4 ways to address the failures we found along the US border’s “virtual wall”

MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border. We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for weeks or months. These cases reflect systemic flaws in the virtual wall: broken towers, algorithms that failed to detect people, and agents who simply did not respond to alerts.

This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past year examining the failures of border surveillance technology and uncovering the stories of the people who die in the borderlands. Each of these deaths should have raised alarms inside US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about the flaws in the agency’s surveillance network.

This is particularly true for cases near the latest towers built by the defense company Anduril, which continues to win major contracts and is poised to benefit from the windfall of federal money slated for border security. The US is set to spend $1 billion to triple the size of the virtual wall by 2034. Here are four ideas for what CBP should do next to address these failures.

An audit is necessary because, despite poring over thousands of pages of police reports and other documents about surveillance towers, we have only limited knowledge of how many towers are out there and where they’re located. CBP does not publish a comprehensive map of its virtual wall. We instead relied on mapping work led by the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation and then used satellite imagery to verify where specific towers were and approximately when they were installed.

We analyzed lots of towers—nearly 600. But that’s still far less than the 800 the government says operate today. And our estimates of when they went up are inexact.

That means our tally of more than 1,050 people who have died near them is an undercount. And we don’t have a complete picture of where along the border the problem is worst. An internal audit would not have such limitations.