More than half a century ago, the US installed an electronic fence along its southern border. The intruder alert system began in 1970, when 177 ground sensors were set up along the Chula Vista sector of California. These sensors, along with the radio transmitters that connected them to computers (still rolling on magnetic tape) created a network aimed at “deportable” or “illegal” “aliens,” definitions developed after the 1924 national quota system was set up.
This border technology had first seen “action” in the late 1960s on the McNamara Line. This was a “barrier system” on the border between North and South Vietnam. Named after US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a proponent of technological fixes and business efficiency at the Pentagon, the war zone system linked acoustic and heat-detecting remote sensing with fortified field positions and land-mined choke points. It was designed to keep the army of North Vietnam (NVA) from infiltrating into South Vietnam.
The system had been prototyped at the Army Electronic Proving Ground facility at Fort Huachuca, Arizona—a one-time frontier outpost established, one journalist in 1967 wrote, “to chase down intransigent Indians.” The racial logic behind such frontier thinking spanned decades.
“In the US public debate of the 1970s, the southern border was imagined as out of control due to the ‘thousands’ of migrants who crossed it, overwhelming an understaffed US Border Patrol.”
The fact that the border electronic fence solution didn’t work so well—random cattle and helicopters set off “false-positive” alerts—wasn’t nearly as important to higher-ups as “the promise of technological mastery over lands and people” it seemed to offer.
“Despite its repeated failures to command territory and people, the electronic fence was part of an imperial control fantasy that spanned the globe,” writes Chaar-López. Of course, it didn’t work very well in Vietnam, either.
“Decades prior to the post 9/11 increase in cybersecurity measures, the US–Mexico border of the 1970s was one of the critical spaces where government actors experimented with automating the control of racialized populations,” continues Chaar-López. He cites the electronic fence as an early version of the “border wall”—physical attempts to enclose the long border zone and “master the messiness of the borderlands.” He places such efforts at “the intersections of automation, nation making, and racial sorting logics.”