The disastrous scenario on the US-Mexico border is, and has been, deliberately produced. All through the final a number of administrations, no matter marketing campaign and different public rhetoric, the porous nature of the border has remained unresolved. On a number of events, the scenario because it has developed has been blamed largely on incompetence and authorities inefficiency. Although some administrations have been more durable than others with reference to terrestrial migration (beneath some metrics), the US-Mexico border has not been sealed off so to power entrants to cross by formally acknowledged and managed ports of entry.
Below the present administration, it has been pointedly apparent that even the sections of the border that do include bodily obstacles are being dismantled on function, all of the whereas unlawful crossings have risen to unprecedented ranges. Regardless of the motives for this deliberate coverage on the a part of the Biden administration, the top end result has been the widespread characterization of the disaster as an “invasion,” priming the voter bloc often most involved with border safety – the American Proper – for military-style “options.”
Whereas the justifications for the frenzied media protection are primarily based on the precise actuality that the border is certainly extremely insecure (and has been for a while), the coverage responses from American politicians reveal that there’s a bipartisan consensus about what should be achieved. Tellingly, the identical “resolution” can be being quietly rolled out in any respect American ports of entry that aren’t at present being “overrun”, similar to airports. That resolution, in fact, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous units.
This “resolution” isn’t just being carried out all through america as an alleged technique of thwarting migrants, additionally it is being quickly carried out all through the world in obvious lockstep. The explanations for the unstated, however apparent, world consistency in implementing invasive, biometric surveillance is because of the achievement of worldwide coverage agendas, ratified by practically each nation on the planet, that search each to limit the extent of individuals’s freedom of motion and to surveil individuals’s actions (and far, way more) by the world implementation of digital identification. These coverage agendas embrace primarily the UN’s Agenda 2030 or Sustainable Growth Targets, particularly SDG 16, in addition to Interpol’s World Policing Targets.
Whereas the American Proper has been somewhat outspoken in its rejection of the UN’s Agenda 2030, and the digital ID venture at massive, the misery over the border scenario is getting used to fabricate consent amongst this particular group for “options” which are centered on increasing surveillance and biometric assortment versus the implementation of bodily obstacles.
The Digital Wall
The Hawaiian shirt-wearing inventor of the VR headset Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, has turn out to be the face of America’s “digital border wall.” Luckey, the mind behind the protection tech agency Anduril, is a long-time affiliate of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, with Luckey having met Thiel at 19 when Luckey presided over his first firm Oculus Rift, which was later offered to Fb. Thiel was then on Fb’s board and was additionally instrumental in the rise of the social media firm. Luckey’s Anduril can be backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and one other Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, can be an Anduril investor.
Anduril is likely one of the predominant beneficiaries of presidency contracts to construct autonomous surveillance towers alongside the US-Mexico border, which are actually additionally being rolled out alongside the US-Canada border. As a consequence, they’re prone to be among the many beneficiaries of the Senate’s present proposal for “border safety,” which units apart $170 million for extra towers to be construct.
Below the Trump and now Biden administrations, Luckey has been vocal about how Anduril will create “a digital wall that isn’t a barrier a lot as an online of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees.” As famous by WIRED in 2018, Luckey and Anduril has lengthy been pitching its know-how “as a complement to – or substitute for – a lot of [then] President Trump’s promised bodily wall.”
Luckey was a donor to Trump’s inaugural committee and his obvious mentor, Peter Thiel, was a key determine on Trump’s transition workforce, notably for protection. The corporate clothes itself in “America First” rhetoric, particularly with regards to border safety, framing itself as a beacon of “Western democracy” and nationalism in an age of globalism. Regardless of this, Anduril is a part of a community that fronts for the long-standing surveillance ambitions of the identical American “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile.
Luckey’s Anduril wouldn’t exist with out the help of Thiel and a number of other executives from Thiel’s Palantir. As Limitless Hangout has reported in a number of articles, Palantir is a CIA entrance explicitly geared toward resurrecting the controversial surveillance dragnet as soon as housed by the Pentagon’s DARPA often called Whole Data Consciousness (TIA), which sought to make use of warrantless, dragnet surveillance of People to stop crime and terrorism earlier than it occurs (i.e. pre-crime, a subject which Palantir has since pioneered and which was primarily made DOJ coverage by Trump’s Legal professional Common William Barr).
A type of Palantir executives who later got here to Anduril, Trae Stephens, labored at a authorities intelligence company (he declines to specify which one) earlier than becoming a member of Palantir. From there, Stephens joined Thiel’s Founders Fund and ended up on the boards of among the most controversial Founders Fund-funded corporations, similar to Carbyne911. Financed partly by Jeffrey Epstein and the brainchild of former Israeli Prime Minister (and Epstein affiliate) Ehud Barak, Carbyne’s platform additionally includes invasive knowledge assortment from civilians and “predictive policing” functionalities. On Carbyne’s board, Stephens initially sat alongside Barak in addition to Israeli intelligence-linked figures like Pinchas Buchris (former commander of Israel’s Unit 8200), Lital Leshem (“former” Israeli intelligence operative who know works for documented CIA asset and former head of the notorious mercenary group Blackwater, Erik Prince), and Nicole Junkermann (an Epstein affiliate who has since rebranded as a enterprise capitalist in rising applied sciences and FinTech). Stephens stays on Carbyne’s board, the place he now sits alongside former US Homeland Safety chiefs Michael Chertoff (Bush administration) and Kirstjen Nielsen (Trump administration).
Thanks partly to Thiel’s affect over the early Trump administration, Stephens was chosen to supervise Trump’s transition workforce for the Protection Division, the place he “steered” Trump’s early Pentagon insurance policies. On the time, Stephens was additionally in talks with Luckey to create a brand new firm. After Luckey left Fb beneath a cloud of controversy in late March 2017, he and Stephens created Anduril and different Palantir executives have been recruited to hitch the corporate. Inside a yr of its existence, Anduril had already netted thousands and thousands in contracts from the Division of Homeland Safety. Stephens has remained at Thiel’s Founders Fund since co-founding Anduril.
Not not like Palantir, Anduril can be a contemporary reboot of a failed DHS initiative from across the similar time as TIA. The Safe Border Initiative Community (SBInet) was a Bush-era DHS effort that sought to construct a digital border wall that would not solely deter and detect unlawful border crossings, but in addition routinely designate these unlawful crossers a “menace stage” in addition to predict “unlawful border actions” earlier than they happen. Like Anduril, it relied on surveillance towers and a litany of sensors unfold all through the surroundings. This system, although shuttered by DHS in 2011, by no means really ended, because the DHS report asserting the “finish” of SBInet said the next:
DHS is at present creating a complete border know-how deployment plan that can construct upon profitable know-how at present deployed and supply the optimum mixture of confirmed surveillance applied sciences by sector. The place acceptable, this know-how plan can even embrace components of the previous SBInet program which have confirmed profitable.
Similar to Anduril’s advertising technique, SBInet was pitched as a less expensive, more cost effective and “sooner” technique of securing the border than the development of bodily obstacles. Anduril has overtly laid out its technique to keep away from the pitfalls of SBInet; whereas SBInet was doomed to fail by hiring incompetent contractors to construct and promote the system to the federal government, Anduril plans to personal the system it builds and lease it to the federal government, which – in keeping with Trae Stephens – “creates an incentive to maintain improvement prices low.” Regardless of claims it’s “low” value, since 2017, large DHS contracts have been given to Anduril to satisfy most of the unique ambitions of the SBInet venture and, regardless of the development of a whole lot of towers and thousands and thousands spent, the border stays extra insecure than ever.
One among Anduril’s earliest advocates was Congressman Will Hurd, a former officer within the CIA’s clandestine operations division who now represents Texas within the Home of Representatives. With Hurd’s assist, Anduril was in a position to place their first prototypes for the “digital wall” on the border-adjacent personal property of an nameless rancher. Customized and Border Safety (CBP) then performed their first official pilot of Anduril towers in 2018, resulting in the Trump administration’s approval to deploy Anduril’s towers alongside the whole thing of the south-western border in 2020. That approval noticed Anduril awarded a five-year and still-ongoing contract and in addition noticed the contract designated a “program of file,” that means it’s deemed important sufficient to be a devoted merchandise within the DHS finances.
Trump, within the latter years of his presidential time period, started to embrace the kind of digital wall that Anduril would allow much more so than the bodily barrier he had campaigned on. In January 2019, for instance, Trump said “The partitions we’re constructing should not medieval partitions. They’re good partitions designed to fulfill the wants of frontline border brokers.” The “good partitions”, Trump went on to say, would come with “sensors, displays and cutting-edge know-how.”
Below the Biden administration, Anduril’s star has continued to rise. That is partially because of the thousands and thousands the corporate has spent lobbying Congress, but in addition facilitated by the long-standing bipartisan love affair with constructing a “good wall” on the Southern border. CBP was given thousands and thousands for autonomous surveillance towers alongside the border within the 2021 US Citizenship Act after which once more within the 2022 omnibus invoice, with thousands and thousands extra granted final yr. The lion-share of that cash is destined for Anduril’s coffers. This yr, if the Senate’s bipartisan “border safety” efforts are any indication, Anduril stands to achieve much more contracts to construct ever extra autonomous towers, which are actually accompanied by autonomous drones and different linked units. Luckey, regardless of Anduril’s claims that there’ll at all times be human oversight of its merchandise, has said that his imaginative and prescient for the way forward for warfare that Anduril helps to construct will quickly end in people taking part in ever extra insignificant roles.
Whereas Anduril is likely one of the predominant corporations constructing the “digital wall,” they don’t seem to be alone. Common Dynamics, a protection agency deeply linked to organized crime, espionage scandals and corruption, has developed a number of hundred distant video surveillance methods (RVSS) towers for CBP whereas Google, one other Huge Tech agency with CIA connections, has been tapped by CBP to have its AI used at the side of Anduril’s towers, which additionally make the most of Anduril’s personal AI working system often called Lattice. Anduril is merely the seen face of the “digital wall” that has positioned itself in shut proximity to Trump’s political motion and is bound to profit if Trump is re-elected later this yr. Nevertheless, Anduril has been more than pleased to cozy as much as the Biden administration, having praised Biden for calling to develop border safety measures utilizing “high-tech capability,” which they’ve say they’ve “delivered.”
But, regardless of help from each political events, thousands and thousands upon thousands and thousands of funding and a number of other a whole lot of towers and supporting units deployed, this “digital wall” has achieved nothing to cease the drastic improve in unlawful migration into america. Why, because the towers have been deployed, are unlawful crossings skyrocketing? Why is it that the proposed resolution to this “invasion” is to construct much more towers? One may argue that the reply to these questions lies in the truth that the border disaster is getting used to fabricate consent amongst People for the implementation of a surveillance panopticon, not simply on the border, however effectively into the inside of the nation.
The Thiel-Funded, All Seeing AI
Anduril’s different authorities contracts means that the corporate’s installations on the border are solely a small part of what a accomplished “good wall” would possibly entail. Along with their contracts with CBP, Anduril is a significant contractor for the Division of Protection and provides (or is quickly to produce) the army with autonomous plane, similar to its Ghost platform and autonomous underwater automobiles. Just like the drones that interface with their surveillance towers on the border, they’re framed as helpful for surveillance and reconnaissance, however are additionally in a position to ship payloads, i.e. they’re able to be outfitted with weapons of battle. They’ve additionally been creating weapon methods that seem to fall beneath the controversial class of autonomous weapons, that means that the unmanned gadget may kill with out significant human oversight. These drones make the most of Lattice, the identical AI-enabled working system as people who run Anduril’s border towers and surveillance drones. Final yr, Anduril unveiled a brand new model of Lattice that “is designed to foster dynamic collaboration amongst autonomous methods,” e.g. permitting surveillance drones/towers and weaponized ones to be interoperable and conduct missions collectively with out essentially needing a human to coordinate them.
Anduril’s ambitions go far past dominating the Pentagon’s push into autonomous automobiles and AI and the Southern border’s “digital wall.” Anduril’s web site describes how Lattice might be deployed to surveil and defend the 16 vital infrastructure sectors which were recognized in america, together with “dams, power, nuclear reactors, transportation methods, water and wastewater, and communications.” “Securing vital infrastructure is important for the U.S. and past, and, much like our border safety resolution, Lattice can take over the uninteresting work of monitoring cameras and sensors for threats to vital infrastructure websites and liberate people to do one thing about it,” the corporate states on their web site. The corporate has additionally pitched Lattice to be used in detecting and responding to wildfires and conducting civilian search and rescue missions. Luckey has said that Anduril in the end plans “to show American and allied warfighters into invincible technomancers.”
The potential risks of Anduril can solely absolutely be fleshed out when contemplating the household of Thiel-backed protection/intelligence corporations as an entire. For example, Thiel’s Palantir, which has quite a few ties to Anduril apart from simply Thiel, is the engine that intelligence companies and militaries (within the US and past) use to investigate drone footage, satellite tv for pc imagery, and open-source knowledge and switch that visible and non-visual knowledge into actionable intelligence. It has been overtly described by mainstream retailers like Bloomberg as “utilizing Battle on Terror instruments to trace Americans” and has lengthy been a significant driver of “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime. One other Thiel-funded enterprise, Clearview AI, has developed AI-powered facial recognition instruments that have been skilled off of billions of images scrapped from the web, lots of them from the Thiel-backed social media platform Fb and the Fb-owned Instagram. Regardless of being a favourite of US regulation enforcement and DHS, Clearview AI has been sued quite a few occasions over privateness violations and its database has been banned in quite a few nations together with Australia, Britain, Italy and Canada. Like Palantir, which mainstream media has acknowledged for years as understanding “every part about you” and even referred to as an “all-seeing eye,” Clearview AI’s instruments are allegedly in a position to “establish activists at a protest or a horny stranger on the subway, revealing not simply their names however the place they lived, what they did and whom they knew.”
In wanting on the overlap shared between Palantir, Anduril, Clearview AI and even Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which has been backed by Founders Fund since 2008 and is tied to Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens), one wonders if this Thiel-backed household of corporations may ultimately function an interoperable system for whole AI surveillance. Troublingly, there are quite a few indications that is already occurring. Moreover, given their frequent hyperlinks to Thiel, it appears that evidently such an end result was seemingly at all times the intent.
For example, as Stavroula Pabst beforehand reported for Limitless Hangout, Anduril and Palantir, each contractors to army and intelligence companies, are at present collaborating on the Military’s Tactical Intelligence Concentrating on Entry Node (TITAN) program. As well as, Anduril has introduced that its Lattice AI system “is now for every part” and designed to be interoperable with the merchandise of different contractors. All three of those Thiel-backed corporations have been testing the interoperable use of their merchandise already within the Ukraine battle and look like utilizing Israel’s battle on the Gaza Strip for the identical ends.
Typically, these applied sciences are examined and used overseas first earlier than they’re deployed at house, one thing that even mainstream media has acknowledged that Palantir has been doing for years. The so-called Battle on Home Terror has lengthy been about retooling the weapons of the Battle on Terror as a method of curbing home dissent and Palantir is only one of a number of corporations aiding that shift. Equally, Clearview AI, regardless of claims that the corporate is Trump-linked and tied to right-leaning political circles, has bragged about its utility to the US regulation enforcement neighborhood by highlighting the corporate’s position in figuring out these concerned in January 6th, which the corporate’s CEO refers to as an “riot.” After January 6th, Clearview AI’s use by US regulation enforcement jumped by 26%.
Nevertheless, Thiel, Luckey and others on this community who’re constructing the home panopticon usually declare that they’re defending “Western values” and “democracy” by embracing army and intelligence contracts. In addition they rely closely on “America First” rhetoric. These corporations distinction themselves to corporations like Google, the place workers have beforehand scuttled the large army contracts over moral considerations, although figures like Eric Schmidt, the previous Google CEO who’s a giant backer of the Democrats and the Biden administration, are equally creating autonomous weapon know-how additionally beneath the guise of “defending democracy.” These Huge Tech oligarchs in the end agree concerning the plan, although Thiel and his ilk are way more vocal about their willingness to miss moral quandaries within the pursuit of ever extra profitable authorities contracts and cloak themselves in right-leaning, “America First” rhetoric.
This intelligence-linked net of Thiel-backed corporations is poised to observe this similar trajectory with respect to the “good wall” being erected on the southern border in addition to the northern border. Whereas framed as solely surveilling border crossings, the surveillance towers, drones and associated units being deployed are in a position to spy past the border and into American border cities and cities. Whereas Anduril’s towers particularly are sometimes framed as being positioned in rural, sparsely populated elements of the southern border, there are a number of which are positioned near main city facilities.
There’s additionally the difficulty of the so-called “Structure Free Zone,” which refers back to the “border area” claimed by the US authorities that extends roughly 100 miles inland from all the US’ terrestrial (together with coastal) borders. It’s estimated that 2/3 of all People stay inside this “border area”, which additionally contains 9 of the ten largest US cities. The blatant overreach has been criticized by left-leaning (e.g. the ACLU) and right-leaning teams (e.g. the CATO Institute) alike. Every time there are frenzied pushes within the media (mainstream and various alike) demanding new border safety measures, many overlook or are merely unaware that the federal government defines “the border” as a lot, way more than simply the bodily US-Mexico border and – thus – military-style measures rolled out on “the border” is also rolled out way more inland.
The “Structure Free Zone” could quickly have implications for the border “good wall.” These surveillance units is also utilized, as soon as they’re succesful, to surveil throughout the government-defined “border area,” the place the violation of primary civil rights by regulation enforcement and CBP is a well-documented phenomenon. On condition that intelligence companies have been recognized to have interaction within the warrantless wiretapping of People for effectively over a decade, it appears seemingly that the “good wall” could possibly be used for a lot of the identical.
Although some latest US courtroom instances have tackled trendy video surveillance ways by regulation enforcement, it’s nonetheless attainable for them to gather knowledge from surveillance cameras with no warrant if the intent is to “guard towards […] crime.” The precarious state of civil liberties within the US, mixed with the rising dominance of a small, close-knit and intelligence-linked group over the surveillance infrastructure of the State, must be fastidiously scrutinized, not quickly rubber-stamped on the again of media-generated panic.
Agenda 2030 and World Policing Targets
The bipartisan consensus round an Anduril-built “good wall” seemingly has its roots in the identical world agenda that’s spurring the speedy implementation of biometric entry/exit methods at ports of entry all through the Western world. For example, that is the yr the place the European Union’s biometric entry/exit system is as a result of launch, whereby vacationers crossing the EU’s new “digital border” system – whether or not terrestrial or aerial – must present their fingerprints and undergo facial scans in the event that they want to enter an EU member state. Regardless of claims that the “digital border” would facilitate simpler journey and scale back wait occasions, present estimates reveal that the brand new system is prone to take nearly ten occasions longer per entry. The UK, regardless of leaving the EU, is additionally poised to “make its borders digital” by 2025, i.e. subsequent yr, with Canada implementing related insurance policies.
Within the US, the transfer towards the “actual ID” system, which is to return into power in 2025, will see biometric assortment within the US turn out to be a requisite for home flights and some other “official functions” that the DHS Secretary can unilaterally decide require a “actual ID.” The “actual ID” additionally gives favorable provisions for digital IDs, similar to digital drivers licenses (such because the “Florida good ID” being piloted in Ron DeSantis-governed Florida) and different “cell digital paperwork and digital playing cards.” Elsewhere within the US, in airports, the push for digital IDs and facial biometric scans continues to quickly advance.
It’s fairly apparent that the “good wall” being constructed on the US’ southern and northern borders is meant to be a part of the identical “digital border” system that DHS has been designing and progressively implementing for many of the previous 20 years. For example, CBP at present makes use of the identical biometric facial comparability know-how used at quite a few land, sea and air ports of entry all through the nation and plans to proceed to increase its use nationwide. As famous above, Anduril’s towers or its affiliated drones may simply be geared up with facial recognition or different associated applied sciences, whereas official terrestrial port of entries are already utilizing the identical biometric system being rolled out at American airports. As well as, lots of these searching for to cross the southern border are being onboarded to the CBP One app, which CBP initially claimed would end in a “protected, orderly and humane” border processing when it was launched in January 2023. That app additionally collects biometric info from candidates of sure nationalities, a performance CBP will seemingly increase sooner or later as reliance on its app will increase.
The obvious world coordination of biometric entry/exit methods isn’t any coincidence, as it’s a coverage initiative deeply linked to the UN’s Agenda 2030, or the Sustainable Growth Targets (SDGs). Particularly, it’s tied to the implementation of SDG 16, which comprises provisions for digital identification methods, amongst different issues. The UN has chosen the worldwide regulation enforcement entity Interpol as its “implementing companion” of SDG 16, a call that in the end spawned Interpol’s SDG-aligned World Policing Targets (GPGs). The GPGs have been accepted and adopted by Interpol’s 196 member nations in 2017. As beforehand famous by Limitless Hangout, Interpol is a harmful group to belief with the huge energy these objectives and their related insurance policies will bestow upon them, as they function as a “pay-to-play” group and have been embroiled in a number of important corruption scandals.
One of many GPGs, GPG No. 2, is to “promote border safety worldwide.” Interpol particularly notes that the implementation of this objective will contain establishing “superior world requirements for an intelligence-led border administration, together with requirements for border surveillance, border checks and associated gear.” These requirements, they proceed, “must be underpinned by know-how and digital development and danger evaluation.” Elsewhere, they talk about how the implementation of this objective can even contain “managing and sharing biometric knowledge, together with with the usage of the Interpol’s Biometric Hub [“a state-of-the-art system for identifying criminals˝] and different hubs.” Interpol has teamed up with biometric digital ID corporations Idemia and Onfido as a part of this effort. Each of these corporations facilitated vaccine passports throughout Covid-19 and are at present serving to to create digital driver’s licenses in some US states.
Interpol is primarily funded by the European Fee and the governments of Germany, the US and Canada, all of which – as famous above – are implementing the identical biometric entry/exit methods on related timelines. Nevertheless, many different Interpol member nations are equally ramping up their adoption of biometric, digital IDs for international journey and home use, together with the West’s ostensible adversary nations, like Russia and China. The overwhelming majority of the world’s nations, whether or not West or East, have signed onto Interpol’s GPGs and the UN’s SDGs, each of which push for complete, biometric digital IDs interfaced with a digital forex pockets (whether or not a CBDC or personal sector-issued equal). Globally, these agendas are being rolled out quickly, forming the inspiration for the following period of extremely centralized world governance.
Nevertheless, in some nations, similar to america, the place a good portion of the inhabitants has turn out to be cautious of digital IDs and digital, programmable cash, unprecedented efforts are being made to promote these globalist insurance policies by way of right-leaning speaking factors in distinction to years prior. For example, digital, programmable cash is being developed within the US, not as a CBDC, however a mixture of regulated stablecoins and tokenized financial institution deposits. Even world carbon markets are being framed, not as being about local weather change, however about innovation and profiting off a brand new class of property. Now, it appears, the biometric “digital border” tied to the UN’s SDGs – a key part of the infrastructure for digital ID – is being offered primarily to the populist proper and being rolled out beneath the guise of tackling unlawful immigration. Not not like Israel’s “good wall,” these partitions might be “turned off” when a disaster must be manufactured and, identical to a lot else, used to promote the identical agendas which are pushing us all into a world, public-private panopticon.
