Twelve years ago I was at a public meeting in Boulevard, California. The subject was illegal immigration and the main speaker was Johnny Williams, then head of the San Diego Border Patrol Sector. I had been working with ranchers in the area trying to hook them up to the Internet to report border crossers. They said they had trouble reporting the location of border crossers and wondered why they couldn't use their GPS devices. I asked Williams if this was possible. He said it wasn't possible because the Border Patrol agents aren't trained to read maps and couldn't use the longitude / latitude coordinates. This is still true today.
Six years ago I started Border Technology, Inc. (See Web). I invested more than $300,000 creating things like ground sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles, and something we called the TONC -- or Tactical Overland Navigation Computer. TONC was designed to overcome the inability of Border Patrol agents to read maps. TONC worked like this: Whenever the U.S. Border Patrol got a report of suspected border intruders that included the general location, a radio signal would be sent to agents closest to the intruders. The agents would look at their TONC and see an arrow pointing to the location of the intruders and a number indicating distance. All the agent had to do was to go in the direction of the arrow until the distance was zero
Border Technology built six of the TONC units at a cost of $12,000 and offered them to Customs and Border Protection for a test - for free. They weren't interested.
American Border Patrol has been using high technology on the border for seven years. It operated a thermal camera from it border ranch that could spot an individual at five miles. It flew unmanned aerial vehicle and was the first to use this technology on the border. (Wednesday Senate hopeful Chris Simcox told Fox News that he thought of the idea of UAVs on the border ten years ago -- but more on that on Monday, December 14th). ABP learned where UAVs can be useful and what the limitations are, including serious FAA airspace restrictions.
Anyone truly interested in the truth about American Border Patrol can go to this Web page and spend the next few hours reading about its accomplishments.
The problem on the border is not technology; there is plenty of that available. The problem is that the government has mismanaged the border problem for decades and it does so intentionally. Most so-called border experts, and that includes the Minutemen, don't understand this. They don't understand that the U.S. Border Patrol is designed to fail. Even if they did, they wouldn't know how to go about proving it. -- (For anyone interested, the problem is defined in detail here.)
The MITRE Corporation has now been given the job of designing a system to assess the performance of the U.S. Border Patrol. Their Web site says they are:
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Twelve years ago I was at a public meeting in Boulevard, California. The subject was illegal immigration and the main speaker was Johnny Williams, then head of the San Diego Border Patrol Sector. I had been working with ranchers in the area trying to hook them up to the Internet to report border crossers. They said they had trouble reporting the location of border crossers and wondered why they couldn't use their GPS devices. I asked Williams if this was possible. He said it wasn't possible because the Border Patrol agents aren't trained to read maps and couldn't use the longitude / latitude coordinates. This is still true today.
