解决美国边境“虚​​拟墙”失败问题的四种方法

《麻省理工科技评论》今天发表了我们对美国政府沿美墨边境安装的监视塔“虚拟墙”附近有多少人死亡的调查。 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.这个故事是《Dying on Camera》的一部分，该书是《麻省理工科技评论》和《圣地亚哥时报》合作的作品。过去一年里，两个新闻编辑室的记者都在研究边境监控技术的失败，并揭露在边境地区死去的人们的故事。 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. 1. Conduct a comprehensive audit of deaths near the virtual wall In this June 16, 2021, file photo, a family from Venezuela moves to a Border Patrol transport vehicle after they and other migrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and turned themselves in to agents in Del Rio, Texas.埃里克·盖伊/美联社照片“如果我是联邦政府，我会进行审计，因为这感觉好像不起作用。” That was New Mexico state representative Sarah Silva’s reaction when MIT Technology Review showed her that in 2024 alone, more than 18 people had died near surveillance towers in just one small stretch of desert near her district. 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 没有发布其虚拟墙的综合地图。 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.我们分析了很多塔楼——近 600 座。但这仍然远远少于政府所说的目前运营的 800 座。我们对它们何时上涨的估计是不准确的。这意味着我们对他们附近死亡人数超过 1,050 人的统计数字被低估了。我们也无法全面了解边境地区问题最严重的地方。内部审计不会有这样的限制。理论上，美国海关边防总署会追踪每座塔何时建成以及何时处于活动状态。 It has had the ability to audit their effectiveness—while quantifying how many people have died near them—since at least 2015, when it began installing the types of towers included in our analysis.但消息人士告诉我们，它从未进行过此类审计。我们的发现使得对这一技术的需求更加迫切。 2. Fix the way the agency tracks migrant deaths and remains If CBP is to analyze instances where people have died near its surveillance technology, it needs to know when and where those deaths happen.目前用于跟踪这些数据的系统已经完全崩溃。正如我们在方法中指出的那样，没有任何国家机构收集和发布有关移民死亡的所有可用记录。 We sifted through thousands of pages of records from dozens of agencies in Texas alone, and our picture is still incomplete owing to the lack of a shared protocol for documenting these deaths in public records. Border Patrol has had its own internal system, called the Border Safety Initiative Tracking Syste