Author: admin

I appear, along with a number of fantastic people, in this great documentary by Brave New Films.

“The same companies that profiteered from the wars in Iraq are profiteering from the militarization of our own border.”

Another appearance on my favorite podcast to discuss the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates’ immigration policies, as well as the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental reasons for migration.

Follow the below URL to listen to the show.

http://www.theradiodispatch.com/show/radio-dispatch-todd-miller-on-the-presidential-candidates-immigration-platforms/

The GuardBot – a rolling, rubber sphere with surveillance cameras attached like small, domed ears – was first meant to explore Mars. Now, it’s showing off its ability to locate undocumented people on the blue carpet at events such as the Border Security Expo, the United States’ premier border policing conference.

At the primary debate this month, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump declared that he would build a wall on the Mexico-US border. However, Homeland Security has already built 700 miles of walls and barriers along the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border over the past couple of decades. Now, the nation’s boundary-builders have gone beyond walls even to the space-age high tech, like the GuardBot. Indeed, the company’s junior engineer Philippe Vibien told Cronkite News that he envisioned 20 or 30 of these rolling balls working in a swarm around the desert borderlands.

In this tech-climate, where US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the largest federal US law enforcement agency and the burgeoning security industry get in bed with each other, their automated border patrol offspring are surely around the corner. These companies are feeding an increasingly privatized market in an “unprecedented boom period.”

Read the rest at Truthout.

“Crisscrossing the borders of our nation, Miller exposes in Border Patrol Nation, the underpinnings of the ever-expanding Homeland Security apparatus that is creating a surveillance state in both the U.S. and abroad.” http://vimeo.com/126197117

I coauthored this piece with Alex Devoid.

April 24, at the Defense, National Security, and Climate Change Symposium in Washington, D.C., Brigadier General Stephen Cheney stepped up to the podium to discuss “conflict and climate change.” Although Cheney is CEO of the American Security Project think tank, he identifies first as a retired Marine who likes to talk about “war fighting.” That’s fitting for a gathering that revolved around the “war on climate change”—a phrase used by journalist Cyril Mychalejko to describe the tendency to fit the world’s coming climatological upheavals into a “national security framework.”

Denialism still holds some sway in Congress, with seven GOP senators expressing outrage in May that FEMA asked states to plan for climate change, but among the military and defense technology elites gathered at the symposium, no time was wasted on debating the science. Instead, the Obama administration’s warning in February that the warming of the planet is “an urgent and growing threat to our national security” set the agenda.

Read the rest here where it was originally published at In These Times:

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18046/a-hawks-eye-view-of-climate-change

A radio interview discussing Border Patrol Nation on Mind Over Matters/KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle in April.

My appearance on the great podcast Radio Dispatch:
“Todd Miller joins us to discuss the Israeli border security company helping to up-armor the border between the US and Mexico, the US government has begun classifying virtually every element of Afghan reconstruction, and listener mail with Molly from the past.”

http://www.theradiodispatch.com/show/radio-dispatch-todd-miller-on-private-companies-militarizing-usmexico-border/

My appearance on The Real News Network:

“For years now, the Mexican-American border has been a place of experimentation, where United States military, security, and technology corporations have tested and refined many of their products in the effort to control immigration. In the past year, however, that market has opened up to foreign security companies, who are procuring new contracts from the U.S. government…”

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13133

I coauthored this piece with Gabriel Schivone.

It was October 2012. Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was explaining his country’s border policing strategies. In his PowerPoint presentation, a photo of the enclosure wall that isolates the Gaza Strip from Israel clicked onscreen. “We have learned lots from Gaza,” he told the audience. “It’s a great laboratory.”

Elkabetz was speaking at a border technology conference and fair surrounded by a dazzling display of technology — the components of his boundary-building lab. There were surveillance balloons with high-powered cameras floating over a desert-camouflaged armored vehicle made by Lockheed Martin. There were seismic sensor systems used to detect the movement of people and other wonders of the modern border-policing world. Around Elkabetz, you could see vivid examples of where the future of such policing was heading, as imagined not by a dystopian science fiction writer but by some of the top corporate techno-innovators on the planet.

Swimming in a sea of border security, the brigadier general was, however, not surrounded by the Mediterranean but by a parched West Texas landscape. He was in El Paso, a 10-minute walk from the wall that separates the United States from Mexico.

Just a few more minutes on foot and Elkabetz could have watched green-striped U.S. Border Patrol vehicles inching along the trickling Rio Grande in front of Ciudad Juarez, one of Mexico’s largest cities filled with U.S. factories and the dead of that country’s drug wars. The Border Patrol agents whom the general might have spotted were then being up-armored with a lethal combination of surveillance technologies, military hardware, assault rifles, helicopters, and drones. This once-peaceful place was being transformed into what Timothy Dunn, in his book The Militarization of the U.S. Mexico Border, terms a state of “low-intensity warfare.”

Read the rest here on TomDispatch, along with Tom Engelhardt’s intro to the piece: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175947/tomgram%3A_miller_and_schivone%2C_bringing_the_battlefield_to_the_border

An excerpt from “Border Patrol Nation,” Chapter 7: “America’s Back Yard.”

The first thing that I want to do when I arrive in Dajabón, one of the Dominican Republic’s border towns with Haiti, is find a good place to eat. After all, it is a five-hour bus ride from the capital of Santo Domingo, through a lush, mountainous landscape with many small towns, all with baseball fields on their edges. As soon as I get off the bus it’s obvious that I’m in borderlands again. There is the roar of a cumbersome green helicopter that will circle the town for hours. A mere three blocks away is Haiti, a nation where more than nine million people earn less than a dollar per day. Between the spot where I step off the bus and Haiti is the Massacre River, representing the border that divides the island of Hispaniola into two countries.

Read the rest here on Mint Press News.