Slashdot Mirror
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."
Really, crowdsourcing a problem like this shouldn't be hard - 21 cameras, lots of geeks, Google Earth? How long will they stay hidden? Let's have a contest to find the things!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...we would be concerned that the cameras might encourage vigilantism. That people would think they saw an illegal immigrant and then jump in their truck with a gun.
That criticism shows up at least twice in the BBC article, but it doesn't make sense to me. The cameras might attract some people already partial to vigilantism, but I don't believe they flat out encourage vigilantes in general.
What's more, the locations of the cameras are secret; otherwise immigrants and traffickers would learn to avoid all those spots within days. The watchers shouldn't be able to find the camera locations, so this stuff about "jumping into their truck with a gun" isn't even possible.
I don't know whether I agree or not with the program, but the "concerns" quoted here seem a little far fetched. Furthermore, vigilantes present as much danger to law enforcement as to their prey, so I don't believe the Border Patrol or sheriff's offices will continue the program if there's significant evidence of more people hunting illegals.
TFA says: "the administrators of the site maintain the primary goal of the initiative is to tackle crime, not illegal immigration." In other words, this is about the war on drugs. At a cost of about 4 million dollars, 21 arrests have been made; "Critics say this does not represent value for money."
This is a fascinating proposition. Let's figure out the value-per-dollar supplied by the war on drugs in general, and see if it's better than the value-per-dollar supplied by this program.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the war on drugs. (The term was first used by Nixon in 1969.) I don't think it will come as a surprise that it's been a failure.
What about the "per-dollar" part? Well, I don't know about your state, but mine (California) spends more on prisons than it spends on education, and the vast majority of prison spending arises from drug prohibition. First of all, you have all the people in prison for buying, selling, or using drugs. Then you have all the crime directly associated with the illegal drug trade; just as the stereotypical Chicago gangster of the 1930's wouldn't have existed without Prohibition, gangs today wouldn't exist without drug prohibition. And then you have all the crime that indirectly arises from drug prohibition. Drug prohibition makes drugs expensive, so people commit crimes to support their habits. So we have all the costs of incarceration, the social costs suffered by the victims of violent crime, etc. It's a lot of money.
So I would estimate that the value-per-dollar of the war on drugs over the last 40 years equals x/y, where x is a number so small that it's controversial whether it's positive or negative, and y is huge.
Find free books.
1. Wear a Bigfoot costume and approach the border. /. front page, then congratulations on the career move from a deal smuggler to an internet celebrity.
2. Frail around for 5 minutes.
3. Take a smoke break and then google "bigfoot Mexican border".
4. If there are no relevant results, you're safe to cross.
5. If there are a few million hits and you find yourself on
The best part is that you're guaranteed not to be fired upon if spotted by the boarder patrol. Also you can claim you're just perpetrating a hoax if you're caught performing steps 1-3.
Security through obscurity never works.