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Five years after<\/span> Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian assured<\/a> employees that the company was \u201cnot working on any projects associated with immigration enforcement at the southern border,\u201d federal contract documents reviewed by The Intercept show that the tech giant is at the center of project to upgrade the so-called virtual wall.<\/p>\n U.S. Customs and Border Protection is planning to modernize older video surveillance towers in Arizona<\/a> that provide the agency an unblinking view of the border. A key part of the effort is adding machine-learning capabilities to CBP cameras, allowing the agency to automatically detect humans and vehicles as they approach the border without continuous monitoring by humans. CBP is purchasing computer vision powers from two vendors, IBM and Equitus. Google, the documents show, will play a critical role stitching those services together by operating a central repository for video surveillance data.<\/p>\n The work is focused on older towers purchased from Israeli military defense contractor Elbit<\/a>. In all, the document notes \u201c50 towers with up to 100 cameras across 6 sites in the Tucson Sector\u201d will be upgraded with machine learning capabilities.<\/p>\n IBM will provide its Maximo Visual Inspection software, a tool the company generally markets for industrial quality control inspections \u2014 not tracking humans. Equitus is offering its Video Sentinel, a more traditional video surveillance analytics program explicitly marketed for border surveillance that, according to a promotional YouTube video<\/a>, recently taken offline, featuring a company executive, can detect\u00a0\u201cpeople walking caravan style \u2026 some of them are carrying backpacks and being identified as mules.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWithin 60 days from the start of the project, real life video from the southern border is available to train and create AI\/ML models to be used by the Equitus Video Sentinel.\u201d<\/p>\n Tying together these machine learning surveillance tools is Google, which the document reveals is supplying CBP with a cloud computing platform known as MAGE: the ModulAr Google Cloud Platform Environment. Based on the document, Google is providing a hub for video surveillance data and will directly host the Equitus AI analysis tool. It appears every camera in CBP\u2019s Tucson Sector will pipe data into Google servers: \u201cThis project will focus initially on 100 simultaneous video streams from the data source for processing,\u201d the document reads, and \u201cthe resulting metadata and keyframes will be sent to CBP\u2019s Google Cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n The diagram also notes that one of Google\u2019s chief rivals, Amazon Web Services, provides CBP with unspecified cloud computing services.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n During President Trump\u2019s<\/span> first term, border surveillance and immigration enforcement work carried a stigma<\/a> in the tech sector<\/a> it has in part shed today.<\/p>\n In 2020, The Intercept revealed<\/a> a document produced by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT, that stated Google Cloud services would be used in conjunction with AI-augmented surveillance towers manufactured by defense contractor Anduril: \u201cGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP) will be utilized for doing innovation projects for C1\u2019s INVNT team like next generation IoT, NLP (Natural Language Processing), Language Translation and Andril [sic] image camera and any other future looking project for CBP. The GCP has unique product features which will help to execute on the mission needs.\u201d (A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that \u201cAndril\u201d was a misspelling of Anduril.)<\/p>\n After the Anduril work came to light, Google\u2019s cloud computing chief Thomas quickly attempted damage control, directly contradicting the Department of Homeland Security and telling concerned employees that the company was not involved in immigration enforcement on the Mexican border, CNBC reported at the time<\/a>. \u201cWe have spoken directly with Customs and Border Patrol and they have confirmed that they are not testing our products for those purposes,\u201d Kurian added.<\/p>\n If this was true then, it\u2019s certainly not now; references to Google services appear repeatedly throughout the tower modernization project document. A technical diagram showing how video data flows between various CBP servers shows Google\u2019s MAGE literally in the middle.<\/p>\n Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment about its use of Google Cloud.<\/p>\n Google did not respond to specific questions about the project, nor address Kurian\u2019s prior denial.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n