Pub-sourcing border control

One of the creepiest uses of “crowdsourcing” — a buzzword du jour denoting the practice of asking an undefined large group of people to perform a task that was traditionally performed by a dedicated in-house employee — has by far been the monitoring of the Texas-Mexico border. The mechanism is quite simple: Anyone can sign ...

One of the creepiest uses of "crowdsourcing" -- a buzzword du jour denoting the practice of asking an undefined large group of people to perform a task that was traditionally performed by a dedicated in-house employee -- has by far been the monitoring of the Texas-Mexico border.

One of the creepiest uses of “crowdsourcing” — a buzzword du jour denoting the practice of asking an undefined large group of people to perform a task that was traditionally performed by a dedicated in-house employee — has by far been the monitoring of the Texas-Mexico border.

The mechanism is quite simple: Anyone can sign up to monitor live footage from a handful of the planned 200 cameras being installed across the 1,254-mile frontier (at a hefty price tag of $2 million) — and send an email with tips to the authorities if they see anything suspicious. The program was on hold for a while, but was relaunched in November. As Jeff Howe (who coined the term “crowdsourcing” in the first place) explained in an earlier blog post, the most interesting thing about the experiment from a technology perspective is whether the community of users would be large enough to justify the huge $2 million investment (with more than 100,000 users signing up for the service, it doesn’t seem so effective to me).

The only consolation is that at least the program is open for anyone outside of the United States to join. The Guardian has even recently reported on a bunch of Australian pub-goers who are glued to their monitors watching the border at a local bar. They’ve been getting so carried away by their duties that they even send celebratory emails to authorities back in Texas.

Photo by DDB/Flickr

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

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