The House Committee on Homeland Security is looking into Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) surveillance network in the wake of a report that nearly one-third of the agency’s cameras along the US-Mexico border don’t work. Privacy advocates say this is just the latest instance of expensive border surveillance infrastructure not working as advertised.
An internal Border Patrol memo obtained by NBC News said that “several technical problems” had contributed to a large-scale outage of the Remote Video Surveillance Systems, a series of surveillance towers and cameras that have been used to remotely surveil the border since 2011. According to the memo, approximately 150 of the 500 cameras are non-operational. The memo says that the Federal…