Just in time for the holidays, a UC San Diego professor has invented the gift for the person who has nothing: a high-tech device that helps save your life while you illegally cross the US-Mexico border. Art professor and human rights activist Ricardo Dominguez calls his controversial creation "a Transborder Immigrant Tool."

Designed for crossing dangerous desert terrain, the device--a cheap Motorola cell phone outfitted with GPS technology--provides the user with basic orientation, the distance to destinations, and the location of water, all under encryption to prevent detection by border patrol agents. The phone is also loaded with short, welcoming poems, consistent with Dominguez's philosophy that "the right of safe passage is a trans-global right."

Dominguez, who developed the technology with the help of other researchers at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, has been accused of "aiding and abetting criminals." He acknowledges that making his device available constitutes an act of civil disobedience, but claims it will only save lives, not increase the number of border crossings.

Dominguez hopes to make his application available for free via the internet, and plans to distribute a large number of his Transborder Immigrant Tools in the summer of 2010, via churches and volunteer groups such as Border Angels and No Mas Muertas.

Cell Phones To Help Illegal Immigration

Cell Phones To Help Illegal Immigration

Cell Phones To Help Illegal Immigration

posted by Recovering Republican® © ™  # 2:30 PM