The disastrous scenario on the US-Mexico border is, and has been, deliberately produced. All through the final a number of administrations, no matter marketing campaign and different public rhetoric, the porous nature of the border has remained unresolved. On a number of events, the scenario because it has developed has been blamed largely on incompetence and authorities inefficiency. Although some administrations have been more durable than others with reference to terrestrial migration (below some metrics), the US-Mexico border has not been sealed off so to drive entrants to cross by way of formally acknowledged and managed ports of entry.
Underneath the present administration, it has been pointedly apparent that even the sections of the border that do include bodily limitations are being dismantled on goal, all of the whereas unlawful crossings have risen to unprecedented ranges. Regardless of the motives for this deliberate coverage on the a part of the Biden administration, the tip consequence has been the widespread characterization of the disaster as an “invasion,” priming the voter bloc normally most involved with border safety – the American Proper – for military-style “options.”
Whereas the justifications for the frenzied media protection are based mostly on the precise actuality that the border is certainly extremely insecure (and has been for a while), the coverage responses from American politicians reveal that there’s a bipartisan consensus about what have to be finished. Tellingly, the identical “resolution” can be being quietly rolled out in any respect American ports of entry that aren’t at present being “overrun”, resembling airports. That resolution, in fact, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous gadgets.
This “resolution” isn’t just being applied all through the USA as an alleged technique of thwarting migrants, it is usually being quickly applied all through the world in obvious lockstep. The explanations for the unstated, however apparent, international consistency in implementing invasive, biometric surveillance is as a result of success of worldwide coverage agendas, ratified by practically each nation on the earth, that search each to limit the extent of individuals’s freedom of motion and to surveil individuals’s actions (and far, far more) by way of the international implementation of digital id. These coverage agendas embody primarily the UN’s Agenda 2030 or Sustainable Improvement Targets, particularly SDG 16, in addition to Interpol’s World Policing Targets.
Whereas the American Proper has been reasonably outspoken in its rejection of the UN’s Agenda 2030, and the digital ID challenge at massive, the misery over the border scenario is getting used to fabricate consent amongst this particular group for “options” which can be centered on increasing surveillance and biometric assortment versus the implementation of bodily limitations.
The Digital Wall
The Hawaiian shirt-wearing inventor of the VR headset Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, has develop into the face of America’s “digital border wall.” Luckey, the mind behind the protection tech agency Anduril, is a long-time affiliate of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, with Luckey having met Thiel at 19 when Luckey presided over his first firm Oculus Rift, which was later offered to Fb. Thiel was then on Fb’s board and was additionally instrumental in the rise of the social media firm. Luckey’s Anduril can be backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and one other Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, can be an Anduril investor.
Anduril is without doubt one of the most important beneficiaries of presidency contracts to construct autonomous surveillance towers alongside the US-Mexico border, which at the moment are additionally being rolled out alongside the US-Canada border. As a consequence, they’re more likely to be among the many beneficiaries of the Senate’s present proposal for “border safety,” which units apart $170 million for added towers to be construct.
Underneath the Trump and now Biden administrations, Luckey has been vocal about how Anduril will create “a digital wall that isn’t a barrier a lot as an internet of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees.” As famous by WIRED in 2018, Luckey and Anduril has lengthy been pitching its know-how “as a complement to – or substitute for – a lot of [then] President Trump’s promised bodily wall.”
Luckey was a donor to Trump’s inaugural committee and his obvious mentor, Peter Thiel, was a key determine on Trump’s transition workforce, significantly for protection. The corporate clothes itself in “America First” rhetoric, particularly with regards to border safety, framing itself as a beacon of “Western democracy” and nationalism in an age of globalism. Regardless of this, Anduril is a part of a community that fronts for the long-standing surveillance ambitions of the identical American “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile.
Luckey’s Anduril wouldn’t exist with out the help of Thiel and several other executives from Thiel’s Palantir. As Limitless Hangout has reported in a number of articles, Palantir is a CIA entrance explicitly aimed toward resurrecting the controversial surveillance dragnet as soon as housed by the Pentagon’s DARPA often known as Complete Info Consciousness (TIA), which sought to make use of warrantless, dragnet surveillance of People to forestall crime and terrorism earlier than it occurs (i.e. pre-crime, a area which Palantir has since pioneered and which was basically made DOJ coverage by Trump’s Lawyer Normal William Barr).
A type of Palantir executives who later got here to Anduril, Trae Stephens, labored at a authorities intelligence company (he declines to specify which one) earlier than becoming a member of Palantir. From there, Stephens joined Thiel’s Founders Fund and ended up on the boards of a few of the most controversial Founders Fund-funded corporations, resembling Carbyne911. Financed partially by Jeffrey Epstein and the brainchild of former Israeli Prime Minister (and Epstein affiliate) Ehud Barak, Carbyne’s platform additionally includes invasive knowledge assortment from civilians and “predictive policing” functionalities. On Carbyne’s board, Stephens initially sat alongside Barak in addition to Israeli intelligence-linked figures like Pinchas Buchris (former commander of Israel’s Unit 8200), Lital Leshem (“former” Israeli intelligence operative who know works for documented CIA asset and former head of the notorious mercenary group Blackwater, Erik Prince), and Nicole Junkermann (an Epstein affiliate who has since rebranded as a enterprise capitalist in rising applied sciences and FinTech). Stephens stays on Carbyne’s board, the place he now sits alongside former US Homeland Safety chiefs Michael Chertoff (Bush administration) and Kirstjen Nielsen (Trump administration).
Thanks partially to Thiel’s affect over the early Trump administration, Stephens was chosen to supervise Trump’s transition workforce for the Protection Division, the place he “steered” Trump’s early Pentagon insurance policies. On the time, Stephens was additionally in talks with Luckey to create a brand new firm. After Luckey left Fb below a cloud of controversy in late March 2017, he and Stephens created Anduril and different Palantir executives had been recruited to hitch the corporate. Inside a yr of its existence, Anduril had already netted hundreds of thousands in contracts from the Division of Homeland Safety. Stephens has remained at Thiel’s Founders Fund since co-founding Anduril.
Not in contrast to Palantir, Anduril can be a contemporary reboot of a failed DHS initiative from across the similar time as TIA. The Safe Border Initiative Community (SBInet) was a Bush-era DHS effort that sought to construct a digital border wall that might not solely deter and detect unlawful border crossings, but additionally mechanically designate these unlawful crossers a “menace degree” in addition to predict “unlawful border actions” earlier than they happen. Like Anduril, it relied on surveillance towers and a litany of sensors unfold all through the atmosphere. This system, although shuttered by DHS in 2011, by no means truly ended, because the DHS report asserting the “finish” of SBInet acknowledged the next:
DHS is at present growing a complete border know-how deployment plan that can construct upon profitable know-how at present deployed and supply the optimum mixture of confirmed surveillance applied sciences by sector. The place acceptable, this know-how plan can even embody parts of the previous SBInet program which have confirmed profitable.
Similar to Anduril’s advertising technique, SBInet was pitched as a less expensive, cheaper and “sooner” technique of securing the border than the development of bodily limitations. Anduril has overtly laid out its technique to keep away from the pitfalls of SBInet; whereas SBInet was doomed to fail by hiring incompetent contractors to construct and promote the system to the federal government, Anduril plans to personal the system it builds and lease it to the federal government, which – in keeping with Trae Stephens – “creates an incentive to maintain growth prices low.” Regardless of claims it’s “low” value, since 2017, large DHS contracts have been given to Anduril to satisfy lots of the unique ambitions of the SBInet challenge and, regardless of the development of a whole lot of towers and hundreds of thousands spent, the border stays extra insecure than ever.
One in all Anduril’s earliest advocates was Congressman Will Hurd, a former officer within the CIA’s clandestine operations division who now represents Texas within the Home of Representatives. With Hurd’s assist, Anduril was in a position to place their first prototypes for the “digital wall” on the border-adjacent non-public property of an nameless rancher. Customized and Border Safety (CBP) then carried out their first official pilot of Anduril towers in 2018, resulting in the Trump administration’s approval to deploy Anduril’s towers alongside the whole thing of the south-western border in 2020. That approval noticed Anduril awarded a five-year and still-ongoing contract and likewise noticed the contract designated a “program of file,” which means it’s deemed important sufficient to be a devoted merchandise within the DHS funds.
Trump, within the latter years of his presidential time period, started to embrace the kind of digital wall that Anduril would allow much more so than the bodily barrier he had campaigned on. In January 2019, for instance, Trump acknowledged “The partitions we’re constructing are usually not medieval partitions. They’re sensible partitions designed to satisfy the wants of frontline border brokers.” The “sensible partitions”, Trump went on to say, would come with “sensors, screens and cutting-edge know-how.”
Underneath the Biden administration, Anduril’s star has continued to rise. That is partially as a result of hundreds of thousands the corporate has spent lobbying Congress, but additionally facilitated by the long-standing bipartisan love affair with constructing a “sensible wall” on the Southern border. CBP was given hundreds of thousands for autonomous surveillance towers alongside the border within the 2021 US Citizenship Act after which once more within the 2022 omnibus invoice, with hundreds of thousands extra granted final yr. The lion-share of that cash is destined for Anduril’s coffers. This yr, if the Senate’s bipartisan “border safety” efforts are any indication, Anduril stands to realize much more contracts to construct ever extra autonomous towers, which at the moment are accompanied by autonomous drones and different linked gadgets. Luckey, regardless of Anduril’s claims that there’ll all the time be human oversight of its merchandise, has acknowledged that his imaginative and prescient for the way forward for warfare that Anduril helps to construct will quickly lead to people enjoying ever extra insignificant roles.
Whereas Anduril is without doubt one of the most important corporations constructing the “digital wall,” they aren’t alone. Normal Dynamics, a protection agency deeply linked to organized crime, espionage scandals and corruption, has developed a number of hundred distant video surveillance techniques (RVSS) towers for CBP whereas Google, one other Large Tech agency with CIA connections, has been tapped by CBP to have its AI used along with Anduril’s towers, which additionally make the most of Anduril’s personal AI working system often known as Lattice. Anduril is merely the seen face of the “digital wall” that has positioned itself in shut proximity to Trump’s political motion and is certain to profit if Trump is re-elected later this yr. Nevertheless, Anduril has been more than pleased to cozy as much as the Biden administration, having praised Biden for calling to develop border safety measures utilizing “high-tech capability,” which they’ve say they’ve “delivered.”
But, regardless of assist from each political events, hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of funding and several other a whole lot of towers and supporting gadgets deployed, this “digital wall” has finished nothing to cease the drastic improve in unlawful migration into the USA. Why, because the towers had been deployed, are unlawful crossings skyrocketing? Why is it that the proposed resolution to this “invasion” is to construct much more towers? One might argue that the reply to these questions lies in the truth that the border disaster is getting used to fabricate consent amongst People for the implementation of a surveillance panopticon, not simply on the border, however effectively into the inside of the nation.
The Thiel-Funded, All Seeing AI
Anduril’s different authorities contracts means that the corporate’s installations on the border are solely a small element of what a accomplished “sensible wall” may entail. Along with their contracts with CBP, Anduril is a significant contractor for the Division of Protection and provides (or is quickly to produce) the navy with autonomous plane, resembling its Ghost platform and autonomous underwater autos. Just like the drones that interface with their surveillance towers on the border, they’re framed as helpful for surveillance and reconnaissance, however are additionally in a position to ship payloads, i.e. they’re able to be outfitted with weapons of warfare. They’ve additionally been growing weapon techniques that seem to fall below the controversial class of autonomous weapons, which means that the unmanned machine might kill with out significant human oversight. These drones make the most of Lattice, the identical AI-enabled working system as those who run Anduril’s border towers and surveillance drones. Final yr, Anduril unveiled a brand new model of Lattice that “is designed to foster dynamic collaboration amongst autonomous techniques,” e.g. permitting surveillance drones/towers and weaponized ones to be interoperable and conduct missions collectively with out essentially needing a human to coordinate them.
Anduril’s ambitions go far past dominating the Pentagon’s push into autonomous autos and AI and the Southern border’s “digital wall.” Anduril’s web site describes how Lattice will be deployed to surveil and shield the 16 crucial infrastructure sectors which have been recognized in the USA, together with “dams, power, nuclear reactors, transportation techniques, water and wastewater, and communications.” “Securing crucial infrastructure is important for the U.S. and past, and, much like our border safety resolution, Lattice can take over the uninteresting work of monitoring cameras and sensors for threats to crucial infrastructure websites and liberate people to do one thing about it,” the corporate states on their web site. The corporate has additionally pitched Lattice to be used in detecting and responding to wildfires and conducting civilian search and rescue missions. Luckey has acknowledged that Anduril finally plans “to show American and allied warfighters into invincible technomancers.”
The potential risks of Anduril can solely totally be fleshed out when contemplating the household of Thiel-backed protection/intelligence corporations as an entire. For example, Thiel’s Palantir, which has quite a few ties to Anduril other than simply Thiel, is the engine that intelligence companies and militaries (within the US and past) use to investigate drone footage, satellite tv for pc imagery, and open-source knowledge and switch that visible and non-visual knowledge into actionable intelligence. It has been overtly described by mainstream shops like Bloomberg as “utilizing Battle on Terror instruments to trace Americans” and has lengthy been a significant driver of “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime. One other Thiel-funded enterprise, Clearview AI, has developed AI-powered facial recognition instruments that had been educated off of billions of images scrapped from the web, a lot of them from the Thiel-backed social media platform Fb and the Fb-owned Instagram. Regardless of being a favourite of US legislation enforcement and DHS, Clearview AI has been sued quite a few occasions over privateness violations and its database has been banned in quite a few international locations together with Australia, Britain, Italy and Canada. Like Palantir, which mainstream media has acknowledged for years as realizing “every part about you” and even known as an “all-seeing eye,” Clearview AI’s instruments are allegedly in a position to “establish activists at a protest or a sexy stranger on the subway, revealing not simply their names however the place they lived, what they did and whom they knew.”
In trying on the overlap shared between Palantir, Anduril, Clearview AI and even Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which has been backed by Founders Fund since 2008 and is tied to Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens), one wonders if this Thiel-backed household of corporations might ultimately function an interoperable system for whole AI surveillance. Troublingly, there are quite a few indications that is already occurring. Moreover, given their widespread hyperlinks to Thiel, plainly such an consequence was seemingly all the time the intent.
For example, as Stavroula Pabst beforehand reported for Limitless Hangout, Anduril and Palantir, each contractors to navy and intelligence companies, are at present collaborating on the Military’s Tactical Intelligence Concentrating on Entry Node (TITAN) program. As well as, Anduril has introduced that its Lattice AI system “is now for every part” and designed to be interoperable with the merchandise of different contractors. All three of those Thiel-backed corporations have been testing the interoperable use of their merchandise already within the Ukraine battle and seem like utilizing Israel’s warfare on the Gaza Strip for the identical ends.
How Peter Thiel-Linked Tech is Fueling the Ukraine Battle
As warfare in Ukraine continues, controversial protection contractors and adjoining corporations like Palantir, Anduril, and Clearview AI are taking benefit to develop and level-up controversial AI-driven weapons techniques and surveillance applied sciences. These organizations’ widespread hyperlink? The assist of the controversial, but ever-more highly effective Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
Typically, these applied sciences are examined and used overseas first earlier than they’re deployed at residence, one thing that even mainstream media has acknowledged that Palantir has been doing for years. The so-called Battle on Home Terror has lengthy been about retooling the weapons of the Battle on Terror as a method of curbing home dissent and Palantir is only one of a number of corporations aiding that shift. Equally, Clearview AI, regardless of claims that the corporate is Trump-linked and tied to right-leaning political circles, has bragged about its utility to the US legislation enforcement neighborhood by highlighting the corporate’s function in figuring out these concerned in January 6th, which the corporate’s CEO refers to as an “revolt.” After January 6th, Clearview AI’s use by US legislation enforcement jumped by 26%.
Nevertheless, Thiel, Luckey and others on this community who’re constructing the home panopticon typically declare that they’re defending “Western values” and “democracy” by embracing navy and intelligence contracts. In addition they rely closely on “America First” rhetoric. These corporations distinction themselves to corporations like Google, the place workers have beforehand scuttled the massive navy contracts over moral considerations, although figures like Eric Schmidt, the previous Google CEO who’s a giant backer of the Democrats and the Biden administration, are equally growing autonomous weapon know-how additionally below the guise of “defending democracy.” These Large Tech oligarchs finally agree concerning the plan, although Thiel and his ilk are far more vocal about their willingness to miss moral quandaries within the pursuit of ever extra profitable authorities contracts and cloak themselves in right-leaning, “America First” rhetoric.
This intelligence-linked net of Thiel-backed corporations is poised to comply with this similar trajectory with respect to the “sensible wall” being erected on the southern border in addition to the northern border. Whereas framed as solely surveilling border crossings, the surveillance towers, drones and associated gadgets being deployed are in a position to spy past the border and into American border cities and cities. Whereas Anduril’s towers particularly are sometimes framed as being positioned in rural, sparsely populated components of the southern border, there are a number of which can be positioned near main city facilities.
There’s additionally the problem of the so-called “Structure Free Zone,” which refers back to the “border area” claimed by the US authorities that extends roughly 100 miles inland from all the US’ terrestrial (together with coastal) borders. It’s estimated that 2/3 of all People reside inside this “border area”, which additionally contains 9 of the ten largest US cities. The blatant overreach has been criticized by left-leaning (e.g. the ACLU) and right-leaning teams (e.g. the CATO Institute) alike. Every time there are frenzied pushes within the media (mainstream and various alike) demanding new border safety measures, many neglect or are merely unaware that the federal government defines “the border” as a lot, far more than simply the bodily US-Mexico border and – thus – military-style measures rolled out on “the border” is also rolled out far more inland.
The “Structure Free Zone” could quickly have implications for the border “sensible wall.” These surveillance gadgets is also utilized, as soon as they’re succesful, to surveil throughout the government-defined “border area,” the place the violation of fundamental civil rights by legislation enforcement and CBP is a well-documented phenomenon. On condition that intelligence companies have been identified to have interaction within the warrantless wiretapping of People for effectively over a decade, it appears seemingly that the “sensible wall” might be used for a lot of the identical.
Although some current US court docket circumstances have tackled trendy video surveillance ways by legislation enforcement, it’s nonetheless doable for them to gather knowledge from surveillance cameras with no warrant if the intent is to “guard towards […] crime.” The precarious state of civil liberties within the US, mixed with the rising dominance of a small, close-knit and intelligence-linked group over the surveillance infrastructure of the State, must be rigorously scrutinized, not quickly rubber-stamped on the again of media-generated panic.
Agenda 2030 and World Policing Targets
The bipartisan consensus round an Anduril-built “sensible wall” seemingly has its roots in the identical international agenda that’s spurring the fast implementation of biometric entry/exit techniques at ports of entry all through the Western world. For example, that is the yr the place the European Union’s biometric entry/exit system is as a result of launch, whereby vacationers crossing the EU’s new “digital border” system – whether or not terrestrial or aerial – must present their fingerprints and undergo facial scans in the event that they want to enter an EU member state. Regardless of claims that the “digital border” would facilitate simpler journey and cut back wait occasions, present estimates reveal that the brand new system is more likely to take virtually ten occasions longer per entry. The UK, regardless of leaving the EU, is additionally poised to “make its borders digital” by 2025, i.e. subsequent yr, with Canada implementing related insurance policies.
Within the US, the transfer towards the “actual ID” system, which is to come back into drive in 2025, will see biometric assortment within the US develop into a requisite for home flights and every other “official functions” that the DHS Secretary can unilaterally decide require a “actual ID.” The “actual ID” additionally offers favorable provisions for digital IDs, resembling digital drivers licenses (such because the “Florida sensible ID” being piloted in Ron DeSantis-governed Florida) and different “cellular digital paperwork and digital playing cards.” Elsewhere within the US, in airports, the push for digital IDs and facial biometric scans continues to quickly advance.
It’s fairly apparent that the “sensible wall” being constructed on the US’ southern and northern borders is meant to be a part of the identical “digital border” system that DHS has been designing and regularly implementing for a lot of the previous 20 years. For example, CBP at present makes use of the identical biometric facial comparability know-how used at quite a few land, sea and air ports of entry all through the nation and plans to proceed to develop its use nationwide. As famous above, Anduril’s towers or its affiliated drones might simply be outfitted with facial recognition or different associated applied sciences, whereas official terrestrial port of entries are already utilizing the identical biometric system being rolled out at American airports. As well as, a lot of these searching for to cross the southern border are being onboarded to the CBP One app, which CBP initially claimed would lead to a “protected, orderly and humane” border processing when it was launched in January 2023. That app additionally collects biometric data from candidates of sure nationalities, a performance CBP will seemingly develop sooner or later as reliance on its app will increase.
The obvious international coordination of biometric entry/exit techniques isn’t any coincidence, as it’s a coverage initiative deeply linked to the UN’s Agenda 2030, or the Sustainable Improvement Targets (SDGs). Particularly, it’s tied to the implementation of SDG 16, which accommodates provisions for digital id techniques, amongst different issues. The UN has chosen the worldwide legislation enforcement entity Interpol as its “implementing companion” of SDG 16, a call that finally spawned Interpol’s SDG-aligned World Policing Targets (GPGs). The GPGs had been permitted and adopted by Interpol’s 196 member international locations in 2017. As beforehand famous by Limitless Hangout, Interpol is a harmful group to belief with the huge energy these objectives and their related insurance policies will bestow upon them, as they function as a “pay-to-play” group and have been embroiled in a number of vital corruption scandals.
SDG16: Half 1 — Constructing the World Police State
The United Nations claims that the aim of Sustainable Improvement Aim 16 (SDG16) is to advertise peaceable and inclusive societies and to supply entry to justice for all. Hiding behind the rhetoric is the true goal: to strengthen and consolidate the ability and authority of the “international governance regime” and to take advantage of threats—each actual and imagined—with a purpose to advance regime hegemony.
One of many GPGs, GPG No. 2, is to “promote border safety worldwide.” Interpol particularly notes that the implementation of this purpose will contain establishing “superior international requirements for an intelligence-led border administration, together with requirements for border surveillance, border checks and associated gear.” These requirements, they proceed, “must be underpinned by know-how and digital development and threat evaluation.” Elsewhere, they talk about how the implementation of this purpose can even contain “managing and sharing biometric knowledge, together with with using the Interpol’s Biometric Hub [“a state-of-the-art system for identifying criminals˝] and different hubs.” Interpol has teamed up with biometric digital ID corporations Idemia and Onfido as a part of this effort. Each of these corporations facilitated vaccine passports throughout Covid-19 and are at present serving to to create digital driver’s licenses in some US states.
Interpol is primarily funded by the European Fee and the governments of Germany, the US and Canada, all of which – as famous above – are implementing the identical biometric entry/exit techniques on related timelines. Nevertheless, many different Interpol member international locations are equally ramping up their adoption of biometric, digital IDs for overseas journey and home use, together with the West’s ostensible adversary international locations, like Russia and China. The overwhelming majority of the world’s international locations, whether or not West or East, have signed onto Interpol’s GPGs and the UN’s SDGs, each of which push for complete, biometric digital IDs interfaced with a digital forex pockets (whether or not a CBDC or non-public sector-issued equal). Globally, these agendas are being rolled out quickly, forming the muse for the following period of extremely centralized international governance.
Nevertheless, in some international locations, resembling the USA, the place a good portion of the inhabitants has develop into cautious of digital IDs and digital, programmable cash, unprecedented efforts are being made to promote these globalist insurance policies through right-leaning speaking factors in distinction to years prior. For example, digital, programmable cash is being developed within the US, not as a CBDC, however a mixture of regulated stablecoins and tokenized financial institution deposits. Even international carbon markets are being framed, not as being about local weather change, however about innovation and profiting off a brand new class of property. Now, it appears, the biometric “digital border” tied to the UN’s SDGs – a key element of the infrastructure for digital ID – is being offered primarily to the populist proper and being rolled out below the guise of tackling unlawful immigration. Not in contrast to Israel’s “sensible wall,” these partitions will be “turned off” when a disaster must be manufactured and, similar to a lot else, used to promote the identical agendas which can be pushing us all into a worldwide, public-private panopticon.
