public safety assignment #2
smilenjoylife
borderworld2.pdf
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
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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.
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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 d
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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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Borderworld
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