Google Is Helping Government Build an AI-Powered Border Surveillance System

Remember the guys who found a way to turn your personal information into cold hard cash? They're now a key part of president Donald Trump's AI-powered border dystopia, according to new reporting by The Intercept. Google, once a company that simply tracked your every move to serve targeted ads, is now pushing the boundaries of surveillance and control by partnering with the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), according to TK new reporting by The Intercept.

Apr 13, 2025 - 21:21

Google Is Helping Government Build an AI-Powered Border Surveillance System

New investigative reporting has uncovered a tech giant in the middle of a cruel AI-powered border dystopia.

Remember the guys who found a way to turn your personal information into cold hard cash? It brings us no pleasure to report that they're now expanding into the border surveillance industry.

Google, once a company that simply tracked your every move to serve targeted ads, is now a key player in the US Customs and Border Patrol's (CBP) AI surveillance system, according to new reporting by The Intercept.

The tech giant makes up the core of a multi-company venture to modernize the CBP's surveillance monitoring towers, a project started by Donald Trump's predecessor, Joe Biden.

Under the agreement, Google is providing CBP with its cloud computing program, the ModulAr Cloud Platform Environment — which for reasons beyond us is abreviated to MAGE — and which serves as the hub connecting Equitus AI and IBM's Maximo Visual Inspection software, according to The Intercept. The project is primarily focused on saddling cameras in and around Tucson with AI capabilities, though more experimental rollouts are likely as a bipartisan border tech bill flies through the House on its way to the Senate.

Google's servers will process the video feed of every Tuscon-area CBP camera to identify approaching people and vehicles.

"This project will focus initially on 100 simultaneous video streams from the data source for processing," a CBP document viewed by The Intercept read. "The resulting metadata and keyframes will be sent to CBP’s Google Cloud."

The revelation comes in the middle of Trump's brutal crackdown on migrants flocking to the US from Central and South America, a system built by Democrats and Republicans alike.

That context is key: the Trump administration has used AI to scour social media accounts of foreign nationals, repositioned spy satellites to trawl the border, and disappeared hundreds of asylum seekers to El Salvador's notorious "Terrorism Confinement Center".

Google's CBP venture is just the latest deployment of technology to clamp down on asylum seekers, many of whom flee their homelands as a result of economic hardship caused by US foreign policy and wealth extraction. Though public-private surveillance tools might aid enforcement agencies — not to mention pad the pockets of tech companies — they do nothing to address the cause of the immigration crisis.

Instead, they ratchet up the human cruelty to new heights, adding to racial discrimination in immigration enforcement, militarizing the immigration system, and automating the kinds of violence and abuse that are all too common for those struggling for asylum.

"For more than two decades, surveillance towers at the border have proven to be a boondoggle," Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told The Intercept. "Adding AI isn’t going to make it any less of a boondoggle — it will just be an AI-powered boondoggle."

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