Virtual Fence Fails Border Test

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor.
posted March 2, 2008 @ 8:44am PST

The Bush administration and a great many Americans had been counting on a “virtual fence” along America’s border with Mexico to dramatically reduce illegal immigration into the US. Those hopes were dashed yesterday when the Heimatschutzministerium’s spokesman Gregory L. Giddens announced, “we . . . have delayed our deployment as we work through the issues on Project 28 [the test segment of the fence]. While there is clear urgency of the mission, we also want to make sure we do this right.” Boeing’s effort appears to have been a complete failure.

The virtual fence is supposed to be a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance equipment. Project 28 is the 28 mile test area south of Tucson, Arizona. The Government Accountability Office had warned that things weren’t going right some time ago. The Washington Post observed “problems included Boeing’s use of inappropriate commercial software, designed for use by police dispatchers, to integrate data related to illicit border-crossings.” Compounding the problem, “Boeing has already been paid $20.6 million for the pilot project, and in December, the DHS [Department of Homeland Security, a/k/a Heimatschutzministerium] gave the firm another $65 million to replace the software with military-style, battle management software.” Good money after bad is the appropriate expression.

It appears, however, that Boeing acted as it did under severe political pressure from the White House. The Post also noted a “nongovernment source” [read: someone at Boeing who knows] told the paper, “the Bush administration’s push to speed the project during last year’s immigration debate led Boeing to deploy equipment without enough testing or consultation. With more time, the source said, equipment and software will be tested more carefully and integrated with input from Border Patrol agents in three remote locations. ‘Doing it this way mitigates all kinds of risk,’ said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Those running the project ‘basically took equipment, put it on towers and put it out there without any testing as such’ because of the tight deadline.”

As a result, Boeing’s software was overwhelmed by the huge amount of data from the sensors. Remote controlled cameras couldn’t lock in on targets because of the lousy speed at which the system operated. The Post cited Richard M. Stana, the GAO’s director of homeland security issues, as pointing out “Radar systems were also triggered inadvertently by rain and other environmental factors. Cameras had trouble resolving images at five kilometers when they were expected to work at twice that distance.”

This means that the project is going to be delayed by about three years, and even then, there will have to be less reliance on towers and robots, and more on physical fences. Mr. Stana has testified, “The total cost is not yet known," because the Heimatschutzministerium folks “do not yet know the type of terrain where the fencing is to be constructed, the materials to be used, or the cost to acquire the land.” Perhaps a fence isn’t the right way to go about this in the first place.