Patrolling the US Border Via Webcam

The BBC features a story today on a controversial effort to patrol the border between Mexico and Texas by means of 21 hidden cameras, the output of which is streamed online for viewers at home, who can then report suspected illegal border crossings; more than 130,000 people have registered to observe the streams, from as far afield as "Australia, Mexico, Colombia, Israel, New Zealand and the UK."

Comments

Re:Mexico?

[Eudial]

more than 130,000 people have registered to observe the streams, from as far afield as "Australia, Mexico, Colombia, Israel, New Zealand and the UK."

Could it be that Mexicans have registered for the purpose of locating the cameras?

... or to continuously report a bunch of fake border crossings all the time so that the real events drown in a sea of fake ones.

Re:Why guard the border at all?

[MichaelSmith]

Really, if some impoverished people want to come to your country, is it such a bad thing for you, as a "rich" person?

Put that way its not really a bad thing but spare a thought for the great number of people from poor countries who do the right thing by applying through channels, filling out the forms and working hard to qualify. Letting asylum seekers through does two bad things IMHO:

• It creates a black market for often lethal people smuggling.
• It reduces the number of places for migrants who use the system from end to end.

I 1997 I visited friends in the US. They had an apartment in Manhattan and during the day I made use of the laundry in their building. The demographics in the laundry and the attached playground were totally different from elsewhere generally in the building. The clothes were being washed and the children were being cared for by middle aged women from central America. It was actually a lot like Malaysia (my wife's native country), where many families have Indonesian servants.

If you want to retain your identity, migration has to be slow. I am sure that India or Sri Lanka could dump enough people on NZ in one year to create a new majority. I doubt that even the past immigrants from those countries want that to happen. And it is a sad fact I think that population pressure has to be used to reduce population growth. Its sad because starvation is implied in that equation.

There is no obscurity.

[fyngyrz]

The various Texas border regions are approximately 100,000 square miles. Finding a pinhole camera over such a large area is akin to looking for a specific grain of sand on the beach.

Please. This isn't even slightly tricky. Time the sunset / shadows. That gives you the east-west position (and very accurately, too.) Local noon identifies local midnight (and every other local time) perfectly. So does sunset. Since the cameras are on the border, that reduces the problem to a very small one -- what portion(s) of the border match those times. Then go there (using GPS and holding a pic of the POV of the camera)... walk right up to it, grab it, throw it in the 4WD. Rinse, repeat. If the cameras are observing places where people can go, they're in places where people can get at them.

Also, borders aren't "square miles", they are linear miles. The problem is not as intractable as you want to think it is.

Offer me fifty grand per camera, as well as guaranteed legal immunity, and I'll go down there and hand the vast majority of em to you in a dusty heap in, oh, a couple of weeks or so. It'd be fun. :)

Re:Stop or I'll show you my genitals!

[dangitman]

You contact the webcam base in the USA and the call the feds with the location.

So, essentially, you could spam the authorities and tell them where to go. I guess that could never be abused by drug smugglers or illegal immigrants, could it?