It will be situated on the nation's borders, designed to prevent people from illegally entering the U.S. But please, don't call it a wall. SBInet, part of the Department of Homeland Security's Secure Border Initiative, is an integrated surveillance system that aims to curb illegal immigration without the need to construct a politically controversial physical wall.
SBInet's primary goal is to give U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) improved oversight of thousands of miles of international frontier, says Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a defense and homeland security think tank. "The idea is to look at ways that technology can enhance the operations of federal forces at the border," he says. "It's essentially to enhance the operations of the Border Patrol."
But as construction gets under way, observers wonder if technology—even the most advanced surveillance tools available—can substitute for physical barriers and vigilant Border Patrol officers.
"This has not been done before," says Goure. "What you actually have now is an experimental process."
TECHNOLOGY SMORGASBORD
Last September, Boeing beat out rivals Ericsson, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon to become SBInet's prime contractor, and it plans to leverage the expertise and capabilities of scores of subcontractors to meet the project's goals. In a published statement, the company says it will deploy an "appropriate mix and amount of systems along border areas that are between points of entry to detect those [people and vehicles] approaching the border."
Under SBInet, border enforcement will be divided into sectors, each with a local command center. The technology will be used to detect, monitor, and classify potential and actual border-crossers. When a breach is detected, the system will alert command centers to dispatch agents to the scene.
Although the government envisions SBInet eventually protecting some 6000 miles of border with both Mexico and Canada, it's kicking off this year with Project 28, a 28-mile long test deployment near Tucson, Ariz. The trial will use the most extensive arsenal of advanced surveillance tools ever deployed. Boeing and its partners will supply technologies to SBInet that fall into five basic categories:
• Ground-based and tower-mounted sensors, cameras, and radar
• Fixed and mobile telecommunications systems
• Ground-penetrating detecting systems
• Command and control center equipment
• Information database and intelligence analysis systems
LAND AND AIR
SBInet's centerpiece, and certainly its most visible component, will be a series of 98-foot tall mobile towers (Fig. 1). Each tower will be studded with surveillance devices, including motion detectors, a telephoto camera, thermal imaging, radar, and wireless access points. Although each tower will cost upward of several million dollars, the structure is relatively cheap compared to its alternatives.
"You put it up, add some self-protection measures, and call it a day," Goure says. "You don't have to worry about pilots, bad weather, downtime, and all that kind of stuff."
A key tower technology is the Manportable Surveillance and Target Acquisition Radar (MSTAR). Developed by DRS Technologies, MSTAR is designed to serve as a flexible, low-power ground-surveillance radar, providing wide-area (360°) surveillance day and night and in all weather conditions. Its primary task is to locate moving targets, automatically classifying the objects as people, tracked or wheeled vehicles, helicopters, or boats.
Another crucial tower technology is the Long-Range Reconnaissance and Observation System (LORROS) camera from Kollsman (Fig. 2). It provides longrange daytime and nighttime surveillance. The camera can be manually controlled or set up to receive input from MSTAR to scan areas where the radar detects activity. After detecting an object, the camera transmits its images to a central computer for identification.
The exact type and number of devices included on any particular tower will vary, depending on the local terrain, climate, population density, and other factors. The unmanned towers are designed to give border patrol officers unprecedented monitoring resources along borders that are currently delineated in many remote areas by nothing more than a wobbly barbed-wire fence.
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