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.