If a new Senate Republican border security bill is passed as currently drafted, it would dramatically increase the amount of surveillance technologies used against immigrants and, in some cases, American citizens traveling to and from the United States.

The bill, known as the "Building America's Trust Act," is authored by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). It aims for a "long-term border security and interior enforcement strategy," according to its summary. However, the senators have yet to formally introduce the text of the bill.

So Ars is going to do it for them: we received an advance copy of the bill’s text from an anonymous source, and we are publishing it here before it has been formally introduced in the Senate. Ars repeatedly contacted the offices of all six senators who are listed as co-sponsors for comment—none made anyone available.

Of the seven law enforcement advocacy organizations that have already endorsed the legislation, two of them—the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition and the National Association of Police Organizations—confirmed to Ars that the text that we received is authentic. Also, the document we were given contains Senate Bill number 1757, which matches the listing on the Library of Congress website and matches versions of the Building America's Trust Act that those two organizations had received (and sent on to us) from Sen. Cornyn's staff.

According to the draft text, a slew of advanced surveillance technologies would be deployed at the border, including more use of drones (not less than 24 hours per day, five days per week), increased recording, and storage of various " biometric exit data ." The bill would also require that some "aliens" who are ordered to be removed would be subject to mandatory DNA collection , among other heightened scrutiny measures.

"Until our borders are fully secure, the current system will continue to reward people who enter our country illegally over those who follow the law," said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) in a statement issued last week. "This bill will make sure our immigration officers have the tools and resources they need to enforce our laws and secure our borders."

Brandon Judd, the head of the National Border Patrol Council, wrote in a recent letter to Sen. Cornyn that the bill serves as the "longterm, multi-layered approach to border security that this nation desperately needs."

The chairman of the Southwestern Border Sheriff's Coalition, Larry Guerra, called it a "major step in making our border safe" in his own letter.

More and more

The bill, which is hundreds of pages long, includes numerous proposed changes, including an upgrade of "forward operating bases" on the Mexican border, hiring of " not fewer than 26,370 full-time equivalent agents ," and an uptick in the number of federal judges in the southwestern United States.

Civil liberties and privacy activists are primarily concerned that the Building America's Trust Act would mark an unprecedented increase in border-area surveillance.

"This is a surveillance bill in pretty weak disguise. And it won't be limited to immigrants," Alvaro Bedoya, a law professor at Georgetown University, told Ars. "It would pave the way for more face scans of American citizens at airports. It would aggressively deploy drones at the 'border,' but [it] doesn't mention that DHS interprets its authority to operate at the 'border' to extend to any area within 100 miles of the actual legal border."

Just last month, Bedoya spoke out against a DHS expansion of facial recognition of outbound travelers at a handful of American airports.

Jake Laperruque, a lawyer with the Constitution Project, e-mailed Ars to say that the bill is a "mass surveillance expansion" that is "masquerading as border security."

"Controversial measures—like stockpiling biometric databases, using facial recognition on everyone at points of travel, and sending drones along the entire border zone—should raise alarm bells," he e-mailed.

Similarly, Neema Singh Guliani, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told Ars that the bill "includes an alarming amount of unnecessary surveillance that goes far beyond current practices."

"It proposes a host of privacy invasive technologies to track and surveil individuals in the US—including iris scans, DNA, face recognition, and drones," she continued. "It proposes this surge in surveillance with virtually no regard to privacy or the legitimate Fourth Amendment interests at stake."

Border exception

Under the "border exception" doctrine, fewer and fewer Fourth Amendment protections are applied to anyone crossing into the United States. In essence, the legal theory allows warrantless searches of persons and their belongings in ways that might otherwise be considered unjustified if they were conducted elsewhere. That notion has been used to justify electronic searches at the border in recent years, which Customs and Border Protection officials say happens only exceedingly rarely. Earlier this year, a California man told Ars about a recent episode at San Francisco International Airport in which border agents threatened to "be dicks" if he didn't unlock his iPhone.

One of the sections of the act specifically calls for the head of DHS to create a system for "iris prints and voice scans" of all immigrants. The section is not specifically limited to undocumented persons or even criminal suspects.

Adam Schwartz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that this was uncharted territory.

"We really can't stop ourselves from leaving our biometric footprints behind us," he told Ars. "We leave our DNA and fingerprints around, too. While we can change our credit card number or our passport numbers, we're stuck with our biometrics."

His colleague India McKinney is a legislative analyst with EFF who worked as a Congressional staffer for a decade. She didn't mince words after she reviewed the bill.

"It does strike me as a wish list of super xenophobic desires," she told Ars. "This is a harsh bill. There's a lot of things that we've seen pop up in other areas in one package here."