They got a fence, they got some solar-powered webcams, they got a bunch of volunteers who are totally not racist. A little duct tape and some chewing gum should make border security just about perfect.
Published by Kyso Kisaen November 4th, 2006 in Brilliant Ideas, HUH!?, Immigration, Racism, Wankers, WingnutsAre you obsessivly concerned about illegal immigrants but are too much of a sissy boy pansy to quit your job, put on every piece of cammo you own, and sit yer ass on the boring Canadian and glamourous and dangerous sexy Mexican borders? Do you long for a way to protect your country from migrant farm labor from the comfort and safety of your own home?
Well guess what? Rick Perry has a bone to throw to YOU, my friend!* Now you can do your part to monitor carefully selected known border problem areas** and relay any suspicious activity to the proper authorities via the Batphone***.
A US state has begun testing a website that aims to police illegal immigration by offering web users surveillance footage from the Mexican border.
The site intends to give web users the chance to virtually patrol the Texas border and contact the authorities if they spot seemingly illegal crossings.
A dozen (count ‘em!) high-tech webcams, eight of which actually work, is too many webcams for the border patrol to monitor, what with them busy with the other bajillion cameras they already have out there, and the motion sensors and the being all trained and stuff. That’s why they need you to be among the 35,000 people who are already watching such pre-selected potential disaster spots as a parking lot, or a dam.
Absolutely no immigration violators will sneak past what appears to be a line of moving cars, the scene from Camera No. 1.
Other cameras seemed to show a parking lot and a lake dam near McAllen, all apparently innocent scenes but obviously sensitive locations in the war on terror.
Now, as with any high tech, innovative law enforcement program, there are a few problems:
Reports say footage streamed by the cameras often appeared to be very grainy.
Views in some cases were obscured by foliage, while at other times, it was impossible to tell whether a group of people in sight were illegal immigrants or not.
But don’t let the fact that you can’t distinguish between coyotes, coyotes, and your Minutemen comrades-in -arms- that- they- are- totally- not- going- to- use- but- best- have- them- just- in- case using IE7 alone stop you from doing your part to monitor tiny swaths of Texas and then calling the border guard every time you see a jackaloupe. They’ll appreciate your efforts, seeing as they’re probably not busy. After all, if they were doing their job you wouldn’t have to be monitoring the border for them, right?
First I will take your jobs, then I will take your women! What’s this? A webcam? Damn and blast, I am foiled!
I went to texasborderwatch.com to watch some border, but unfortunately $5,000,000.00 only gets you IE compatibility, no Firefox for you.
OK, maybe this was a waste of money, a last-ditch political ploy to rile up the base the week before elections. But it doesn’t have to be a total wash - Mark Shapiro at Internet Video Magazine has a helpful list of suggestions on how to best utilize the cameras:
- Maybe we could run spam superimposed over the top of the images - text ads for Viagra, free spyware killers, etc.
- volunteer drama groups could be encouraged to do performances in the desert. While they are emoting, skilled eyes could patrol the desert background for illicit movement.
- Patriotic web sites who support this effort could take a few of these web cam feeds and then run them on their homepages or along the bottom third of the screen. Add a push button link that automatically sends an alert to the local police or Guardsman and you will be all set.
- Offer a prize - if you see a alien, report him and if they get captured, you get maybe $10,000 or so. Think of all the late night stoners and partiers who would stay awake for a 10G payday.
- Here’s an idea. Make it into a reality TV show, invite Paris Hilton and few other b-list celebrities to camp out on the border, and to confront the illegal aliens. I bet that that might get a few eyeballs watching.
I volunteer to play the part of the jackaloupe.
*PS from R.P.: Rick Perry: Protecting Our Borders, Protecting You. Vote Rick Perry.
**Or random patches of desert. Like you can tell the difference.
***Instructions available here
Ha! You beat me to it! [Deleting post]
Not bad, considering Firefox froze up while I was searching for the perfect jackaloupe picture.
So why not go the next step and offer patriotic Americans the ability to monitor intersections, or city streets, or those brown people down the street, or your neighbors?
When everyone is watching and being watched, at all times, we will enjoy the ultimate freedom!!!
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!
Well, what got me excited was the idea that this was the perfect opportunity for the 101st Fighting Keyboardists to finally serve their country! They could take shifts in scout teams, proving all the haters wrong by risking their fingers and wrists to protect the Rio Grande from Osama bin Laden and his Mexican cronies.
Behold the awesome control panel at texasborderwatch.com:
Wow, look at all that detail! Of course, none of these cams actually worked:
These are the actual images from the site, I’m not making this up. And that “report” button is literally just a “mailto” link. If someone actually reported wrongdoing, we would have to wait for the recipient to wade through his joke forwards and hope his spamcatcher didn’t snag the message before stopping the invading terrorists in their tracks.
I was also hoping we could have one pointed somewhere worth watching for any wrongdoing:
I’m waiting to see who is going to be the first person to start pointing the webcams at the ground or the sky.
A mailto: link? Brilliant. 35,000 border watchers watching the same bits of border, seeing the same supicious activity, and reporting it using the same link at the same time. How can they tell which mail server crashes are just server crashes and which are batsignals from the concerned public? Do they have two response teams: one to rush out and nab the illegals and one to call their network guy or ISP customer service?
- volunteer drama groups could be encouraged to do performances in the desert.
Oh, man, I’m so into this idea. I wish I lived in a border state.
What an image you’ve made: a dozen or so freaks, out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by miles of nothing, putting on a show for the coyotes, the lizards, the buzzards… and the 35,000 or so cheeto-stained wretches who couldn’t find anything more interesting than these cams on the entire intertubes.
Or how’s this: a lone vehicle drives into view. A single guy gets out and drops his pants, mooning the 35,000 audience. He gets back in car and drives away. It’d be funny to the home audience, but for people at the scene (who presumably don’t know the cam is there) it would just be kind of surreal.
I mean, really… 35,000? Compare that to the average audience of an average cable public-access show. What exhibitionist freakjob wouldn’t jump at the chance at that sort of viewership? (Your comment about latenight stoners reminded me of this. After all, who the hell else watches cable public-access tv?)
If such public displays of bizarrity before gov’t-paid webcams actually take off, then I say let’s put them on every corner. We need more street theater, life just isn’t surreal enough.
The idea that the DHS suddenly would get 35,000 emails about some guy mooning a parking lot or a bunch of hippies dressed as endangered species dancing around in the middle of the desert… well, that just makes me smile wickedly.
So what if you catch the Minutemen themselves engaging in illegal activity? Do you click the link, keyboard warrior?
Kyso, anyone could be a traitor, even Minutemen. So if you see any suspicious activity of any kind, from anyone, even people you know (or especially people you know), the government wants you to report them.
(That new girl they got at the Stop ‘N Gas is cute, but she could be working for Al Quaeda!…)
The less suspicious they look, the more likely they are to be infultrating our Christian way of life, putting us at ease, acting like normal Americans until - They strike us in our moment of greatest weakness!
There’s too much at stake to take any chances. We must do our part to stop the evildoers!…
You know, I just thought of something. My boyfriend spent the last three or four years studying political science, conflict management, international relations and to some small extent economics (it sounds like a lot but there’s not really too much to the CM and IR programs here, and alot of the courses overlap). For that entire time he’s spoken, very eloquently, about wanting to get a job where he could affect policy, although he was equally divided between foriegn policy and regional economic policy.
Then recently he quit it all and started talking about going into business. His reason (well one of them, anyway) is that one person can’t really get much done in government, because all of the decisions are made by elected officials like Perry, but the implementation is left to beauracrats who are not in too much danger of being replaced during elections. The result is that if you are in a position to make decisions, you are powerless to ensure their success, but if you are in a position to make policy successful, you are not in any position to determine which policy gets used. The result for people like Perry is that you can make a big sweeping fucktard gesture like allocating huge sums of money to a stupid border webcam project, but you are in no position to make sure those sums are spent well - the beauracracy has the power to step in and fuck your plans all up, and then it just look like the plan itself failed.
Maybe that’s what happened here. Even if only half of the 5 mil figure was actually alloted to the project, the execution is so terrible that I would feel much better if I could believe that the incompetence was at some level intentional. A gubernatorial cockblock, I guess.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the implementation is intentional. As a bureaucrat in my real life, I can definitely see that if you didn’t like the direction of a certain policy, you could screw it up and not get caught. Of course, I think the initiative that created my job is one of the best things the government has ever done, so that’s a non-issue with me. Just an observation.
Anyway, what I think would be fun to do: Get a group of people together and get dressed like turn of the 20th century cabelleros. Get some horses and some rifles and then go up and down the border staging some of Pancho Villa’s more daring raids for the webcams.
From the website:
Microsoft Internet Explorer is required to utilize this web site. Firefox is not supported.
Figures.
OMG, I’m dying laughing at the thought of performance art for the dorito eating tattletale set…
Can you report illegal gringos crossing into Mexico ?.
Niche article, thanks you for write this article