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Abstract
The new technologies of bio-informatic border security and remote surveillance that have emerged as key infrastructures of reconfigured mobility regimes depend on various kinds of labor to produce the effect of bordering. The current retrofitting and technological remediation of borders suggests their transformation away from static demarcators of hard territorial boundaries toward much more sophisticated, flexible, and mobile devices of tracking, filtration, and exclusion. Borders require the labor of software developers, designers, engineers, infrastructure builders, border guards, systems experts, and many others who produce the “smart border”; but they also depend on the labor of “data-ready” travelers who produce themselves at the border, as well as the underground labor of those who traffic in informal and illegalized economies across such borders. Bordering increasingly relies on technological forms of mediation that are embedded within hi-tech, military and private corporate logics, but are also resisted by electronic and physical “hacks” or bypassing of informational and infrastructural architectures. In this paper we consider three socio-technological assemblages of the border, and the labor which makes and unmakes them: (1) the interlocking “cyber-mobilities” of contemporary airports including visual technologies for baggage, cargo, and passenger inspection, as well as information technologies for passenger dataveillance, air traffic control, and human resource systems; (2) the development of the Schengen Information System database of the EU, and its implications for wider migrant rights and internal mobility within the EU, as well as radical border media that have attempted to intervene in that border space; and (3) elements of the US–Mexico “smart border” regime known as the Secure Border Initiative Network (2006–2011), and those who have tried to tactically evade, disrupt, or undermine the working of this border.
Notes
2. http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v3n1/biemann.html for a good description
3. Grossraum (Borders of Europe), dir. Lonnie van Brummelen in collaboration with Siebren de Haan (The Netherlands, 2004–2005, 35 mm, 35 mins, color, silent), is a “triptych” filmed along three sensitive crossing points on the EU border: Hrebenne, a border post between Ukraine and Poland; the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco; and the green zone which splits Cyprus into two. By directing our gaze to the demarcations of the geopolitical “greater area” or “Grossraum” of the EU, van Brummelen reveals the paradox of a zone of freedom whose development is dependent on the strength and policing of its borders.
6. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/tunnels-proliferate-under-us-mexico-border/article2267535/
8. The contract for SBInet was awarded to one primary defense contractor, Boeing, who then retained over 90 subcontractors for various components of the project about whom it refrains from public disclosure of information in the name of industrial secrecy. The secrecy loop extends to the Department of Homeland Security, who both issued a guidance order to Boeing to refrain from public comment on SBInet, and themselves refuse to provide information about the nature of the contracts (Richey Citation2007).
9. In a Government Accountability Office (US GAO Citation2011, 17; US GAO Citation2010) report that contributed to the project's demise, one in a long list of problems that was found with Project 28 (over 1300 defects), from endless delays to poor integration of different technical components, was the fact that radar and ground sensors would be triggered by heavy rainfall or blowing sagebrush and get misidentified as “unwanted intrusions” by people (Neubauer Citation2011; Chisti and Bergeron Citation2011).
10. The new approach will seek out multiple contractors, allowing those who lost out to Boeing in the first round to compete (Censer Citation2011).
11. Some news items regarding the cancelation of SBInet seem to indicate that the failure of the project may have propelled the increasing push for UAV or drone technologies in border policing (Pelofsky Citation2011).