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Headlines : Sci-TechBoeing Is Awarded Border Contract
The contract became a priority for defense companies as the Pentagon began looking at curtailing spending amid the rising costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. To make up for the slowdown, defense contractors have been focused on winning nontraditional defense work such as border security, large-scale facilities management and maritime surveillance.
“There is a large global market for border security,” Wayne Esser, Boeing’s “capture team leader” for the contract, said before the award was announced. “The winner of this is going to be well-positioned for that market.”
[Posted By Szamko]Republished from LA Times
From their Huntington Beach facility, Boeing Co. engineers crafted a plan to line the Mexican border with 1,800 towers equipped with sensors that can detect when a person steps onto American soil.
Infrared cameras will sense the body heat of possible intruders, and radars will track vehicles that may carry illegal immigrants and drugs into the United States. On Thursday, Boeing’s plan won a key contract, one that could lead to a virtual fence along 7,500 miles of the U.S.’ borders with Mexico and Canada.
Homeland Security officials said Thursday that the initial three-year contract was worth $67 million and called for Boeing to build its tower-based system along a 28-mile stretch of the border near Tucson. But analysts said the project could be expanded and total more than $2.5 billion.
Boeing beat out three of the nation’s largest defense corporations and a Swedish cellphone maker for the contract — part of a larger homeland security initiative to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the country.
When the project is completed, Boeing said, its towers would leave little of the now-porous borders undetected, creating a high-tech fence longer than the Great Wall of China.
Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.
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Posted by anthony on Tuesday, July 11th 2006
When I heard the expression “virtual fence”, it got me laughing silly.
“But analysts said that eventually the security initiative could be worth more than $8 billion as the U.S. looks to expand the project to secure the Eastern and Western coastlines.”
How could you possibly secure a coastline? Don’t people, like, go to the beach and like, live on the beach and, like, drive boats around and shit? Yea. These people are retarded.
God bless the Jasons.
When the project is completed, Boeing said, its towers would leave little of the now-porous borders undetected, creating a high-tech fence longer than the Great Wall of China.
They must know that the Great Wall of China failed to stop the ‘invaders’ it was constructed to stop?
Boeing touts their system by comparing it to the Great Wall of China, which failed. Boeing can’t even find a successful obstacle to compare theirs to for their press releases, yet their towers are supposed to protect the border? For some reason this doesn’t fill me with confidence.