America's Already Building a Wall on the Mexican Border, It's Just Digital Matt Novak - Gizmodo
go to original September 3, 2015

2005 photo showing a Southern California monitoring station (AP/Lenny Ignelzi)

Donald Trump wants to build a wall along the US-Mexico border. But whether you agree with his plan or not, America’s already doing it. The wall just happens to be digital.

The idea for a brick-and-mortar wall with Mexico has gone through fluctuating degrees of popularity over the past few decades. But whenever the plan for a “real” wall loses steam, the so-called digital wall — a vast and comprehensive network of motion sensors and video cameras — becomes much more popular.

There’s already high-tech surveillance of this kind on the border, but as NextGov reports, the US Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday that it will be focusing more resources on the digital wall in Arizona. Along with the Border Patrol, they will be putting $US145 million into the construction of six new towers and high-tech surveillance equipment that will dot the landscape between them.

The digital wall replaces the $US1 billion so-called Secure Border Initiative Network, conceived in 2005, which would have blanketed the entire southwest border with radar-equipped, camera-mounted towers. DHS abandoned the program in 2011, after realising contract specifications did not jive with the reality of the harsh southwest terrain. Cameras malfunctioned and radars in densely populated areas proved futile.

Read the rest at Gizmodo

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