Securing Our Borders
Securing Our Borders
The United States' borders with Canada and Mexico cover approximately 7,000 miles. In addition, the country has over 95,000 miles of exposed shoreline. The biggest challenge in securing those borders is the complexity and scale of the problem. In addition to the authorized ports of entry the borders encompass a challenging variety of terrain, climates, and remoteness that pose significant challenges to the Border Patrol agents who are tasked with guarding these areas and detecting illegal intrusions. As a result, for years, despite the energetic work of Federal officials and the assistance of state, local and tribal partners, the U.S. has not enjoyed full control of its borders. On a typical day in Fiscal Year 2005, US Customs and Border Patrol Agents made 62 arrests at ports of entry and apprehended over 3,250 suspects along the open border for illegal entry.
However, in addition to protecting the Homeland and safeguarding our economy, the Department of Homeland Security must also facilitate legitimate trade and travel. More than 1 million people and several million tons of cargo cross those borders every day. Therefore, the country's constant challenge is to allow legal travelers and legitimate cargo in while denying access to illegal entrants and suspicious cargo.
In order to successfully monitor the thousands of miles of open terrain that comprise these borders, Customs and Border Patrol agents need innovative ways to solve these complex problems. Adding more agents is not a viable solution. Those agents must be armed with the latest technologies they need to succeed. These will include the latest generation of high-tech cameras, sensors, radiation detectors, biometric information and unmanned aerial vehicles to help apprehend criminal or terrorist elements attempting to enter the U.S.
Now more than ever, the Department of Homeland Security is calling on the private sector to provide these innovative technology solutions. Through the recently awarded Secure Border Initiative ("SBI"), and other contracts, a virtual fence is being built and deployed along our borders. At the core of SBI are 1,800 sensor towers, 80-200 feet tall, depending upon the terrain, equipped with radar, cameras and other sensors that can spot and home in on suspicious movements. Once the radar detects a suspicious movement or behavior it will call upon a smart camera to interrogate the object. Intelligent video will be used to classify the object as friend or foe. In this way, needless alarms will not be generated by animals, wind blown debris or other objects that might otherwise trigger a radar alarm and cause an agent to be dispatched. By weeding out false alarms, intelligent video will reduce guard costs and expenses while providing the highest levels of detection.
The Secure Border Initiative also calls for a new way of thinking about the border. The border is not merely a physical frontier and therefore securing it requires attention to processes that begin far outside our borders, occur at the borders, and extend to all regions of the U.S. This requires all governmental agencies to maximize their levels of cooperation, utilize the experience that they build up on a case by case basis and encourage communication between all relevant stakeholders. Hence SBI is moving away from the tradition of "need to know" intelligence and data access to a "need to share" model that encourages enforcement officers to access, share and use video intelligence to better secure the borders and Homeland. Because intelligent video collects information and tags it in a manner that makes it fully searchable within its archives, it fosters enhanced communication between local field offices and headquarters in a way that isolated events can now be interpreted as possible predictors of patterns of activity of larger import and significance.
Added control and security of the border will lead to increased public confidence, enhanced public safety and protection of the U.S. economy. By using the latest technologies Border Patrol agents will be able to deter would-be violators by changing their perceptions of what they will encounter along the border and the consequences of such encounters.
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