a half a billion dollar high tech failure by homeland security that has a 99% failure rate! Original Article Sensors along border wasting agents' time Less than 1% of alerts lead to captures Mike Madden Republic Washington Bureau Jan. 21, 2006 12:00 AM WASHINGTON - U.S. Border Patrol agents are forced to waste time responding to alerts from sensors tripped by animals and passing trains instead of the illegal border crossers and drug smugglers they are designed to catch, a government audit says. Less than 1 percent of the alerts lead to arrests, but officials maintain the technology still has value. "Despite claims that (the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System) prevents (Office of Border Patrol) agents from having to respond to false alarms, the analysis indicates that OBP agents are spending many hours investigating legitimate activities, primarily because sensors cannot differentiate between illegal activity and legitimate events," according to the report by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General. Millions spent on system The government has spent more than $429 million since 1997 on technology systems designed to help secure the border, and Homeland Security officials are preparing to solicit bids from private contractors sometime this year for a new $2.5 billion system. A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, did not return a call for comment on the audit. In a response attached to the audit, the agency's acting commissioner, Deborah Spero, said the Bush administration agreed with the report's recommendation to find ways to measure how the technology helps agents. But officials objected to its "negative" tone. Critics outside government and several internal reports have raised questions about how the money for technology has been spent and whether all the equipment works the way it is supposed to. A study last year found incomplete installation, shoddy equipment, poor management and inflated costs for installing cameras along the Southwestern border. Patrol investigation In the audit, released in mid-December, investigators looked at every alert generated by remote sensors, cameras and observation by people during five 24-hour periods last April and May in three Border Patrol sectors in the Southwest: Tucson, and El Paso and Laredo, Texas, and three along the Canadian border. The sensors, which are hidden or buried along major smuggling routes near the border, detect seismic vibrations triggered when something passes by. They cost $3,500 each. Remote cameras, which can scan the area near sensors, aren't set up to automatically look at a sensor that sets off an alert, so Border Patrol technicians must point cameras at them manually. Comparing sensors On the Mexican border, sensors sounded 29,710 alerts, one every 44 seconds, on average. Agents couldn't even determine what caused the alerts 62 percent of the time, either because technicians didn't pass information on to a field agent fast enough, because no agent was available to investigate it, or because it took agents too long to reach the sensor. With sensors deployed in remote locations in the desert, response times can vary depending on how far away the nearest Border Patrol station is. Of the incidents agents investigated, 90 percent were caused by something other than illegal activity, like a passing car, a train or an animal. Only 252 incidents, less than 1 percent of all the sensor alerts, led agents to apprehend people crossing the border illegally. Auditors said it was possible some of the alerts agents couldn't investigate were triggered by illegal activity. But, they said, that was unlikely because of the high rate of false alarms in cases with known causes. The results on the Canadian border weren't much better, with false alarms generating 92 percent of the 2,077 alerts by sensors. Border cameras at work In the Southwest, cameras performed better, with 57 percent of the 155 incidents captured on video in the Southwest leading to apprehensions, and only 1 percent turning out to be a false alarm. Likewise, of the 780 observations by people, whether vehicle stops, aerial observation, Border Patrol surveillance or citizen tips, 49 percent led to apprehensions, though 40 percent were false alarms. Homeland Security officials say the technology helps secure the border by pointing agents to trouble spots, letting the Border Patrol cover more ground with fewer people. But the report said more agents and technicians should be added to respond to computerized alerts. Investigators also found that there wasn't any way to judge whether the sensors make the Border Patrol more effective and recommended that officials develop standards to evaluate the system. "Sensors have always been just one arrow in the quiver, one tool that the Border Patrol has," said Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., whose Tucson district runs along the border. "It's still a tool that helps. If it actually hinders, we better look fairly seriously at it." Border Patrol agents get used to chasing down false leads as part of the job, said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing about 10,000 agents in the field. Bonner said he once was sent to investigate alerts triggered by a sensor placed on a railroad track in the desert, which contracted at night when temperatures plunged, rattling the sensor as if something had moved nearby. The technology can be useful but shouldn't be relied on too heavily, he said. "You know that something's moving around there. It could be a cow, it could be a coyote, not the two-legged variety, or it could be people," Bonner said. "We're not Luddites, by any stretch of the imagination, but by the same token we recognize that it takes a human being to catch a human being." 'No silver bullet' Security technology experts said no piece of equipment, on its own, will stop illegal immigration. "You can't just throw technology at a problem," said James Carafano, senior fellow for national security and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. "There is no silver bullet, there is no one single thing that you're going to do on the border in terms of technology that is going to solve your problems." Reach the reporter at mmadden@gns.gannett.com or (202)906-8123.