TomDispatch Regular Todd Miller and Gabriel Schivone begin their distinctly eye-opening piece on how a potential consortium of Israeli high-tech companies, a tech park at the University of Arizona, and Mexican low-wage labor will combine to try to shut down the U.S. Mexican border this way: “It was October 2012. Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was explaining his country’s border policing strategies. In his PowerPoint presentation, a photo of the enclosure wall that isolates the Gaza Strip from Israel clicked onscreen. ‘We have learned lots from Gaza,’ he told the audience. ‘It’s a great laboratory.’ “Elkabetz was speaking at a border technology conference and fair surrounded by a dazzling display of technology -- the components of his boundary-building lab. There were surveillance balloons with high-powered cameras floating over a desert-camouflaged armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin. There were seismic sensor systems used to detect the movement of people and other wonders of the modern border-policing world. Around Elkabetz, you could see vivid examples of where the future of such policing was heading, as imagined not by a dystopian science fiction writer but by some of the top corporate techno-innovators on the planet. “Swimming in a sea of border security, the brigadier general was, however, not surrounded by the Mediterranean but by a parched West Texas landscape. He was in El Paso, a 10-minute walk from the wall that separates the United States from Mexico.”
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 19:12:01 +0000
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