WSJ report on "virtual fence" technology leaves a few questions

Let's take a look at that technological fence that Rudy "Mr. Security" Giuliani is so hot about. It's a big contract for Boeing, and it's now online on the Arizona border. The Wall Street Journal (sub required) investigates the installation:

The Bush administration's push for immigration reform will face a serious test in a distant corner of Arizona this weekend, as the government begins evaluating the first 28-mile section of an electronic "virtual fence" intended to seal the nation's borders.

The government is expected to take possession soon of the first set of camera towers that Boeing Co. has built along the border with Mexico. The 98-foot-tall structures are supposed to give the Homeland Security Department an unblinking eye on anyone or anything attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally.

We call it "Sauron-tech".

The test project's ability to deliver as promised could determine the fate of the immigration-reform measures now being debated in Washington. Passage of those measures depends in large part on persuading skeptical Republicans to accept the administration's assurances that it will be able to effectively police U.S. borders by the end of next year.

Please, persuade me! It would be so much nicer than the insults.

...Mr. Bush endorsed a proposal to divert $4.4 billion collected from fees and penalties toward improving border security and increasing workplace enforcement of immigration laws. Some of that money would be likely to support initiatives like Boeing's virtual fence.

Oh, so this is where the 4.4 billion goes?

For the first section of the fence, the Chicago aerospace company outfitted nine towers, spaced out along a particularly active section of border just southwest of Tucson, with video cameras and radar that can zoom in on people up to five miles away and detect automobiles as far away as 15 miles. The information will be beamed to a command center and to a fleet of specially equipped Customs and Border Patrol vehicles, alerting federal agents to attempts by drug smugglers, human traffickers or would be immigrants to sneak across the border.

"10:05 PM Hey, there's a guy sneaking across the border!"

"10:06 PM Hey, there's a guy sneaking across the border!"

"10:07 PM Hey, there's a guy sneaking across the border!"

"10:07 PM Hey, there's a guy sneaking across the border!"

"10:09 PM Hey, there's a guy sneaking across the border!"

The plan has its doubters. "Fences, virtual or otherwise, don't stop immigrants, law-enforcement agents do," says T.J. Bonner, president of the union representing working Border Patrol agents. Some agents also are concerned that deep-pocketed drug cartels will be able to develop or buy technology to defeat the system.

Si, Es Posible.

Actually, I'm not sure why such deep pockets and advanced technology would even be necessary. A guy with a ghillie suit and a .270 could probably crawl in and knock out the cameras from a hundred yards out and be gone before the patrolmen arrived. And if he failed, he or his brother could come back the next day and try again.

Now, I do think this is a very revealing quote. We've already heard from Boeing, a vast defense contractor with an interest in proving this technological fence, and now we are hearing from the Border Patrol union, who don't like either kind of fence. I'm not sure what he's worried about; if either fence is ineffective, as he says they will be, we'll still need border patrolmen to take up the slack.

This is not intended to denigrate the hard and necessary work of the border patrol. But the writers of this article--and I think the DC bureaucracy--are hearing from these two very interested parties on the issue. So, which group has a stake in building an actual fence?

In the Human Events article linked above, Rudy quotes Mel Martinez's observation that:

[Martinez]said, sure, you could put up a fence, if you want, except the only people that will put it up will be the illegal immigrants. Nobody else will be building that fence.

Well, just like Boeing and the Border Patrol's lobbyists, their lobbyists aren't the biggest fans of the fence.

Asa Hutchinson, who was border-security czar under former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, views barriers as doomed to fail, unless accompanied by an immigration overhaul that takes pressure off the borders. Without a legal option for people to enter the country, they will find ways to get in illegally, he argues.

Well, I'm not an immigration attorney, but I suspect that there is some possible way to enter the country legally. The problem is that it's easier to come in illegally.

Boeing received an initial $70 million contract last year to begin developing the system. If it works, the government envisions erecting hundreds of camera towers along the borders with Mexico and Canada. They are being touted as a cost-effective way of monitoring borders between the U.S., Mexico and Canada without stringing thousands of miles of conventional fence.

It's cheaper to build, but is it cheaper to maintain?

Nobody has more riding on the success of the project than Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who backed it in 2005 as the centerpiece of the administration's efforts to gain control of the nation's borders.

Um, nobody has more riding on it? Nobody's talking about replacing Chertoff with an illegal immigrant.

...

"We are looking for the right balance between staffing, technology and tactical infrastructure to keep adequate track of the activity along the border," says Greg Giddens, the government's executive director for the program. He said that one underlying requirement for all of the government's activities is the need for surveillance. "As soon as somebody crosses over, we want to be able to see them on camera or radar and then continue to track them."

"10:10 PM Hey, there's a guy sneaking across the border! He's heading north."

"10:12 PM Hey, there's a guy sneaking across the border! He's heading north."

"10:15 PM Hey, there's a guy sneaking across the border! He's stopping---hey, he's pointing a rifle at the tower!"

To help protect the towers against vandals, officials have set up a system of sensors that will sound an alarm if somebody gets too close to one of the structures. Each tower is also equipped with a "hailer horn," which can broadcast warnings at a volume equivalent to that of a jetliner taking off. The horns will enable agents in the main operations center to pick up a microphone and shout warnings to anybody who looks suspicious, officials say.

"HEY! PUT DOWN THAT RIFLE! PUT IT DOWN NOW!!! IT IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE TO..."(pop, tinkle) "Aw, crap, we lost visual...YOU BETTER QUIT IT! FEDERAL AGENTS WILL BE THERE IN FIFTEEN MINUTES, PAL, AND WHEN THEY..." (pop, static....)

...

Officials say information from the radar, motion sensors and long-range cameras will be beamed directly to agents' patrol vehicles, giving them the ability to respond quickly to illegal crossings in urban areas before immigrants can disappear into the local population. In remote areas, officials say they hope to be able to detect immigrants early enough to be able to intercept them when convenient.

"KKKHHHK...Um, if it's convenient, Agent Barnes, could you drive out to pylon five and look for that guy with the rifle? We can't see him, but he was there five minutes ago."

...Although most of the towers are miles from civilization, the government and Boeing have already raised hackles among the residents of the tiny desert town of Arivaca, Ariz., 12 miles north of the border. Residents say that on short notice and with little opportunity for them to object, Boeing built a tower on a hillside within sight of where most of the town's 1,500 residents live.

"When I look out my window at night, I can see the red light on top of the tower, and I know that there's a camera right beneath it that could be looking back at me," says Roger Beal, co-owner of the town's only store, the Arivaca Mercantile.

Wait'll they start in with the jetliner-volume PA system. That'll make friends.

Incidentally, one of the (irrelevant) objections to the fence is that it's ugly. But apparently these suckers are aesthetic masterpieces:

Government officials say that Boeing put the camera outside Arivaca because it was the first relatively flat terrain north of the border. Nearer to the border, the land is rife with gullies, washes and outcroppings that would allow illegal visitors to pass unnoticed. Mr. Giddens, SBI's executive director, said that enough safeguards are in place to prevent agents from abusing the cameras. "But we realize that we will have to show them by our actions," he said.

Big Brother is watching.

Okay, seriously: I don't mind the idea of these towers too much. I think it's a useful supplementary technology and--given our current threat matrix as I understand it-- probably entirely adequate for the Canadian border, where the occasional pot smuggler comes through instead of a large labor migration.

But the advantage of this system alone over a real fence alone remains unclear. Rather than actually preventing border crossings, it merely attempts to deter them. What's more, it relies on a complex, tightly-coupled system coordinating the high-tech towers, which Mexican cartels will be trying to disable (they're already setting fires to clear the way through National Forests), a command center tasked with interpreting the data from the towers and dispatching patrols to investigate apparent breaches, and then border patrolmen being available and driving out to respond to every reported crossing.

And then let's say they catch someone. They interview the person, and attempt to identify them and their citizenship status. After all, these are inland; maybe it's a hiker or a local who will be spotted and subjected to an unpleasant investigation. And then if the Border Patrol decides the person they're investigating is an illegal alien, they'll arrest and incarcerate them. Maybe after a few days they'll deport them, flying or busing them back into Mexico. Maybe there's an outstanding warrant or the suspect is a gang member, so instead they'll prosecute them. That's a lot of trouble to deal with these people whom the system detects coming over the border. So is the SDI system going to be cheaper in the long run? Overall, I doubt it.

But the costs aren't only monetary. Maybe some of these remote contacts get a little heated, and you end up with another Ramos and Compean situation. Or, worse, another Kris Eggle. Is it really preferable to build a system that increases conflict between law enforcement and suspects, rather than one that prevents the crime of crossing the border from being committed in the first place?

I predict some success on paper for this test installation; for the present, it will serve to deter illegal aliens from crossing within this eighteen-mile stretch and instead force them to drive around either end, like the Germans did around the Maginot line. If they are built all along the border, however, they will be circumvented swiftly--through collaboration, through sabotage, or just through misdirections, diversions, and false alarms.

While this technological fence is better than nothing, this report hasn't convinced me that, by itself, the SDI would be a reliable or satisfactory solution to the national security challenges presented by our southern border. As a supplement to notify law enforcement that the fence has been breached, it looks quite valuable. But I question the judgment of border security advocates who really believe this network of cameras on poles would really be sufficient to control the border.