‘Tech Doesn't Just Stay at the Border’: Petra Molnar on Surveillance’s Long Reach

Petra Molnar is an anthropologist and attorney focused on human rights and migration. Molnar, who is based in Toronto, serves as the associate director of York University’s Refugee Law Lab and as a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She has worked on migrant justice causes since 2008, first assisting directly with families resettling in Canada and now as a lawyer and researcher. She is the author of The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a book published by The New Press in May exploring surveillance technology along borders across the world, including at the U.S.-Mexico divide. Molnar spoke with the Texas Observer about surveillance tech and borders as a testing ground.