Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., on introducing legislation aimed at increasing national security. During his first press conference as president, Joe Biden claimed that border officials were "sending back the vast majority of the families" arriving at our southern border. Unfortunately, as every outlet that covered the issue has since reported, Biden's statement has proven false. Before he took the oath of office, then-candidate Biden was on the campaign trail promising amnesty and open borders. Now, Biden's refusal to enforce the law is allowing thousands of migrants to cross the border illegally every day, even as overworked Customs and Border Patrol agents collect, transport, and process thousands more.

One of the victims killed in last week's Tesla car crash in Texas, which police suspect to have involved the vehicle's autopilot mode, was William Varner, a 58-year-old anaesthesiologist, his employer said. In the incident on Saturday, two men were killed after their 2019 Tesla Model S, travelling at a high speed, failed to negotiate a curve and crashed into a tree, catching fire, police reports noted. According to the police, one of the victims was found in the passenger seat and the other in the back seat, while nobody was at the driving seat at the time of impact, raising doubts on the involvement of the car's autopilot mode. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Monday saying that data logs retrieved from the crashed car by the company ruled out the use of the autopilot system. "Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled ... Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have," he tweeted.

After years of promises about a physical wall stretching along the United States-Mexico border, president Donald Trump declared a state of emergency last week in an attempt to secure wall funding in spite of Congressional opposition. But physical barriers alone have always been both ineffective and expensive. And the constant debate around that singular aspect has distracted from a much more pressing issue: how the US can expand its use of technology for screening and enforcement at the border without overstepping already strained privacy rights. Border security technologies, like surveillance drones and biometric identity schemes, received funding in Congress's most recent spending bill as an alternative to Trump's physical wall. But privacy advocates have long argued that a "smart wall," often called a "smart fence," can pose real threats to human rights not just at checkpoints and processing facilities, but for anyone within the 100-mile-wide "border zone" in which US Customs and Border Protection has jurisdiction. "The way that this debate has been weaponized has really shut down a big portion of the conversation that we should be having," says Evan Greer, deputy director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future.