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US Scraps Virtual Fence Along Mexican Border
Pickens writes "The Arizona Republic reports that the federal government has officially cancelled its multibillion-dollar plan to build a virtual fence along the border with Mexico as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano disclosed in a congressional briefing that the program known as SBInet was costing too much and achieving too little. 'SBInet cannot meet its original objective of providing a single, integrated border-security technology solution,' says Napolitano. Boeing was hired in 2006 to develop the system under a three-year federal contract with cost projections for full build-out as high as $8 billion but efforts were plagued by delays, glitches, budget increases and congressional criticism. Napolitano has ordered Customs and Border Protection to launch a more modest and geographically tailored effort using SBInet funds and existing technology such as mobile-surveillance systems, unmanned aircraft, thermal-imaging devices and remote-video surveillance with proven elements of SBInet including stationary radar and infrared-sensor towers. SBInet cost nearly $1 billion for development along 53 miles of Arizona border."
n/t
This is what you get for taking ideas from a comedy movie based on a bunch of TV skits.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I wonder if, given the rash of cancellations and scalebacks lately, this isn't about the programs so much as it is about Boeing?
Or is Boeing just that big and pervasive?
Maybe it would be good at counting illegals crossing but it does nothing to stop them.
When hundreds of thousands (literally) cross every year, we don't need sensors on the border. Just stand there and some are sure to cross your path.
Come on in.
Get free food, and my wallet is over there for you to raid.
Take it all, and leave behind a mess in my home, paleskin stranger.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm curious as to why the project failed. They claim to have a much cheaper plan that they're going to try now; why didn't they try that in the first place? Is it going to be substantially less effective? So ineffective that it's not worth spending money on that, either?
The article mentions "glitches and delays". Is that because Boeing is just bad at its job? Or is it a fundamentally difficult thing?
I'm not asking about the political implications, which are substantial. I just want to know: America is supposed to be good at tech, but this is hardly the first time that a Big Government Project has failed. Is there a lesson we can learn here? Or is it endemic to the fact that the US government does things on a scale no other operation in the world does?
It seems pretty clear that nobody in Washington is interested in controlling illegal immigration, so why do we continue to waste money on it? If you're going to build a fence, build a real fence that actually keeps people out.
Can't we at least get a better class of pork-barrel projects to funnel money to defense contractors? I'd appreciate getting at least some value for the money.
I think i have an obsession for technical solutions. I can't walk by any new gadget without thinking "That could solve this problem" and ending up buying most of them. But in the end even i learned, that for social problems, you need social solutions. If you try to solve social problems with technology, you will always fail. It's also true the other way round: you cannot solve technological problems with social measures. Unless one accepts that, failures like this fence will happen again and again.
CU, Martin
This makes Reagan's Star Wars Defense Initiative (SDI(Net)) look like a good deal !!
Whatever happened to that Cuckoo guy ?? What was his name ?? The guy who laid the cuckoo egg SDI Net trap on his machine for the commie spy ??
When I think "securing borders" I tend to think of it more than just keeping out illegal immigrants, I tend to think of having every inch of our border secured as a national security issue. So with that in mind, I'd prefer something like massive walls with deep trenches, guard watch towers every now and then and so on. Illegal immigration concerns aside I am amazed that we don't take border security more seriously. We certainly have spent tons more money on more ridiculous ideas (elective wars, etc).
How much would it cost to station 1 guard every mile for 53 miles with a radio? Certainly not 1 billion dollars. Especially if they hire some illegals for the job.
Although I'd expand that a bit more. It's not just about hiring the politicians who got you the money (get $1 billion for our company and we'll hire you at $1 million a year for every year of that contract or subsequent contracts).
It's also about hiring the FAMILIES of those politicians. Look around and you'll see an amazing number of wives and children of those politicians SOMEHOW working for the very corporations that benefit from the government contracts that those politicians push through based on fear of the (illegals | terrorists | pedophiles).
Mandatory 1 year federal prison sentence for each illegal alien employed by anyone for any reason.
That one sentence would solve the problem immediately and better than any fence or wall.
Got Code?
A billion dollars? What if I drove to my local Fry's Electronis, and bought IP cams, all-weather cable, cheap routers and switches, and asked you to watch the border from the screen you're on now?
Oh, and maybe we could have 5,000 iPads or iPhones available for pickup at Apple stores so Border Patrol agents could watch too.
I could load the stuff in my pickup, you could set up the WAN, and I'm guessing we'd still have $990 million dollars left to buy up some little-used, suddenly available high tech IR and radar detector form Government surplus...
Maybe it takes an X-Prize.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
Most Illegals come to the US for jobs and/or social services. Deny them that, and they will stop coming. This would be *far* less expensive, and more effective. That would take care of about 70% of the problem. We would still need to patrol for the real bad guys. No system is perfect, but this would make a lot of sense.
1. Make e-verify mandatory.
2. Have IDs that are very difficult, if not impossible, to forge. Our money is very difficult to counterfeit, why not do the same with IDs?
3. No ETINs for illegals.
4. No sweeping amnesty, ever. No rewards for breaking our law.
5. As I understand it, in Mexico, you spend, at least, two years in prison for entering the country illegally. That is for the first offense. The US should adopt, and enforce, similar laws.
6. No more anchor-baby loophole.
7. Prison time for anybody who knowing hires an illegal.
See how easy that is? Fixing the illegal immigration problem is not that hard. The problem is corrupt US politicians who do not want to fix the problem, but the corporate owners don't want the problem fixed.
It's the same as any other prohibition.. To increase the profit margins by creating contraband, to control a market, to create scarcity of resources. Here it's for human trafficking. The slave trade. It's time to rip the fences down and free the slaves.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The technology part of SBInet, the "Berlin Wall Solution" was always in doubt. However, the bigger part was the level of extortion fees demanded by Neopolitano from Boeing and subcontractors.
The back-up plan is now the "Ho Chi Minh Trail Solution" to keep the guard towers, outfitted with 50 caliber machine gun, morter and lots of China Lakes, with distributed motion-trackers and foot-traps.
This plan too will come under budget pressures.
Given the level of hatred of the Federal Officials for US citizens, they will opt for the "DMZ Solution" and use anti-personel mines including cluster mines along a 6-mile wide swath from the Pacific Ocean in California to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. Since the Federal Officials, including President Obama are duty bound to ignore US Laws and treaties about using mines to kill ones own civilians, they will seek to turn the US into a North Korean-like State whose civilians exist soley for sexual ammusement of the President.
--308
And, you know, actually give out jail time, instead of just the occasional fine they'll deduct from their profits. So those jobs for illegals dry up, and they stop trying to come in.
I know, I know. That's crazy talk. Why would either party go after rich and powerful people, when they can just spend the sheeple's hard-earned cash? Otherwise they might have to spend it on health care, education, roads, or something else that might actually be useful.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
The Mexican Constitution guarantees people free transit across the country, including migrating.
As long as you identify yourself the government can held you against your will inside the country unless they know you have a legal procedure pending that demands you are rooted.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What we need is some kind of wall to keep out non-citizens. I think the Chinese invented the idea 2500 years ago, when they wanted to stop immigrants from the north, so let's go negotiate with them to build it for us.
The East Germans have more modern experience. They were mostly successful in keeping those dirty Capitalists out with their wall. Yeah, that's the ticket, the Berlin Wall was built to keep the Mexicans, errr, the West Germans *out*. Yeah.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Let's do the math.
The US Mexico border is 1,969 miles. Stationing on average 4 guards per mile gives us 7,876 guards. 4 shifts to give us 24x7x365 coverage gives us 31,504 guards.
31,504 guards would give us 4 guards per mile of US Mexico border, 24x7x365.
Assume generously that each guard costs us $150,000 / yr for pay, benefits, equipment, logistics, training, and administration.
BOTTOM LINE: For a price of 4.75 billion USD per year we can have 1 well paid, well equipped guard stationed on average every 1/4 mile along the entire 1,969 miles of the US Mexico border.
No, that doesn't include facilities and infrastructure to support the operation, but building guard towers, barracks, and administrative buildings is one of the few things that the government excels at.
Like government make-work programs? This is among the best I can think of in terms of jobs created per $$$ because it puts real people on the ground doing what real people do best. Rather than giving billions to some contractor who will employ 1,000 people, we are CREATING 31,504 NEW JOBS, and they are good hard working outdoor jobs, in the service of our nation, that most Americans would be proud to do and to pay for.
Personally I would like to see open borders and see us eliminate the uneconomical policies that drive us to fight the free flow of people and ideas, but that's not going to happen, so let's secure the damn thing.
Who is going to pay and organize that massive administrative burden?
You can't resolve social issues with your brain dead pseudo solutions.
The issue at hand is economical disparity: USians can pay cheap labour with their pocket change, and neither party really wants to abandon such fruitful economic interchange. It is only right wing posturing from people that actually don't appreciate the realities of economical interchange in the border that get infuriated about illegal immigration.
As long as this economic disparity is the prevailing situation, Mexicans and others will continue to risk their lives to try to improve themselves.
People are already dying in the crossing to the US, people already know that attempting to acquire the devalued US dream can be fatal, if you think your "solutions" will deter people with such determination I think your grasp of reality has been distorted by your cushioned existence.
Or you are wilfully ignorant.
Your pick.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
and see everyone driving their bmw and audi suv's living in million dollar homes
you paid for it
haha... fences
make it one hundred yards wide with shards of broken glass beneath
Much much cheaper. Pocket the difference and move on.
Fucking racist!
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but seriously. Fuck off and die.
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
Speaking of fence....
Making A Mockery Of Border Security In 18 Seconds
http://mariopiperni.com/immigration/making-a-mockery-of-border-security-in-18-seconds.php
Fucking racist!
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but seriously. Fuck off and die.
What's wrong with fucking Mexicans? My wife is Hispanic so I'm fucking a Mexican all the time. Well, she is a natural born US Citizen of US Citizen parents. I guess the proper way of saying it is that I'm fucking an American with Mexican ancestors.
Still, if you have a problem with fucking Mexicans, wouldn't that make YOU the racist?
(Smile)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
They could cut cost by hiring mexicans to build it
...the same thing:
"Immigration made this country great, but there's too much of it now."
And people will be still saying it many generations after we've gone.
Assume we station a guard every 500 feet along this 53 mile section. That would require 560 guards.
At 60000 per year per guard, that is 33.6 million per year.
A billion dollars would provide around 30 years of coverage.
Ooh, contentious, making it harder to buy guns in the USA. I can't see that going down too favourably. After all, with the latest highly publicised shooting the general agreement was the one thing that shouldn't be done was to tighten gun laws, in fact lots of people were saying the solution was *more* guns.
Actually I think lots of folk in the USA believe the answer to most things is more guns. So good luck with your idea, as sensible as it sounds.
I've also heard that the Mexican crime groups buy most of their guns in the USA and ship them over the border.
Perhaps a simpler solution would be to search vehicles leaving the USA and arrest folk who can't provide good reasons for transporting the guns, or provide ownership papers? You're not allowed to take guns on international flights without strict paperwork for example.
That's not racist. :-/
AC is just showing a propensity for a certain type of porn....
Seriously, though....I read this story in my local paper yesterday, I think. This is the first time I've ever seen /. behind the local paper for news like this.
Of course, it could have been posted on /. three days ago, and this is just a dupe....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
This is why I hate the illegal immigration debate do much. The real solution is clear...no jobs for illegals, no illegals. We could just start stepping on the toes of, for example, the meat industry, who have used illegal labor to turn what was a great factory job in the 50s into something suited only for those who don't want all their fingers. Instead, we get to have this same retarded politically motivated, racism inflaming shit storm in every election, perpetuated by assholes who have no intention of solving a problem that conjures so much useful anger...don't even get me started.
Well, it sounds like most of the border activity between USA and Mexico is about keeping people travelling from South to North.
I'd make a guess that with a long land border, one of the main places that illegal goods of any description get smuggled into Mexico will be via the USA. So that would be my guess. From the USA.
Of course Mexico has land borders with Guatemala and Belize, so its likely illegal goods including guns come from there as well.
That's a new one. What the hell is cyberware?
"delays, glitches, budget increases and congressional criticism"
I think that description of Boeing was cribbed from its 2006 annual report, so really, the government has nothing to cry "foul" on here.
Of coarse all that would really mean is immigrants would have to bribe guards to get across. If there's 30,000 guards there are bound to be ones that can be bribed. The only thing that will reduce illegal immigration is for the economic situation in Mexico to get better, or for America to remove the immigration quotas.
There is an historical context for building PHYSICAL (not virtual BS) walls that protect one territory from another. Honestly, I would be for copying the engineering plans that the israelis used to build their wall in the west bank. Use those plans to build one just like it across the mexican border.. ALL of it and then implement the plan that was suggested by another user for 31,000 guards every 1/4 mi along the wall with machine gun nests, snipers, electronic sensors, AND the wall set back enough to have a mine field. Further, I'd have underground microphones or seismomoters that measure for vibrations. If someone is detected digging underground then we go out, drill a hole in the ground down to where the tunnel is and drop some C4 in and be done with it. I would not play games with this. The great wall of china worked great for a while and for a time so did Hadrian's Wall in England during the roman empire. As for those already here? If they have been here a while and have been well behaved, have a job, etc then give them work visas and a chance at citizenship if they keep a clean criminal record for 11 years. There is no way we are going to deport 15-30 million people back across the border who are here illegally.
If it weren't for all of the drug wars, I'm sure the US would have invaded Mexico at some point to "spread democracy" over the corrupted Mexican government.
It'll never happen.
Actually, I think the mexican drug wars makes invading Mexico much more tempting, not less. It provides specific enemies that are easy to hate by both local and foreign standards (and provide legitimate threats to both).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Now that the project's canceled, can we get a refund? Or do we end up with a cardboard box of expensive, custom junk?
@ arth1
It is unfortunate that you got your misinformation from the mass media about the source of weapons used in the Mexican drug war, most of that misinformation comes from the anti-gun campaigns who spread it through our mass media networks and which then are repeated by the politicians. The weapons used in the drug war are military type weapons that are fully-automatic rifles and carbines along with some grenades and grenade launcher attachments. These weapons are smuggled into Mexico from other Latin American countries left over after their civil wars or sold by corrupt government officials, from overseas by gun dealers from Asia, Middle East, or Eastern Europe, and captured or taken from willing and unwilling Mexican authorities themselves. A small amount of the weapons do come from the United States because it is the largest producer of modern weapons but very few if any weapons come from the ordinary citizens themselves due to the restrictions and sheer prices that I outline below.
Source: LMGTFY - Mexican Drug War Gun Seizure
National Firearms Act (NFA)
In the United States the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934, amended in 1968, and updated in 1986 controls the purchase and ownership of grenades (aka destructive devices), sound suppressors and parts (aka silencers), short-barreled rifles and shotguns (aka SBRs), fully-automatic guns (aka machine guns). There is a prohibition in effect since May 19, 1986 that prevents the possession and purchase of fully-automatic rifles and carbines (aka "machine guns") by non-government entities (i.e. ordinary citizens) so any machine guns owned by ordinary citizens are usually old guns manufactured and imported before then. There are State laws that also govern the ownership of such weapons that must be followed but most of states in the union do not put any restrictions on the right of ordinary citizens to possess such firearms.
Source: Bureau of Alcohol, Tabaco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) - National Firearms Act (NFA)
How To Purchase a Machine Gun, Silencer, or Short-Barreled Rifle/Shotgun Legally!
The NFA allows for the purchase and possession of such devices by ordinary citizens by the completion of ATF Form 1 (5320.1) and the payment of a $200 fee for a tax stamp (a fee that has not changed since 1934!). However, the completion line 13. Law Enforcement Certification on the form requires the signature of the Chief Law Enforcement Officer that is neigh impossible in many urban or even rural locations, but that can be bypassed by the creation of a Living Trust and assigning the NFA regulated weapon to the Trust and making yourself a trustee and giving yourself the power to possess and use the weapon on behalf of the Trust that can be accomplished for as little as $100 online or a bit more if done by an actual lawyer.
So it is possible for an ordinary citizen to purchase such a weapon but this requires a little bit of paperwork, fingerprinting, a $200 fee for the tax stamp, and $100 or more for the creation of a Trust.
Source:
ATF Form 1 (5320.1) - Application to Make and Register a Firearm,
ATF Form 4 (5320.4) - Application for Tax paid Transfer and Registration of Firearm
Expensive Prices for Pre-1986 Machine Guns - $6K, $13K, $18K
The 1986 restriction on machine guns prevents the sale of modern manufactured machine guns so the prices on pre-1986 guns follow economic market scarcity rules since no more can be made available and their prices are highly inflated due to this restriction well above the actual value of the firearm. The most desirab
Anybody else old enough to remember the "electronic fence" between North Vietnam and the south? The popular name at the time was "The McNamara Line". However, those of us who were there called it a lot of other things. Worked about as well as other more ancient "walls" like the Great Wall, the Maginot Line and dozens of others throughout history. Walls, whether made of steel and concrete or bits and bytes have never really worked. Like the man said you can not solve all social problems with technology.
It's obvious the US does not intend to stop illegal immigrants form Mexico, it's just a show to buy votes and hand juicy gobs of taxpayer money to friends. It would be profitable and easy to just fine companies employing illegal immigrants until it was cheaper to hire Americans. It seems this isn't acceptable because some of those companies would just move to Mexico/India/China. Any other method that might actually work has similar problems. But the "I'll spend massive amounts of tax payer dollars on obviously ineffective solutions" seems to work really, really well on America voter if you phrase it right.
I bet you could buy a hell of a lot of landmines for what we had planned on spending on this thing. If we're going to be the bad guys (and lets face it, securing the southern US border in any way that will be even remotely effective is going to make us look like really bad people) then we might as well just crank this up to 11 and do about a quarter-mile wide strip of mine fields on the US side. Kill ten or fifteen thousand of them in the first three months and this will come to a screeching halt in no time.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
US big business interests are dead set against this because they love cheap illegal labor that they can exploit and use to keep the wages of everyone down. This is why there are blue collar Spanish speaking communities all over the US. The unions were shut down in areas like meat packing and construction, and the illegals moved in. Instant cheap disposable workers you can kill, maim and fire at will with no repercussions.
Immigrant communities are clearly against it because they have high levels of resident aliens, both documented and undocumented. The don't trust the government no matter what their immigration status. If you pay any attention to right wing rhetoric about immigration, you'd be scared too. Lot of Republicans are are talking about ending birthright citizenship, and just like the Arizona law would love to ship anyone they think "looks illegal" out of the country without due process.
Civil liberty groups are against this because it would, among other things, require a national ID card, or some equivalent. Sadly, we are effectively way past that point with the current information gathering capabilities already in place. We have all the bad privacy implications of national ID without any of the transparency or oversight. If you doubt this, see how hard it is for someone to get off the DHS automatic search list.
So a feasible solution exists, but nobody wants it.
Why is Snark Required?
You can make a simpler presentation of this concept by simply calling it a 10-fold expansion of the 1991 Border Patrol ($300 million budget for 3,000 agents: http://archive.gao.gov/t2pbat6/147284.pdf) to 30,000 and $3 billion.
Part of the problem with this idea - which is generally feasible and affordable - is the ambivalence about locking down the border by people who actually live there. The "patrol" the entire border idea requires building a patrol road and infrastructure where there along the entire border much of which is currently wilderness. The border ended up where it is partly because of the nearly impassable terrain much of it runs through. Through many areas it will be impossible to patrol directly on the border and an interception line will have to be drawn in the interior where some-to-many U.S. citizens will need to traverse the line daily. The line will have to run through the property of numerous people, who generally will not like the idea.
The high-tech invisible border idea was an effort to do a technological end run around these problems.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
It should have been a moat filled with radioactive acid, alligators, paranoia, and sharks with lasers on their heads!
... the money it would take to build this thing is enough to improve the quality of life in Mexico enough that they wouldn't be crossing the border in droves anymore.
There is a winding road
Across the shifting sands
And room for everyone
Living in the promiseland
- w nelson
The Chinese built a wall 400 years ago. Have y0u seen it? Surely with modern technology we could at least equal it. By itself it wouldn't stop the traffic, but throw a group of armed guards every 100 yards with regular patrols on both sides, and you have something that will stop illegal immigrants from even bothering to make the trip to the border.
Once you've stopped the immigrants from trying, you can get serious about the drug and weapons traffickers. Shooting an immigrant is bad. Shooting a drug or weapon smuggler is a different matter. We need to secure the border from all three - illegal immigrants, drugs, and weapons.
Yes, it will be expensive, but it will be well worth it, both for the U.S. and for Mexico.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Let's get some perspective. The US-Mexico land border is about 3200km long. $8 billion amounts to $2.5 million per metre of border. You don't need no stinking virtual border, at that price they could get something on the scale of a concrete dam, footed 10-20m below grade, running the whole length. At the purchase scale of billions, you can get some extremely price competitive sensing gear. The problem here is not that the technological solution is wrong; it's that Boeing is absolutely unfit to provide cost-effective, down-to-earth solutions to certain real-life problems where they face no competition. If they priced their jets according to the same pricing model, a 747 would be costing $2B. They are on cloud nine, but worse -- whoever signs the bills is mentally in even worse shape.
I've done some conservative back-of-the-envelope calculations, and assuming that land and easements are free, for just under $1B you could have some pretty nice tech deployed to cover entire US-Mexico border with state of the art SAR, NIR and VIS imaging, with delayed imagery available also online to the public (how's that for transparency, huh?). Another $1B would comfortably cover operations and maintenance for a decade. But the whole system has to be properly engineered, you can't have it running on grandstanding and buzzwords. The Boeing division responsible for that project has clearly shown a total ineptness to do anything much at all.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Could do a lot for education or health care in our country (as in the US). Instead we favor handing it to a defensive contractor with almost zero accountability. Yep, this makes perfect sense. I can see how this will help our national budget problems.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The Israeli security fence - which was highly successful, cost $2 million per kilometer or $3.2 million per mile (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/fence.html). So we could have had 300 miles or real fence. The total border is 1969 miles but 889 miles of this is the Rio Grande so the cost here would not be the same.
U.S. citizens are not going down to the local Cabella's and buying fully automatic weapons.
Let's see...you are a Mexican drug King Pin with millions of dollars at your disposal. To acquire arms you:
a) Recruit thousands of U.S. citizens to buy semi-automatic weapons, smuggle them to Mexico and then convert them to fully automatic.
b) Buy them on the international weapons market.
If you choose A then you ARE the racist because you are saying the Mexicans are fucking stupid.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Turn the boarder into an arcade shooter. Remote controlled vehicles with guns mounted on top, players could login over the internet and score points for shooting people. Of course the gamers would pay fees to play and that combined with what would otherwise be spent on boarder patrol can go towards the upkeep of the machines.
If the technical approach is not feasible then send human bounty hunters out there. The US has enough psychos that you could pay them for every human head they bring in from the dessert. Plus, it means they are killing boarder runners instead of citizens so the community is also safer.
Fine the hell out of the "patriotic" corporations like Wal-Mart that hire illegals. $10,000 per worker per day is a good start.
because it puts real people on the ground doing what real people do best.
And that would be "watching helplessly as 100 people bum-rush you, with the nearest help over 300 yards away"?
to the military-industrial complex. How many of the 60 million or so uninsured Americans could have been provided with coverage for that money? I'm going to guess pretty close to all of them several times over. And this is just one program. If you'd have just let the Bush tax cuts for the extraordinarily wealthy expire, then you'd be in even better shape.
Personally, I gave up on America long ago. The country is a writeoff at this point, there's nothing left worth saving.
Sorry, didn't log in. The bum-rush comment is mine.
There's an easy-to-implement solution (or four) for this problem which have been tried and done successfully throughout history (assuming the idea is to keep foreign invaders out and/or encourage illegal and likely disloyal foreign nationals already in your country to leave):
* An armed wall with bastions. I suspect the cost would be comparable if you were to have a sane human/machine monitor ratio (hint: monitoring does nothing if there is no physical deterrent worth being concerned about)
* No social sympathy (legally and culturally) for the 'condition'. Allowing the motivated ones to come here only dillutes their own home country's strength of survival. Real, actual efforts to prevent them from working here.
* Go in and shoot the bastards who are ruining the fun in their home country, and take it over as a corporate holding stock, of sorts (hey, the US gets accused of much worse, every time a Republican is in office).
* Allow the people in those border states to legally defend themselves. The bandits who break in, steal, etc. along the border (who are often called 'immigrants') are often treated by LE as victims, whereas the property owners are acted upon harshly if they do anything to protect their livelihood.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
One of the previous stories on this subject had a good summary on why it failed. I will quote it here since I haven't seen the original poster around this time.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1586102&cid=31519434
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by Degrees (220395)
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60 Minutes did a story on this system a few months ago. As best I recollect:
1) The initial plan was vague. If you don't have an actual plan, then you won't ever have to call call the project done. This is good for Boeing, bad for the people paying the bills.
2) They finally decided that the plan would be that computers and cameras should surveil the area between towers, and, alert the people running the dispatch center of suspicious activity. "Suspicious activity" = people in the area. No person would be walking in these areas unless they were trying to cross the border illegally.
3) Boeing designed and delivered the initial system. THEN sat down the dispatch people at the consoles. Who promptly said it sucked and was worthless. You heard that right: Boeing did NOT bother to bring in the users who would use the system during the design phase. Also, it was here that the 'discovery' was made that the optics and cameras were WAY more expensive than Boeing originally said (because a web-cam is one thing, and camera that can resolve a clear picture at two miles is another). Of course, better optics means (a lot) more data (which the networks couldn't handle), larger storage requirements for the DVR, etc.
4) Re-work time.
5) Finally the trial tests. Oops. The heat seeking portion doesn't work in the heat of a desert. The radar kept triggering on wind-blown bushes and the occasional Rocket J. Squirrel. The radar didn't work for people sized targets in the rain. If you are a group of bad guys and see that that the camera is swiveling toward you, freeze for a bit (drop to your hands and knees and pretend to be the authorized Bullwinkle J. Moose). The camera will move on. The electronics equipment couldn't handle the heat. The electronics equipment couldn't handle the dust. The dust clogged gear was on the wrong end of very tall / difficult to climb towers.
6) In-truck computers. The Border Patrol was supposed to chase down people being guided by laptops hooked back to base. Except it is essentially impossible to drive around in the (extremely bumpy) desert AND work a computer at the same time.
Did I mention that a single World-War One style trench subverts the whole thing?
Nine towers and 28 miles in, the problems seem insurmountable. Boeing keeps saying they could deliver a system that works though. Just throw gobs more billion at it.... It's a 2,000 mile border.
Prosp long and liver.
Well, America is a large country. What about being able to accommodate more immigrants? Most Americans are very happy to say that theirs is a country of immigrants, why trying to revert that? Just find a way for those Mexicans that would rather be Americans to be useful. Heck, maybe America can recover some of the industries that went to China for cheap labor. More made-in-USA stuff would be really cool to have. And all that cultural mix could only be enriching to both groups. Instead of being afraid of that immigration, America could benefit from it as a whole. Those Mexican immigrants would be better citizens if they feel more welcome. These people are willing to work a lot, to send their children to am
Radar and IR controlled automatic machine guns spaced 500 yards will lower the bill a lot.
Israel does it cheaper - lets copy them!.
Fine companies. Nah. Just say no tax deductions for next 5 years, and real jail time for complicit employers.
That way every illegal you catch costs you $100K instead of most of them costing you nothing because they work and pay for their own food and lodging.
Lets not forget these are PEOPLE we are talking about MOST of which want to have a BETTER life and are willing to work to achieve it. Most of the Mexicans I have met in Alabama are hard working and industrious. I have friends that actually PREFER to hire them because they work hard, don't gripe, and don't show up drunk.
Civil liberty groups are against this because it would, among other things, require a national ID card
Not really. Birth certificates are good enough. Yes, they can be forged, but they can also be checked against state and hospital records. What's needed is just something to motivate employers to actually check. A law imposing stiff penalties on employers of undocumented workers would accomplish that, as long as there's a good chance of getting caught. Another law offering illegal aliens a green card for turning in their boss would nearly ensure that employers would be caught.
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Let's do the math.
The US Mexico border is 1,969 miles. Stationing on average 4 guards per mile gives us 7,876 guards. 4 shifts to give us 24x7x365 coverage gives us 31,504 guards.
31,504 guards would give us 4 guards per mile of US Mexico border, 24x7x365.
Assume generously that each guard costs us $150,000 / yr for pay, benefits, equipment, logistics, training, and administration.
BOTTOM LINE: For a price of 4.75 billion USD per year we can have 1 well paid, well equipped guard stationed on average every 1/4 mile along the entire 1,969 miles of the US Mexico border.
You're on the right track, but your numbers are a little low. One guard per 1/4 mile is too far apart for any kind of mutual support, and in many places too far apart to prevent people from easily slipping through the gaps.
To make it work, you need to add fences with sensors. Your 31,000 guards would be sufficient to walk the fences and check for gaps, check alarms, etc., and then you'd need another force of guards, probably another 16,000, set up as alert response teams (ARTs), mounted in trucks.
If I were given the job of designing this, based on what I learned about physical security while manning similar perimeters in the military, I'd put up guard towers every 1/2 mile, with sensor-monitoring stations and spotlights. The guard in the tower would generally use his eyeballs. He'd have a roving buddy, probably mounted on an ATV, to check sensor alerts and get a ground view of "their" half-mile of fence.
The ARTs would be eight-man teams, posted one team per four-mile stretch. They should move from time to time so the intruders can't predict their location. In the event of detection of a crossing in force, too large for a single ART to handle, ARTs from nearby sectors could be called in and there should also be a helicopter-based quick response force, possibly with heavy weapons if the coyotes take all this as a challenge.
All of the above is kind of an average. In areas where the terrain is flat, wildlife is sparse (wildlife causes a lot of false alarms on the fence sensors) and crossing intensity is low, the resources can be spaced a little more widely. In other areas more resources will have to be applied.
Also, you'd need a few teams with ground-penetrating radar equipment who periodically cover the whole length checking for tunnels.
My guess is that all of this would cost around $4B to build, plus an ongoing cost of about $6B per year for people, maintenance and equipment.
Oh, and it still wouldn't be anywhere close to 100% effective.
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Since the primary function of government is protection the citizenry's primary asset -- their territory -- it seems to me that $8 billion out of $4000 billion isn't too much for the citizenry to demand in return for their taxes.
Seastead this.
No, but it doesn't have to be. To evade something like this would take more money and effort than a minimum wage job picking produce or mowing lawns is worth.
No, but it doesn't have to be. To evade something like this would take more money and effort than a minimum wage job picking produce or mowing lawns is worth.
More money and effort than one (less than) minimum wage job is worth... but what about a chunk of each of several hundred such jobs? Coyotes make their money on volume, just like pretty much any other smuggler.
Also, the drug traffickers move a lot of stuff over the border, and they are highly motivated to find a way to get it across. And they're heavily armed, and well-equipped.
Against either threat you don't want to have guards all by themselves, 1/4 mile from the nearest buddy. Against both, it'd just be a good way to get your border patrol agents killed. Given the number of people in Mexico who want to get into the US, and given how badly they want to do it, you need something more like what I described.
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Seriously, Boeing and the others are constantly being paid huge amounts of money to start projects and fail on them. This one must be the most successful boeing contract in years... this time it seems like they didn't even have to do any work. The bureaucrats just pushed the papers around and had meetings with the politicians who they sponsor instead.
So, I'd like to see some government committee put together to :
a) Find out how much money was spent on the planning phase of this project.
b) Find out if Boeing every actually intended to complete the contract or if they knew from the start that it was a flop.
c) Find out how much Boeing profited from marketing the contract. Maybe not Boeing specifically, but the share holding decision makers.
d) Find out how much Boeing will profit from this project's failure after the fact. I'm not sure how they'd do it, but a failure like this would probably be brushed under the rug if there wasn't a clear method of profiting from it. For example, they can tell shareholders what a great success it was because they collected X% of the fees without ever having to actually produce anything.
For a Billion dollars a year you could have a fence of humans with guns every six feet for 53 miles and pay them $21,440 to just stand there.
Extend that distance to 50 yds (easy rifle range, moderate pistol range) between humans and you get over half a million dollars per person-year. You offer to pay $100k/yr to sit in a lawn chair with binoculars and defend our border, I bet lots of people would take you up on it. It'd spark local business, too. Think of it as a 53 mile, 1866 person breakfast/lunch/dinner cart goldmine.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.