Border Security AI and the Racialization of Deception

• In Event: Feminist Intelligence

Abstract

In this paper I turn to automated border surveillance on the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond. I focus primarily on the AVATAR— funded by the DHS and developed by faculty at the University of Arizona’s BORDERS Center – a technology that houses automated sensors that monitors one’s physiological movements to detect threats such as migrants, criminals, and terrorists. While automated surveillance promises to protect the liberal freedoms of “good” individuals who deserve citizenship, safety and unfettered mobility, I examine the intelligence used in the AI technology as one that is premised on the racialization of deception. In other words, a utopian future in which ubiquitous vision will prevent future catastrophes and secure the border is a tool sought out in the U.S., Poland, Israel, Singapore and around the world is premised on the fears of mass rebellion and chaos. I trace the rise of automated intelligence to the desire to render race visible on the body through the racial science of the body and gestures, to eugenics, and enlightenment science based on secular, visual evidence which demonized phenomena that was outside visuality and legibility.

Author

• Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, University of California Santa Cruz