‘Virtual Fence’ An Expensive Boondoggle
By Michael Webster
Glenn Spencer Comments
Department of Homeland Security said 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.
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