How did data, computer science, and cybernetics become central to border regimes? This is one question illuminated by Iv\u00e1n Chaar L\u00f3pez\u2019s The Cybernetic Border<\/em>. Borders are technological and political, the book argues, in that they abstract and calculate \u201chumanity\u201d and target the state\u2019s \u201cenmity\u201d\u2014the violence or hostility to some life that constitutes the modern state. Chaar L\u00f3pez urges us to understand the racialized enmity of the US empire-nation and its obsession with border crossers in the Sonoran desert.<\/p>\n This is a critical history for our times, as ICE and the US Department of State target union leaders standing with workers, activists challenging genocides, and scientists critical of Trump. Mexican Americans have long been the worst targeted, and we should all be learning from their resistances and struggling in solidarity. We are in a moment that makes clear that the border\u2014as a regime of enmity\u2014can make intruders of us all.<\/p>\n\n Tracking the assembly of a massive technological apparatus over a century, The Cybernetic Border <\/em>shows how the US arrived at a post-9\/11 vision of systems of systems, combining many kinds of data gathered across jurisdictions\u2014the systems we live under today. This century-long construction built both datafied borders and parallel changes to federal agencies. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security brought customs enforcement and immigration naturalization together to refocusing each of their missions on \u201chomeland\u201d and \u201csecurity.\u201d Along with this, Joint Terrorism Task Forces convened law enforcement at federal, state, and local levels to share information and a mission of locating intruders not just at border zones but in mosques, in schools, and in communities. Regional fusion centers were formed to spy on residents and citizens and redistribute intelligence across agencies as well. In the US, we still live with these technologies and institutions that intrude on our lives in the name of finding the danger, usually racialized, within.<\/p>\n All this is why Iv\u00e1n Chaar L\u00f3pez\u2019s The Cybernetic Border <\/em>argues for understanding the border as a \u201ctechnopolitical regime,\u201d organized around the detection of \u201cintruders\u201d violating the sovereignty of a nation. The technical systems change over time: prototypes and pilots come and go, infrastructures crumble or pile atop one another, some companies come and go. State imaginations of who is an intruder expand and shift, and Chaar L\u00f3pez rightly emphasizes the construction of working-class Mexicans, Central Americans, and later, Muslims, as intruders in the US age of empire. The Cybernetic Border <\/em>helps us track the arcs of sovereignty, enmity, and how they are mediated by race and technology: a critical task when the state itself provides resources for, reinforces, and iterates these visions.<\/p>\n How do systems change, even while panic over intruders remains much the same? In the 1970s, Border Patrol worked with defense companies to create a sensor line along the border that would detect intruders and deploy agents to intercept them. The project was modeled on an earlier attempt by the US military to enforce the \u201cMcNamara Line\u201d in Vietnam, detecting Vietnamese people on the move to be targeted for annihilation. The sensors worked poorly in both Vietnam and the southern US. Even so, the state committed vast resources of time and money to prototype a basic framework that Chaar L\u00f3pez traces to our present: the signal processing problem of sensing, transmitting, computing, and responding, and the cultural-political process of differentiating between \u201cintruders\u201d and those welcome in the imagined nation. We start where we live, we start where we have power. And we work to abolish ICE, including by tearing out its data infrastructures and building solidarity against empire wherever we can.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n These systems promise to track intruders. But what they really do is draw all in the field of view under a discriminating and suspicious gaze.<\/p>\n This history makes ICE\u2019s contracts to Palantir, an intelligence-gathering and analysis software company, less surprising, if still terrifying. Palantir, after all, was founded on funding from not only Silicon Valley\u2019s Peter Thiel but also the CIA\u2019s venture capital arm, IN-Q-Tel, founded during the Clinton administration.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Although The Cybernetic Border <\/em>tracks the technopolitics of enmity primarily at the southern border, its lessons matter to so many of us who can be cast as intruders in changing political winds. The border attempts to discriminate between those who serve US ruling coalition projects and those who threaten it. Immigration laws and visa systems control and divide workers, funneling some into low-rights regimes through employer-based and student visa systems.3<\/a><\/sup> The state has also mobilized border enforcement as a tool to scapegoat communities as \u201cforeign\u201d: from Japanese Americans, displaced, dispossessed, and incarcerated during World War II, to US Muslims, most intensely in the wake of 9\/11. Activists challenging US imperial projects\u2014from Black Trinidadian Communist Claudia Jones to Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil\u2014also faced detention and immigration \u201cdue process\u201d detentions as attempts to silence and suppress them.4<\/a><\/sup> Scholar-activist Harsha Walia argues that border regimes practice a kind of divide-and-rule strategy on global working classes, echoing colonial and plantation practices that fomented and consolidated racial and ethnic difference to divide the dominated and consolidate ruling class power.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n As the range of intruders tracked with data shifts and grows, so do the technological networks and tools used to stalk them shift and expand. Even US constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure are constantly eroded. Those coming out of prison are pressured to waive their right to Fourth Amendment protections, as I have learned from Khalid Alexander and others at Pillars of the Community San Diego. Further, law enforcement routinely purchases our data traces from data brokers on the private market<\/a>. Even worse, police tag primarily racialized men as \u201cgang members,\u201d entering them into local databases<\/a> or the federal TECS (Treasury Enforcement Communications System) based on mere suspicion of criminality. Homeland Security uses these databases to fast-track people for deportation.6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n In San Diego, where I organize with a coalition<\/a> against the proliferation of mass surveillance technology, prosecutors and police constantly seek new systems to spread their gaze and speed up data gathering, tracking, and prosecution. They say the data can help exonerate the accused as well. But that argument falls flat: only law enforcement agencies can see the data, and the construction of crime and the ritual of justice is structured to prioritize institutionalized expertise7<\/a><\/sup> for the protection of propertied interests<\/a>, including against resistance.8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n It can feel overwhelming to chase our data, and to even imagine stopping its flows. I\u2019ve got a sticker on my laptop, made by my coworker Dr. Stuart Geiger, that declares in ominous capital letters \u201cTHEY SELL YOUR DATA.\u201d The colors are Google\u2019s cheerful and disarming red, green, yellow, and blue. People love the sticker: it resonates with their concrete experiences of companies and the pull of profit over time, even if the details are always more nuanced. Even as we create community through our frustration, though, the sticker reflects a feeling of intractability I often hear about from the students I teach and people I organize with. \u201cThey sell your data\u201d projects an unbounded \u201cthey.\u201d \u201cData\u201d points to an ocean of informational traces that cannot be clawed back\u2014impossible to do anything about.<\/p>\n\n ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/German-Shepherd-1000x600.jpg\")
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<\/a>\n \n Jenna M. Loyd <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n
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\nThis 1960s and 1970s digital \u201cMcNamara Line\u201d prefigured a networked and platform-like vision of \u201csmart borders\u201d promoted by Obama, Biden, Trump, and their defense contractors. Customs and Border Patrol\u2019s 2012\u20132016 Strategic Plan<\/em> outlined a vision of systems-of-systems intrusion detection by gathering and synthesizing diverse data sources from unmanned aerial systems, agent field observations, relay towers, remote video surveillance, satellite imaging, ground sensors, and much else. These data-aggregating systems would then act as platforms for state actors, enacting US sovereignty as racial enmity focused on the southern border.<\/p>\n
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