This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die? When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the US in April 2024, the day before…
Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part of Dying on Camera, a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Times of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past…
MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the “virtual wall” of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border. We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for…
When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses. As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed…
She had only walked for a couple of hours, and already she was lost. It was early afternoon on Sept. 14, 2025, when 30-year-old Graciela Gómez Hernández crossed the border from the eastern edge of Tijuana into Southern California, sending voice messages to her mother and sister as she walked. This story is part of Dying…
ScrollEd turns textbooks into a scrollable, Instagram-like feed with video, audio, and quizzes. The Palo Alto startup, founded by student co-founders (and spouses) Utsav Gupta and Rebecca Neff, pitches at TechCrunch Disrupt.