The last we heard of DHS's "Project 28" plan to build a 28-mile stretch of virtual fencing along the US / Mexico border in Arizona, it had been postponed until at least 2011 because the towers didn't quite work. Well, it appears that on further review, the system is even more of a total failure, and it's being scrapped entirely: according to Kelly Good, deputy director of the administration's Secure Border Initiative program, Project 28 "hasn't come close" to meeting Border Patrol's goals. Tests of the virtual fence didn't lead to nearly as many arrests as designers had hoped, and the lag from sensor detection to transmission of an image to border agents was apparently a big part of the problem. Boeing, which won the $860M contract to build the system, is now being told to replace it all with upgraded towers, but there's no word on when that's happening or what it'll cost taxpayers on top of the $20M already paid out. We're expecting trillion-dollar chain-link bids to come rolling in any day now.

It looks like the U.S. Border Patrol's fleet of aerial drones will soon be getting a bit of land-based backup, with the first of a series of Boeing-built mobile sensor towers recently passing its first key test. According to the company, the 98-foot tall towers will each be loaded up with a full array of gear, including cameras, radar, wireless data access points, and a tower security system, among other communications and computer equipment, with each tower boasting a line of sight range of about 12 miles. Don't expect the border to become one big hotspot anytime soon, however, with just nine towers currently on track for deployment along the Southwest border in June and no apparent word on further expansion just yet. In any event, we're guessing they wouldn't take too kindly to anyone trying to leech on their bandwidth.

[Via The Register]

Texas Governor Rick Perry has just announced a plan to leverage the eyeballs of millions of voyeuristic web surfers into a de facto army of unpaid border guards, by allowing the general public to watch live streams from video cameras trained on the Mexican border and call a toll-free number to report illegal crossings. Although the governor did not go into details on how many cameras would be installed nor how far apart they would be positioned, he did estimate the cost of the program at around five million dollars, which would buy almost 3,000 high-def HDR-HC3 camcorders even if Sony decided not to give the state a bulk discount. Leaving the whole immigration issue aside, what really stands out about this project is that it could possibly set a precedent for inner-city officials to open up their surveillance cameras to John Q. Public  -- so instead of some authoritarian regime monitoring every citizen's activities, "Big Brother" will actually become all of us.

[Via BBC News]