The Eyes of Chihuahua

For three years Luis Mendoza has periodically gone to the same construction site in downtown Ciudad Ju rez to check on the progress of a -story tower that will serve as the home base of a vast state surveillance project On one visit in early May Mendoza a -year-old activist with the Ju rez group El Frente Pol tico Ciudadano para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos Citizens Political Front in Defense of Human Rights was confronted by a company representative overseeing the project and a police officer and petitioned to leave But during our trip there on a blistering June afternoon we encountered only a stray dog and a handful of construction workers majority of of whom sat or leaned against a dusty chain-link fence One greeted Mendoza warmly with a smile Mendoza and other activists in his group have been keeping watch over the watchtower They re motivated not only by concerns over privacy related to the expanding police scheme but also by worries about a lack of transparency in establishment expenses and technical specifications for the state project In terms of publicly available information You don t have a lot to work with Mendoza announced Once complete this looming tower known as Torre Centinela the Sentinel Tower will serve as the police command center for Chihuahua Mexico s bulk sprawling state and home to million residents including those of Ciudad Ju rez El Paso s larger and more violent sister city Construction is around percent complete as of early July according to Chihuahua s Secretariat of Populace Safety the state police agency Chihuahua state police fly by Mount Cristo Rey in June Mendoza and his fellow human rights activists oppose the tower as a waste of tools that could better be used for investing in youth violence prevention and local tuition initiatives Why is the tower downtown Why even build a tower Mendoza reported He criticized state establishment authorities for failing to consult locals It was a unilateral decision But the imposing tower is just the majority of visible component of a much broader -million project It s like seeing the eye of Sauron hanging over your city disclosed Dave Maass director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation a civil liberties advocacy group referencing the fictional villain from The Lord of the Rings whose surveillance powers emanated from his own dark tower Eventually the -foot-tall Torre Centinelawill be the nucleus of Chihuahua s burgeoning AI-powered state surveillance system called Plataforma Centinela a project introduced in by Governor Mar a Maru Eugenia Campos Galv n a firebrand of Mexico s opposition party the conservative National Action Party PAN Once fully operational the Centinela system will include almost cameras nearly license plate readers and police command subcenters statewide able to deploy facial-recognition apparatus and conduct cross comparisons with a biometrics database of those deemed to be criminals according to presentations and interviews with Chihuahuan executives The Centinela project is running behind schedule Seguritech the business tasked with building the tower was in the past few days fined close to a million pesos or around for delays according to Norte Digital Even so more than percent of Centinela s pan-and-tilt cameras nearly percent of its license plate readers and nearly percent of its fixed-spot cameras are already in place The Campos Galv n administration has promised that the new systemwill improve residents safety describing it as the guardian of Chihuahua in promotional materials In one such video the governor states From here the state will be observed and the the bulk critical decisions will be taken to strengthen the defense and peace of Chihuahuans in all the regions of our beloved state But Chihuahua s massive outlay in surveillance tech is cause for civil liberties concerns on both sides of the U S -Mexico dividing line Maass and other watchdogs commented Specifically he worries information could be gathered in strategies that violate U S laws and passed on to U S law enforcement That type of massive statistics sharing in a binational public like El Paso-Ju rez could impinge on the rights of multiple boundary crossers Is it going to end in people having their devices searched more often Is it going to end in people being rejected from moving across the edge because of something that the Centinela surveillance system picked up he solicited Groundwork has been laid for Centinela s information to be utilized in the United States though Observer records requests turned up sparse concrete examples of its use by Texas law enforcement so far In Chihuahua bulk information related to Centinela is considered confidential by the state until according to responses to the Observer s requests under Mexico s transparency laws But Chihuahua state leaders have certainly offered to let Texas in on the surveillance action and the Lone Star State s governor has leapt at the chance Amid high levels of unauthorized margin crossings in April Governor Greg Abbott directed state troopers to conduct aggressive secondary inspections of commercial vehicles overcoming from Mexico into Texas even though federal Customs and Territory line Protection agents already check trucks That slowed commercial crossings into Texas for about a week created a bottleneck at ports of entry hurt profit margins for businesses importing goods and uncovered no smuggled drugs or foreigners as announced by the Texas Tribune In response to the ramped-up inspections the governors of four northern Mexican states that boundary Texas Chihuahua Coahuila Nuevo L on and Tamaulipas signed defense agreements apparently to appease Abbott though three of those states reportedly had similar population safety protocols already in place Chihuahua s agreement stood out In a memorandum provided to Abbott s office and obtained by the Observer Campos Galv n explained her approach We must build a new limit model she wrote boasting of the plans for Centinela We are willing to share that information with Texas State bureaucrats and commercial partners directly At a press conference that April when the two governors signed their deal Abbott called Campos Galv n s strategy the best limit safeguard plan that I ve seen from any governor from Mexico During the constituents relations campaign for Centinelain Chihuahua s leaders kept their next-door neighbor s interests in mind In a pitch to Abbott Chihuahuan leaders painted Centinelaas a guarantor of territory line safeguard Campos Galv n made a series of promises to Abbott a migrant biometrics database an anti-drone system and permanent tracking of cross-border shipments all powered and supposedly improved by artificial intelligence Advertisement Her proposal for cross-border state-to-state cooperation was unique since international police collaboration is more often brokered at the federal level In one presentation Campos Galv n s office offered The state of Texas could have eyes in this side of the demarcation Tony Payan director of the Center for the U S and Mexico at Rice University s Baker Institute for General Framework declared Campos Galv n s offer to grant Texas such access to a state surveillance system would be essential if her administration follows through in part because such collaboration is usually federal and also because of the proposed degree of access If we assume that the State of Chihuahua is inviting law enforcement agencies to have a more formalized well-established permanent embeddedness in the system I think that would be unique Payan explained We ll see if the Mexican authorities the central Mexican ruling body interferes with that because they may not like it Payan announced the surveillance apparatus should especially alarm those on the Mexican side given the history of involvement between state personnel and cartels There seems to be an utter degree of incompetence by the Mexican regime at just about all levels to prevent their law enforcement agencies their surveillance agencies the information that is shared from being used by organized criminals or handed over to organized criminals he reported Those kinds of leaks he explained enable evasion of law enforcement and an even greater degree of impunity The prospective cross-border exchange of figures involving facial recognition for immigration control purposes is also really worrying according to Santiago Narv ez a researcher at Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales Architecture in Defense of Digital Rights a Mexican advocacy organization focused on records privacy and surveillance Chihuahua is not the first Mexican edge state with a surveillance system Coahuila has its own structure of cameras including a meager hundred with facial-recognition capabilities During the Black Lives Matter protests of facial-recognition tech in Coahuila helped U S leadership track down a couple suspected in an arson event who had fled to Mexico But the collaboration proposed between Chihuahua and Texas has a different context The original pitch was related to immigration control Narv ez pointed out He fears that Centinela s facial-recognition capabilities could be used to perhaps erroneously target settlers who passed through Chihuahua to the United States and detain them deport them in an authoritarian manner and terminate their regular status in the United States in an arbitrary way After first visiting the Torre Centinela on foot I returned to the site in a sleek black helicopter with two Chihuahua state police officers and a spokesperson From more than feet up the cops disclosed that on previous trips they d spotted cartel scouts perched on hilltops in plastic chairs partially hidden and surrounded by strategically placed boulders The sparse shrubby vegetation outside Ju rez could hardly shield a lookout spot Once we flew closer to the territory line I saw cars in long lines on highways waiting to cross in either direction The rust-colored U S confines wall that divides the two cities zigzagged across a mountainous stretch of desert where sandy soil and rock glistened An occasional chunk of the wall was tagged with graffiti sometimes legible even from the air One message on the Mexican side spray-painted in white letters read Fuck Donald Trump and beside it y su pinche muro Looming above the rest of downtown Ju rez was the tower which these same cops will soon use to surveil their state While Centinela s camera grid is only partly operational Mexican police analysts already have had quite a insufficient effective cases Javier Martinez the spokesperson for Chihuahua s Secretariat of Masses Safety narrated me a sparse hours before that helicopter ride Let s suppose we re searching for someone with an orange or pink backpack and the cameras and the programs are searching for this type of person they ll notify you Same with vehicles But district activists and academics in Ju rez and El Paso remain skeptical that a costly mass-surveillance system will meaningfully improve Chihuahua s entrenched crime problems which are largely linked to the international drug contract and cartel-related violence Ciudad Ju rez The whole idea of Plataforma Centinela is preposterous because it won t be used the way it s supposed to noted Howard Campbell an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who has done decades of fieldwork in Ju rez That s never been the event in terms of the Mexican governing body he revealed predicting the project will fail because of rampant corruption and infiltration by organized crime Catalina Castillo another Ju rez human rights activist who works with Mendoza announced she too has little faith that more surveillance could bring meaningful population safety changes especially given that a few high-profile femicides in busy urban areas remain unsolved despite the city s growing camera framework Castillo who is also part of a local feminist collective pointed to a particularly high-profile circumstance In May Isabel Nieto Romero a -year-old general school coach disappeared in a commercial area near the busy Bridge of the Americas confines traversing in Ju rez Six days later her body was identified in an empty lot near train tracks in the southern part of the city She d apparently survived several days after her abduction prior to being asphyxiated according to a postmortem medicinal analysis disclosed by state prosecutors yet officers had not publicly identified her assailant or a suspect despite cameras being present in those same areas In part because of unsolved crimes like Nieto Romero s murder There is constant criticism of Chihuahua s Centinelaproject Castillo noted In response to questions from the Observer in July a Chihuahua state police spokesperson reported officers identified and arrested a suspect in Nieto Romero s murder at the end of May in part using license plate readers and surveillance video from the Centinelasystem Castillo and Mendoza s organization first denounced the Centinela project in In the face of criticism from this coalition and other locality groups Gilberto Loya the state s populace safety secretary called activists criminals Group members demanded an apology at a press conference but never received one Activists express other concerns aside from inefficacy privacy and infiltration by organized crime they re also worried about Centinela s widespread use of artificial intelligence The state s plans include large-scale use of AI technologies including facial recognition and the ability to recognize a car by make model and distinctive characteristics via automated license plate readers Officers in Texas have used automatic license plate readers for years under Abbott s multibillion-dollar frontier safeguard project Operation Lone Star the state expanded its use of plate readers and other AI-powered surveillance technologies Several technical aspects of the Centinelasystem remain undisclosed since information related to the platform has been withheld as confidential by Chihuahua Nevertheless in May Loya the masses safety secretary won a prize for the state s use of artificial intelligence in Centinelaat the World Police Summit a global gathering that attracted more than law enforcement personnel to Dubai In a June interview in his Chihuahua office Loya communicated the Observer that Centinelacan help predict crime using machine learning a subset of artificial intelligence in which a system learns and adapts using statistical models to infer patterns and perform tasks without explicit instructions from the user It can generate a prediction for you about what could end up happening Loya reported It takes what historical content it has about homicides time manner and place and it tells you The exposure could be here Loya explained that like other algorithm-powered tools Centinela will train itself over time As the platform is used more it s fed more it has more machine learning he revealed emphasizing that any use of AI in the platform will be supervised by humans and that decisions about how to do police work will be made by officers Still specific experts warn that predictive policing based on algorithmic recommendations fails to address the root causes of crime and can contribute to discriminatory policing practices In a contemporary assessment calling for the practice to be banned in the United Kingdom Patrick Williams a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the overpolicing of gang members criticized the system Rather than predictive policing it s completely predictable policing It will constantly drive against those who are already marginalised More than three years ago Campos Galv n first offered Texas eyes in this side of the territory line But it s unclear what degree of access Texas personnel definitely have to the Centinela system s input so far In the June interview Loya explained the Observer that Texas representatives will not have direct access or a way to log in They ll have access through us he mentioned Martinez the spokesperson for Chihuahua s Secretariat of Constituents Safety separately stated that a formal plan is in the works to bring Texas state police along with federal law enforcement into the physical tower itself to work with local administration on intelligence-sharing and joint police work They can come and work here when they re at the tower on the platform so they can come set up a assurance roundtable and from here they can extract specific facts he announced The Texas Department of Inhabitants Safety DPS did not respond to emailed questions for this story In response to a masses information request DPS withheld records related to Centinela Employees at the open records office endorsed that DPS possesses intelligence reports mentioning the system but the agency argued to the attorney general that the records should be exempt from disclosure because they consist of threat assessments shared between various state and federal law enforcement partners that would provide insights into what tools are available the possible effectiveness of these tools and the parameters of the searches performed using these tools The attorney general s office agreed Adan Covos the police chief of Presidio a Texas public of bordering the Chihuahuan city of Ojinaga near Big Bend National Park revealed he knew that Mexican personnel had placed cameras near the local port of entry but he d never heard of the overall Centinela system I have no idea about this he stated the Observer by phone El Paso County Sheriff Oscar Ugarte revealed he hadn t heard of it either In response to a records request the City of El Paso Police Department provided one episode review that mentions Centinela specifically its license plate reader database involving the recovery of a stolen SUV On January Maria Williams was about to leave for work when she realized her Toyota Highlander was missing Williams a career counselor at Bowie High School in South El Paso where countless students commute across the demarcation to school had left her computer in the SUV Because of the proximity of her house to a major thoroughfare that provides a straight shot to the international bridge Williams worried a thief might have already taken the carriage to Mexico After hearing from her El Paso police notified their counterparts in Chihuahua who tried to track the carriage using Centinela s license plate reader database and the Highlander s built-in GPS system according to a police statement Two days later Toyota located the Highlander using the car s internal GPS system then Chihuahua state police searched for it via surveillance cameras apprehended the driver and towed the automobile to a police auction lot Javier Martinez looks down at the Centinela tower under construction Williams afraid to pick it up herself because of the history of entanglement between organized crime and law enforcement requested that police return the SUV to her in El Paso At one point her insurance company went to Ju rez and took photos but for two months the Highlander remained in the lot When the conveyance was ultimately returned Williams noticed several things amiss Her SUV was caked in dirt Somebody had attempted to remove the radio screen messed with dials on the mirrors and taken the floor mats her laptop and the battery She now wonders if her Highlander might have been used to commit crimes Police in Chihuahua never explained her where all they tracked her SUV she noted A spokesperson for Chihuahua s Secretariat of Citizens Safety explained the agency did not know details concerning the car and outlined how to file a complaint if needed Part of Williams wishes the police hadn t determined the conveyance at all Now it s like a dirty car to me Williams explained Like somebody took something personal and just disconnected me Editor s Note This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center s AI Accountability Architecture and Under the Volcano an annual binational writing residency in Tepoztl n Morelos The post The Eyes of Chihuahua appeared first on The Texas Observer