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Plenty of Holes Seen In a 'Virtual Fence'
Border Sensors Not Enough, Experts Say

By Spencer S. Hsu and Griff Witte
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 21, 2006; A03





The selection of Boeing Co. to erect a "virtual fence" along 6,000 miles of U.S. border marks a potential turning point in the government's long quest to stop illegal immigration, but its success hinges on overcoming obstacles that doomed past efforts, funding shortages and other problems with the country's immigration controls, according to experts and former U.S. officials.
Congress and the Department of Homeland Security must focus on overcoming technology and management problems that have derailed similar remote-sensing networks set up over the decades by the military and border agencies from Vietnam to Iraq to the southwestern United States, they said.
They also must acknowledge that as much as half of the illegal-immigration problem is driven by the hiring of people who enter the United States through official border points but use fraudulent documents or overstay visas to become part of the estimated population of 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, former immigration officials and members of Congress said.
Surveillance by the government's $2.5 billion Secure Border Initiative Network, or SBInet, "makes some sense and is part of the solution," said former Indiana congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D), vice chairman of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "It's also insufficient, I believe."
C. Stewart Verdery Jr., a former Bush administration assistant secretary for border policy, agreed that a "smart border" buildup alone is doomed to fail, given the government's track record and the labor needs of U.S. employers.
"Boeing and its subcontractors should be pushing the hardest for a comprehensive immigration solution," Verdery said.
Boeing proposes to construct a necklace of 1,800 towers equipped with cameras, sensors and links to sophisticated computers along the nation's vast frontiers with Mexico and Canada. The Department of Homeland Security is scheduled to announce Boeing as the winner of the competition today.
Boeing's plan rests heavily on adapting military technology from the battlefield to the border. The company has suggested, for instance, flying a camera-equipped, truck-mounted, 10-pound drone called the Skylark that Israeli and Australian forces have used to track suspects for as long as 90 minutes at a range of six miles.
Boeing also proposed a variety of ground-based sensors, including underground seismic sensors and tower-mounted motion and heat detectors that have been used to thwart insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Congressional backers and military experts are confident that technologies devised to detect troop movements and tank formations can be adapted for homeland security and, by extension, individual border crossers.
But scientists warn of bedeviling details, and analysts cite political pressures that have led to lavish spending on borders, technology and guards with few results.
Gervasio Prado, founder of SenTech Inc., a sensor maker that was part of two unsuccessful bid teams, said SBINet is good for his industry but is not likely to work.
"I don't think you'll make a dent really," because of the difficulty of managing information from 6,000 miles of sensors and the economic incentives for illegal migrants and their smugglers, he said. "I'd love to say that if you put thousands of sensors in that you could really solve the problem. But I think the help is going to be minimal."
Since 1995, spending on border security has increased tenfold, from $1.2 billion to $12.7 billion, and the number of Border Patrol agents has more than doubled, from 5,000 to 12,319, according to the House Appropriations Committee. Yet the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has jumped from 5 million to more than 11 million.
In addition, several experts said, tighter borders could discourage illegal immigrants already living here from attempting to leave for fear that they won't be able to reenter the country.
The Department of Homeland Security and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service spent $429 million since 1998 on video and remote surveillance on the borders. But nearly half of 489 planned cameras were never installed, 60 percent of sensor alerts are never investigated, 90 percent of the rest are false alarms, and only 1 percent overall resulted in arrests, the Homeland Security inspector general reported in December.
On April 25, the Border Patrol's first and only Predator 2 unmanned aerial vehicle crashed outside Tubac, Ariz., seven months after the $6.5 million craft began flights.
"There has been a huge amount of money poured into the border . . . but the track record of the performance of these technologies is disappointing," said Doris Meissner, former INS commissioner.
James Jay Carafano, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, noted that Congress is moving to build 700 miles of border fence, at a cost of more than $2 billion, and adding about 2,500 border agents, at a cost of about $500 million a year, with an eye on this fall's elections.
By comparison, SBINet is funded at less than $130 million next year by the House and Senate, Carafano said. "If Congress is mandating all this money to go to guards and fences," he said, "my concern is there won't be enough money to put into place SBINet."
Other priorities that could lose the competition for funding are big-ticket programs to process and return illegal immigrants, develop computer systems to verify legal workers for U.S. companies, monitor visa compliance and tighten legal ports of entry, which will cost well over $10 billion, said Meissner and Steven A. Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Boeing's record at delivering major technology is mixed. The company pointed to its success deploying baggage-screening devices to more than 400 airports in less than six months after the terrorist attacks. But the company's machines were criticized for being too large and having high false-alarm rates.
The inspector general's office has also found fault with the work of L-3 Communications, a Boeing subcontractor on SBInet. In December, investigators reported that cameras L-3 deployed for border security as part of the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System malfunctioned when exposed to severe cold or heat.
Homeland Security officials want contractors to fully deploy their equipment in four years, and Boeing has said it can do it in three.
Gregory J. Pottie, a UCLA engineering professor who specializes in sensor technology, testified to the House last week that "if we want to solve this in three years, it could cost us a fortune and we're going to make a lot of mistakes."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company