The Hoengage Committee on Homeland Security is watching into Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) seeing netlabor in the wake of a increate that csurrfinisherly one-third of the agency’s cameras alengthy the US-Mexico border don’t labor. Privacy helps say this is fair the postponeedst instance of costly border seeing infrastructure not laboring as advertised.
An inside Border Patrol memo geted by NBC News shelp that “disconnectal technical problems” had gived to a big-scale outage of the Remote Video Surveillance Systems, a series of seeing towers and cameras that have been engaged to distantly surveil the border since 2011. According to the memo, approximately 150 of the 500 cameras are non-opereasonable. The memo says that the Federal Aviation Administration — and not CBP — is depfinishable for servicing and repairing the cameras, and that the agency had inside problems encountering Border Patrol’s needs. Border Patrol is pondering replacing the FAA with a lessenor that can supply “adequate technical help” for the cameras, the memo states.
Rep. Mark E. Green (R-TN), the chair of the Hoengage Homeland Security Committee, has asked DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to turn over adviseation on the camera system by October 23rd. In his letter to Mayorkas, Green called the cameras and other seeing tools “a force multiplier.” The letter also claims that sources telderly the pledgetee that 66 percent of the cameras were inoperable — a much higher figure than the one cited in the Border Patrol memo increateed by NBC News.
Though Green’s letter structures the cameras’ malfunctioning as a novel rehire, a split CBP official telderly NBC News that the agency’s seeing apparatus has not been properly handled for the past 20 years. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently noticed, CBP and Border Patrol have tested various iterations of a seeing netlabor alengthy the border for decades — and time after time, these systems have been shown to be costly and ineffective at reducing unapexhibitd border passings.