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, two House subcommittees learned today. Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala
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.
