As Todd Miller makes clear today at TomDispatch, there’s a dystopian conversation about U.S. borders going on to which most of us aren’t invited. In his latest piece, he visits Border Security Expo 2014 to see for himself the corporate money to be made off high-tech dystopian dreams about America’s expanding borders. As he writes, “Border Security Expo 2014 catches in one confined space the expansiveness of a ‘booming’ border market. If you include ‘cross-border terrorism, cyber crime, piracy, [the] drug trade, human trafficking, internal dissent, and separatist movements,’ all ‘driving factor[s] for the homeland security market,’ by 2018, it could reach $544 billion globally. It is here that U.S. Homeland Security officials, local law enforcement, and border forces from all over the world talk contracts with private industry representatives, exhibit their techno-optimism, and begin to hammer out a future of ever more hardened, up-armored national and international boundaries. “The global video surveillance market alone is expected to be a $40 billion industry by 2020, almost three times its $13.5 billion value in 2013. According to projections, 2020 border surveillance cameras will be capturing 3.4 trillion video hours globally. In case you were wondering, that’s more than 340 million years of video footage if you were watching 24 hours a day.”
Posted on: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 18:30:00 +0000
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