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Homeland Security Dumping Its Highly Praised “virtual Fence”
Author: michael Webster  | Posted: 23-04-2008 | Comments: 0 | Views: 13 | Rating: (117)  (?) 
Department of Homeland Security said today they will replace its highly valued “virtual fence” on the U.S. Mexican border starting with the Arizona-Mexico section. The new replacement system will include new towers, radars, cameras and computer software, scrapping the brand-new $20 million system because it doesn’t work sufficiently, officials said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff officially accepted the supposedly completed fence from The Boeing Company just two months ago.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have acknowledged that the pilot program designed to detect potential illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and terrorist crossing the U.S.-Mexico border doesn’t work and is not worth keeping or to even try to continue to tweak it.
Chertoff accepted the program on Feb. 22 after Boeing claimed they had apparently resolved software glitches. But within a week, the Government Accountability Office told Congress it “did not fully meet user needs and the project’s design will not be used as the basis for future developments”.
The expensive and unusable system was made up of nine towers along a 28-mile (45-kilometer) section of border straddling the border crossing at Sasabe, southwest of Tucson.
DHS has ordered about 20 new towers, some holding just communications gear, others featuring new cameras or new radars, now at an undetermined cost.
The 'Virtual Fence' along Ariz.-Mexico Border had already been delayed for more than three Years.
The department also is spending an estimated $45 million or more to have a customized computer program written so the collected data is more quickly and efficiently fed to Border Patrol agents.
Even though the system has been operating it hasn't come close to meeting the Border Patrol's goals, said Kelly Good, deputy director of the Secure Border Initiative program office in Washington.
"Probably not to the level that Border Patrol agents on the ground thought that they were going to get. So it didn't meet their expectations."
Agents began using the virtual fence last December, and the towers have resulted in more than 3,000 detentions since, said Greg Giddens, executive director of the SBI program office in Washington.
But that's just a fraction of the several hundred illegal immigrants believed to cross through the Sasabe corridor daily.
The towers, equipped with radars, optical and thermal imaging cameras and other sensors, are supposed to show nearby Border Patrol agents a complete picture of the border on the laptop computers in their patrol trucks. But the system's less-than-optimal results have been heavily criticized by politicians and others and therefore are being replaced.
The department also is spending at least $45 million to have a customized computer program written so the collected data is more quickly and efficiently fed to Border Patrol agents.
Although the system is operating today, it hasn't come close to meeting the Border Patrol's goals, said Kelly Good, deputy director of the Secure Border Initiative program office in Washington.
"Probably not to the level that Border Patrol agents on the ground thought that they were going to get. So it didn't meet their expectations."
Agents began using the virtual fence last December, and the towers have resulted in more than 3,000 detentions since, said Greg Giddens, executive director of the SBI program office in Washington.
But that's just a fraction of the several hundred illegal immigrants believed to cross through the Sasabe corridor daily.
The towers, equipped with radars, optical and thermal imaging cameras and other sensors, are supposed to show nearby Border Patrol agents a complete picture of the border on the laptop computers in their patrol trucks. But the system's less-than-optimal results have been heavily criticized by politicians and others.
The virtual fence is part of a national plan to use physical barriers and high-tech detection capabilities to secure the Mexican border — and ultimately the Canadian boundary too.
Boeing used off-the-shelf software and other equipment initially to get the system up and running quickly.
"Boeing has delivered a system that the Border Patrol currently is operating 24 hours a day," Boeing spokeswoman Deborah Bosick said. She declined further immediate comment.
The pilot project was not intended to be the final, state-of-the-art system for catching illegal immigrants, Giddens said.
The problems with the system involved not just the computer software but the radar and satellite links used to send the information. All will be replaced with different types.
The Government has no estimate as to when the new system will be up and fully operating nor the total costs of the revised project.
Sources:
U.S. Homeland Security
U.S. Border Patrol
Boeing Company
Secure Border Initiative (SBI)
U.S. Customs
Arizona Daily Star
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