β€˜Virtual' Fence a Virtual Bust

Overreaching, lack of project oversight cited

Is Homeland Security's "virtual" border fence a virtual bust?

After spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, the government is now rethinking the scope of the $6.7 billion project, which has shown little in the way of reliable results.

Launched nearly five years ago, the virtual fence's concept was a nearly 2,000-mile system of cameras, radar and ground sensors that would be used to detect illegal border crossers from Border Field State Park near Imperial Beach all the way to Texas. In practice, though, the big dreams have given way to the reality of technological and human limitations, and the project's hardware and software have been plagued with bugs.

"You can make it work well in a lab once -- or in a few places -- but to do it at such a massive scale for continuous use is indeed an extremely challenging research issue," said Professor Mohan Trivedi, the director of UCSD's Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory. "So my gut feeling is that people got very enthusiastic. Everybody wants to solve problems and help communities.

"But in that enthusiasm, they did not really figure out what was the 'jump' that you had to make from the laboratory to the real world," ," Trivedi said in an on-campus interview Thursday.

Trivedi and his research colleagues designed Eagle Eyes, a video surveillance system for a Texas border city's police department. Eagle Eyes became a success story whose scale is dwarfed by the magnitude of Homeland Security's virtual fence.

"[The virtual fence] seemed to us to be an absolute boondoggle," said Pedro Rios, a human rights activist with the San Diego office of the American Friends Service Committee. "There is an enormous amount of money and resources being used -- yet this year we have less people crossing and more people dying in the desert."

Rios sees the project as a venture born of national security rhetoric and lobbyists for government contractors -- Boeing being the "prime" on this project: "There are a lot of vested interests [seeking to secure] a huge amount of grants for controlling the border."

Now there's talk in Washington of scaling the "fence" back to a few segments if not scrapping it altogether -- savings for taxpayers, but troubling for science.

"It would be unfortunate if this particular experience in some way stops the research progress, as well as the eventual potential," Trivedi said. "Because there is no doubt in my mind that sensor-based systems have a lot to offer."

Advocates of aggressive immigration enforcement cite a lack of official oversight in the project's failure to deliver results.

The Border Patrol is waiting to test the virtual fencing along a 23-mile segment in Arizona.

Boeing officials suggest the government needs to refine its expectations.
 

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