The Department of Homeland Security spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to build a virtual wall within the past decade.
It didn't work.
In February 2010, Boeing's in-house magazine, Boeing Frontiers, profiled the efforts of the company's work on the virtual fence, a project called SBInet (where SBI stood for "Secure Border Initiative"). Boeing was four years into its contract with the government to build the network, which involved the construction of 80-foot towers in the Arizona desert topped with sensors and cameras.
Work included placement by cranes of tower foundation “wafers,” piecing tower sections together, and hoisting microwave dishes and radar equipment to the tops of the 80-foot-high (24-meter-high) towers. Teams from across Boeing conducted integration and testing, working with the project’s Tucson field office to network components, troubleshoot software, align the system and meet requirements spelled out by Customs and Border Protection.
In fact, only a month after that, the Department of Homeland Security halted work on the SBInet project. In January 2011, it was killed entirely. About $1 billion had been spent on the project.
In the GAO's words, "about 1,300 SBInet defects had been found from March 2008 through July 2009, with the number of new defects identified during this time generally increasing faster than the number being fixed — a trend that is not indicative of a system that is maturing and ready for deployment."
Had the money spent on SBInet been spent instead on building a wall on the border, it could have covered 73 miles, another GAO report noted. After the project was expanded from the original 28 miles, SBInet covered 53 miles in total.
The problems weren't only administrative. As The Washington Post reported when the project was tabled in 2010, SBInet was the third attempt to solve the border problem with technology. "Between 1998 and 2005," our Spencer Hsu wrote, the government "spent $429 million on earlier surveillance initiatives that were so unreliable that only 1 percent of alarms led to arrests."
An executive with a firm that specializes in long-range object detection explained the problems with the plan to SecurityInfoWatch in 2010. "One of the challenges is that while ground-based radar is great for wide-open, level areas like airport tarmacs, it's not right for that border environment, where you might have tall bushes and uneven terrain," SightLogix's John Romanowich said. "The system was also creating way too many nuisance alarms."
When CBS's "60 Minutes" looked at progress on SBInet in early 2010, it found the same problem.
"You know, when Boeing first got the contract back in 2006, they made promises that they would be able to apprehend, at least detect and apprehend 95 percent, plus or minus five percent, of all the incursions," [the GAO's Richard] Stana told [CBS News' Steve] Kroft.
Asked if that has happened, Stana told Kroft, "No. They promised camera ranges of 10 miles. They promised radar ranges without clutter."
But that didn't happen either, according to Stana.
SightLogix had been approached by a company bidding on the SBInet project, but Romanowich turned them away. "We can't do it; we're bound by the laws of physics," Romanowich said, "so you'll have to find some other company that isn't bound by the laws of physics."
The death of SBInet didn't kill interest in technological protections along the border, as the Center for Investigative Reporting noted in 2011. Other companies that made products similar to components of SBInet got new contracts even as SBInet was failing.
It's easy to see why. Border protection that doesn't require flooding the region with agents (though that's one tactic that President Obama endorsed) and which avoids the ecological and logistical problems of a wall sounds just about perfect. In practice, though, it's proven tricky to turn into reality, even within Obama's own administration.
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