The Border Towers: Lessons Relearned
April 1, 2008
A year ago at this time, most media and many people became entranced by the Department of Homeland Security and Boeing’s technological solution to securing this country’s borders. The SBInet’s Project 28 long range surveillance towers were rising on lands to the south and west of Arivaca. At community meetings, Boeing and DHS told us that P28 would allow them to detect, identify and track anyone crossing the border and the towers would stretch across Arizona by the end of 2008. Technology was coming to the rescue and would effectively and efficiently relieve us of the need to deal with border issues.
Today we know that P28 is not effective as designed, though you won’t hear that from DHS Secretary Chertoff. At a February 22 press conference where DHS took full acceptance of P28 he did nothing but praise the system and said it met all DHS requirements. At a February 27 House Committee on Homeland Security hearing, Richard Stana, Director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues for the Government Accountability Office, concluded his overview of the project this way, ” P28 resulted in a product that did not fully meet user needs and will not be used as a basis for future SBInet development”. Chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Management and Oversight Christopher Carney said in a February 27 statement he had been told by DHS acting Deputy Secretary Schneider that P28 does not do what DHS expected it would.
At the House hearing, a representative for DHS said that people’s expectations got out of hand somehow, that P28 was never intended to be an operational system ready to roll out along the border. It was an “initial prototype demonstration designed to be a proof of concept”, to “demonstrate the feasibility of the SBInet solution. With problems at every level, you’d think that feasibility was emphatically not demonstrated. Instead, DHS went ahead and fully accepted the project.
The Department’s solution to the SBInet solution is to praise P28 while scrapping it and starting over with new hardware, new software, new communications links, new everything. It plans to put its new system in two locations in the Tucson sector by the end of 2008, then extend it through the Tucson, Yuma and El Paso sectors by the end of 2011. More deadlines to watch come and go.
The House Committee hearing on February 27 was titled, “Lessons Learned; The Future of the SBInet”. What lessons has DHS learned? They say they’ve learned that off the shelf components do not automatically interface with each other out of the box, that systems need to be thoroughly tested in the lab before being put in the field, that input from people on the ground is vital to designing a system for their use.
These commonsensical lessons could have been learned from experience before P28. In 2005, the DHS inspector General reported on two border surveillance programs ongoing since 1998. They produced a system that was triggered by insects, horses and weather so that BP agents didn’t bother to investigate 60 percent of sensor alerts. Of the rest, 90 percent were found to be false alarms. All at a cost of $429 million. Lesson unlearned.
What lessons can we learn from the P28 experience? Once again, we learn that we cannot expect DHS to deliver honest, accurate assessments on anything to do with the border. We learn that no level of futility will keep them from steamrolling ahead with towers and fences.
We also learn that along with outsourcing conception, design, procurement, installation, support and maintenance, DHS shipped off their oversight and management responsibilities as well. If not for the GAO and the House Committee on Homeland Security there would be no public oversight at all. And this oversight is one or two levels removed and only grudgingly gets accurate information from DHS. On February 27, Subcommittee Chairman Carney said that only recently had DHS finally informed him privately of P28’s problems and he was still disappointed that their public statements were so “disconnected from reality”.
Boeing seemingly wrote its own contract for P28. Said Chairman Carney, “In an ideal world, Boeing wouldn’t have played such a large role writing their own contract specs”. These specs did not originally include operational performance requirements for the system.
The $20.6 million that Boeing received for P28 is a small fraction of the $1.1 billion in task orders it has been awarded for SBInet projects through February 15, 2008. Some of these contracts are for fencing, Boeing is big into fencing now. Still, they received $135.9 million for mission and systems engineering, testing and evaluation before the P28 contract. They received $69 million for designing and planning the extension of SBInet even as they were missing deadlines on P28. They received $8 million for support and maintenance and $64.5 million for new software at the same time DHS announced “conditional” acceptance. SBInet is a contract mill for Boeing.
We’ve seen it in Iraq, in New Orleans and elsewhere in government: this administration’s insistence on privatizing and outsourcing government functions isn’t resulting in greater effectiveness and efficiency. It’s bringing more abuse and a lack of accountability.
The biggest lesson we can learn here is that there is no technological miracle coming to make problems on the border disappear. We are experiencing an enormous migration of people into this country being driven by global economic and political forces that overwhelm any attempts to control them through mere law enforcement. These are forces of our own making, generated by our own global economic exploitation. As a visiting professor from the Netherlands said at a border issues conference in Arivaca awhile back, if you want globally mobile capital and globally mobile markets you’re going to also get globally mobile labor. Our attempts to secure the border have been counterproductive because they don’t align with the economic and political realities that we ourselves have created. And they don’t deal with human issues from a human perspective.
For too long people have suffered and died to get into this country to do jobs that are already waiting for them. Jobs we are told no one else will do. Jobs we are told are necessary in our economy. Yet we respond to these people as if they were attacking us. We’ve created a low level war situation on the border between countries that should be allied neighbors. The lesson of 14 years of experience is that ever increasing levels of law enforcement have only led to increased violence, increased suffering and decreased civil and human rights along the border. It hasn’t diminished the number of people crossing but has increased the illegal immigrant population in this country by making it more difficult to cross back and forth.
The vast majority of people illegally crossing the border are not criminals or “terrorists”. Militarization of the border is a misguided and futile response. We need immigration and economic policy reform to address the real human issues faced by the large number of border crossers. If we can deal with immigration through humanistic policies that allow
needed people to come here and work and help create opportunities in other countries, we can dramatically reduce the number of people trying to cross the border illegally. Reasonable levels of law enforcement can deal with the remaining criminality. The threat of terrorism does not necessitate the fencing and surveiling of our entire southern and northern borders.
Of course, there are substantial interests in keeping the situation like it is. There is huge money in smuggling people across the border now. So much so that drug smugglers are getting more involved. This is increasing the violence perpetrated on migrants. As we’ve seen, there is huge money in securing the border on this side and much of our economy is fueled by exploiting migrants for substandard wages. War is an economic engine.
We’re told not to expect any significant discussion on comprehensive immigration reform until well after November’s elections. The war at home on our own border needs to be addressed as much as the war in Iraq and the economy. This is an opportunity to bring the issue before the public and make it stay there.
DHS is coming to the Arivaca Community Center for the latest in our series of community meetings on Thursday, April 10 at 6pm. Now that they own the obsolete P28 system, maybe they’ll be interested in removing the Arivaca surveillance tower, the one that can’t see south even if it could work. It’s not such a shining example of progress in securing the border anymore. We’ll see.
Copyright 2008 Peter Ragan
Comments
Got something to say?