his spartan office in

Washington, Knight gave me the more compre-

hensive briefing he had promised. As things now

stood, sitting at his own desk or at any registered

computer (or tablet or smartphone) anywhere in

the world, Knight could click from a feed origi-

nating from a helicopter or a Predator or a P3

The primary
question was: Where
and how would the
limits of the border

domain be set? fR
O

m
T

O
P

:
G

A
R

y
W

IL
L

IA
m

S
/

G
E

T
T

y
I
m
A
G
E

S
;

JO
h
N
B
.
C
A
R
N
E
T
T

THE LONG VIEW

Customs and Border

Protection’s “Big Pipe”

surveillance system

will soon integrate video

from river cameras along

the border with

data from unmanned

aerial vehicles.

continued on page 81

Borderworld

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 66 11/15/11 11:43 AM

surveillance plane to any other feed, includ-

ing a new test sight—a DHS camera pointed

at a security line inside Hartsfield-Jackson

Atlanta International Airport. Click, scroll,

click; just like that.

I asked Knight how this might all work

in practice, and he described a hypothetical

mission in which a Guardian drone (the mar-

itime version of the Predator) encounters an

unidentified watercraft in the waters off

Miami. The Big Pipe enables all the people

from all the agencies who have an interest

in the mission to be logged in simultane-

ously, each one watching the same video

feed in real time, along with the same charts

and maps and other mission data. The OAM

drone operator might not be able to identify

the craft, but a Coast Guard analyst could

pronounce his take on the matter without

having to wait for the pilot to verbalize what

he thinks he’s seeing on the water.

That all sounded useful and efficient,

but the real advantage, Knight continued,

was not just being able to see things; it

was being able to switch perspectives on

the fly. Say the target vessel is approach-

ing Miami, a major metropolitan area and

therefore off limits. The drone could hand

off the target to a manned Dash 8 aircraft.

Then, as the vessel enters the port, it could

be handed off again, now to fixed video

cameras, whereupon ground personnel

could also play a role. One platform can’t

do it all—the air assets can’t stay airborne

forever or go wherever you want them; the

still cameras can’t move—“but if you start

putting all these camera systems together,

you’ve functionally closed the gap.”

It was becoming clear that the

Big Pipe, with its persistent and per-

vasive surveillance capacity and its

ability to archive everything into an

easily accessible mission data package

for intelligence analysis, could soon out-

strip the command-and-control software

used by American soldiers in war zones

around the world. Knight wasn’t just talk-

ing about a specific operational zone like

the Rio Grande Valley sector or the waters

off the coast of Florida. He was target-

ing a much larger domain: the national

air radar picture and the coastal marine

surface radar picture, not just the sur-

veillance cameras in the ports and along

the border but also the surveillance cam-

eras in metropolitan areas—airports,

train stations, on the side of buildings,

anywhere—such that the theater of

operations was expanded to the widest

possible extent. This broad spectrum of

surveillance was really what Knight had

in mind when he told me about total

domain awareness, an operating picture

that encompassed pretty much the entire

country. Total domain awareness meant

the ability to apply these tools, at will and

as needed, anywhere in the U.S.

As I listened to Knight describe his

vision, I recalled Borkowski’s skepticism

about the ability of technology, by itself,

to solve our border problems. It wasn’t

clear, for example, that a fully robust Big

Pipe could have prevented the gun that

was purchased near Dallas and later killed

Jaime Zapata from ending up in the Zetas’

arsenal—unless, of course, the movement

of goods and people inside our borders

were managed with the same rigor we

apply to the traffic crossing the border.

That level of operational control is beyond

reach for now, but judging from the logis-

tical expertise I saw demonstrated at the

World Trade Bridge, it is far from unat-

tainable. In October, a DHS official named

Mariko Silver, testifying before Congress

on border security, would make a similar

point, explaining that President Obama’s

border-security policy “requires us to

move beyond seeing border management

as simply guarding or policing the juris-

dictional line between the United States

and Mexico. The border and the interior

are inextricably linked.”

The mission of securing our national

borders has thus become indistinguishable

from a new and still emerging under-

standing of what constitutes homeland

security. The border has become a labora-

tory in which new security techniques can

be perfected and where military tactics

can be adapted for domestic application.

Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion

that the border is slowly expanding to fill

the entire continent.

Knight had tried to explain all of this

to me back in Texas, but at that point I

hadn’t fully understood what he meant.

Now I could see. “The military does some

of the same stuff, but they can’t do what

we do. They work in the classified world.

We actually cross domains,” he had said.

“We are paving the way.”

Roger D. Hodge is the former editor of

Harper’s Magazine and the author of The

Mendacity of Hope. He lives in Brooklyn.

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JA N UA R Y 2012 P O P U L A R S C I E N C E 81

Borderworld

PSC0112_WL_Borders_FINAL.indd 81 11/15/11 11:43 AM

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