This lengthy but insubstantial and poorly sourced article basically boils down to its lead sentence: "The Department of Homeland Security spent $20 million on a "virtual fence" to better secure 28 miles of the Arizona-Mexican border but has no way to measure its effectiveness and never consulted with the field agents who will use the system before it was installed..." No need to read further.

This piece sounds like serious reporting, but mostly just tell us what particular members of Congress had to say about the virtual fence. No one from Boeing is interviewed, and while we're told the project did not meet expectations, we're not told why. Considering the politicization around this issue, independent perspectives are warranted.

The article echoes legislators bemoaning the lack of information, lack of specifications, lack of testing; but does not do very much heavy lifting that might shed some light on the problems. How much funding was allocated to developing the suspect tracking algorithms? Boeing lobbyist expenditures are not mentioned. The more costly alternatives that were proposed are not mentioned. The broad questions of US agriculture subsidies and NAFTA exacerbating the immigration problem are not mentioned, only the problems in building the fence. Something there is, that does not like a fence.

This article provides Washington-based information. It lacks information from the site, and thus falls short of genuine journalistic content. Reporting of opinions is balanced in that both Democrats and Republicans are quoted, but reporting of facts is modest.

As a French I can understand context of the story