Google Cloud Facilitates AI Surveillance Along U.S.-Mexico Border Despite Prior Denials: Report

Google Cloud is facilitating artificial intelligence-powered surveillance for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the southern border, according to federal contract documents reviewed by The Intercept, despite previous denials by its leadership that it would be involved in such work.

The project involves upgrading 50 towers with up to 100 cameras across six sites. These towers, originally built by Israeli defense contractor Elbit, will be enhanced with machine learning tools to automatically detect people and vehicles without requiring human monitoring.

In October 2020, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told employees that the company was "not working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border." Kurian further stated that Google had spoken with CBP, which "confirmed that they are not testing our products for those purposes."

However, the findings by The Intercept show that not only is Google Cloud currently supporting the major CBP initiative to modernize surveillance towers in the Tucson Sector of the Arizona border but two companies —IBM and Equitus— are providing computer vision software to enable this capability.

IBM is supplying its Maximo Visual Inspection tool, typically used for industrial quality control. Equitus is contributing its Video Sentinel software, which is explicitly designed for border surveillance and has been promoted for its ability to detect groups like "people walking caravan style," including suspected smugglers.

Google's role, however, is central as the documents describe how the company is providing the cloud infrastructure to host and process the video data from the surveillance towers. Known as MAGE (ModulAr Google Cloud Platform Environment), the system will act as a hub for video feeds and metadata. "This project will focus initially on 100 simultaneous video streams," one section notes, with data being sent directly to CBP's Google Cloud environment for AI analysis.

Jim Kelly, an executive with Google Public Sector, told The Intercept that CBP may be accessing Google's services through a third-party reseller and emphasized that the company is "not on the contract." However, he acknowledged that Google Cloud services were being used, likening them to off-the-shelf products like a mobile network or standard computing hardware.

The documents place Google Cloud in the middle of the data flow for the surveillance towers, contradicting Kurian's previous assurances. One CBP diagram reviewed by The Intercept visually shows Google's MAGE platform at the center of the operation.

Civil liberties groups consulted by the site raised concerns about the implications of AI surveillance along the border. Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, stated that the initiative comes "on top of the wasted tax dollars," and added, "border communities end up paying the price with their privacy."