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Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, who left Facebook in March, wants to build a wall... with LIDAR sensors:
Palmer Freeman Luckey was the kind of wunderkind Silicon Valley venerates. When he was just 21, he made an overnight fortune selling his start-up, a company called Oculus VR that made virtual-reality gear, to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.
But the success story took a sideways turn this year when Mr. Luckey was pressured to leave Facebook months after news spread that he had secretly donated to an organization dedicated to spreading anti-Hillary Clinton internet memes.
[...] And he has a new start-up in the works, a company that is developing surveillance technology that could be deployed on borders between countries and around military bases, according to three people familiar with the plan who asked for anonymity because it's still confidential. They said the investment fund run by Peter Thiel, a technology adviser to Mr. Trump, planned to support the effort.
In an emailed statement, Mr. Luckey confirmed that he was working on a defense-related start-up. "We are spending more than ever on defense technology, yet the pace of innovation has been slowing for decades," he wrote. "We need a new kind of defense company, one that will save taxpayer dollars while creating superior technology to keep our troops and citizens safer."
Also at BBC, CNET, Boing Boing, PCMag, and Engadget.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:23PM
The idea is a strong military response to human traffickers. If the sensors are good enough, you would detect that many people moving in a group across a stretch of the border. Single people moving across you can still respond to in the same fashion, but I doubt that they would. Not when the U.S might have a 5-10 minute response time, and it is military.
I don't think it's impossible. The kind of sensor technology I'm talking about can track individual people within a crowd. Yes, the whole are is pretty much a courtyard, and the wall is largely eliminated. There is no wall. At most there would be sidewalks, paths, railings, and more or less infrastructure to support pedestrian use.
If the system is tracking people, and it cannot identify someone, and they move outside of the courtyard before checking in, that's when personnel are dispatched to process them. Meaning, they can be nice about it. However, it would be a crime to leave this "DMZ" so to speak without being processed. I think most people will be processed just fine, perhaps even in an automated fashion for people that move back and forth often.
It's not a wall. It's a sensor grid that people and objects move across. We can design special areas like courtyards to process them efficiently, ports to process goods, and then designate other areas as do-not-pass-unless-you-want-the-Area-51 treatment. Where people currently drive across is already sufficient to process with sensors and could get an efficiency boost. My idea is to create a path of least resistance. If the checkpoints are nice and easy, law abiding citizens will use them. If the ports are quick and efficient, then businesses will not complain. At that point, you can start treating unexpected border crossings as military incursions. Which brings up something I find funny, and that is that so many people on the far right in the U.S are convinced Mexicans come in daily in hordes, while the truth is that Mexican immigration has been going the over way. America became a very difficult and toxic placed to be after the Great Depression II: The Fuckening. 10 years of great hardship has solved the immigration problem for everyone except the people that need there to be an immigration problem. You know, for reasons. My own personal belief is that those 11 million illegal immigrants that are here, are in fact Americans. It was our failure to recognize it, and if I interpret the American spirit and soul the way that I do, those people have already suffered enough exploitation and been fucked deeply to the point they really are just like every other American. Fucked :)
They absolutely have control over it. The whole idea is to also aid in proper stewardship of the environment, and to share data. Mexico and Canada both benefit from the sensor technology as their border security is more or less integrated with ours at that point. The Native American Indians have access to the sensor data, as they are a recognized sovereign territory by U.S treaty. I'm perfectly fine with them protecting their lands and using their own personnel to do it. Obviously military intercepts will not happen on their territory, but you can see their territory as one big courtyard from the Mexican/U.S government point of view.
Security is cumulative and works best in depth. Canada is fairly secure (maybe more so than the U.S), and I don't think Mexico is a 3rd world country or anything. The problems there largely stem from the U.S War on Drugs anyways. I'm comfortable with the security that they both provide, and are more worried about the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans being used to access us.
Ohhhh, this gets rid of the Constitutional Free zones too. The border is greatly reduced in size legally and the sensor data largely becomes public. If you stay 5 miles away from any border or checkpoint, you are not being scanned.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.