The US is quietly building a digital border wall of AI-powered towers, drones and facial recognition — bad news for privacy, good business for Peter Thiel's companies.

• Federal auditors say the number of automatic surveillance towers along US borders will triple over the next several years, funded by Trump's big spending bill.
• The towers come from Anduril, a Peter Thiel-backed company that has teamed with Palantir, Oracle and SpaceX to become the new defense-contractor class.
• The towers use radar, thermal imaging and AI software that can scan cars, count passengers and read plates from far away.
• Border agents claim a 100-mile zone where normal constitutional limits do not apply — a strip that covers New York, Chicago, LA, Boston and most major coastal cities.
• All that video has to be stored somewhere, which is helping drive the data-center boom, and private contractors cannot be forced to hand over records the way government agencies can.

Outlook: Expect the tower buildout and biometric checks to keep expanding inland, with little legal pushback unless the courts take on the border-zone exemption.