At my age, I should really know better. It was late when I got home, but I wanted an update on that poor Asian Yale student, so when I got home I turned on The Jerry Springer Network which pretty much goes under the call letters CNN these days. There, on the AC*360 segment “Keeping Them Honest”, I got to witness the left hand of al-Qaeda in all its glory.

Two people with absolutely no idea what security costs or what national security really is yacking on about a pair of border crossings in Montana which were lightly used, but both getting $33 million in upgrades as part of the stimulus. Not only did they name the towns and show the sites, they even publicly stated that the crossings were closed in the evening. The camera shots showed there was obviously no eye-in-the-sky camera on a pole providing 360 degree surveillance and no significant barricades stopping someone from driving around the location at night.

Thanks guys. You really know how to do Bin Laden’s job for him. Should we name the next terrorist attack to occur on U.S. soil after you? It seems only fitting.

Apparently these two guys don’t watch news reports from any other network either. If they had, they would have known that it took Canada a while to start tightening its entry requirements and most intelligence communities suspect a large pool of sleeper cells is sitting in Canada where border crossing into the U.S. is much easier. God knows it would be tough for them to get across the Mexican border now. The odds of them getting mowed down by the drug dealers thinking their human trafficing business was being infringed upon are quite high. For several months I’ve actually been wondering how the various government agencies were going to spin it in the press when a terrorist cell stupid enough to try crossing that border did get mowed down my people not in uniform. In truth, I’ve been pondering how come someone hasn’t manufactured evidence for drug lord consumption showing that the white supremacists/vigilantes/Minute Men/whatever-they-are-called-in-the-press-this-week slipping across the border offing their troops. If even half of the news reports are correct about those boys spoiling for a shooting war, all it is going to take is for the first drug dealer to open fire on them and the world ammo supply will drop considerably. I’m actually finding it hard to believe it hasn’t happened already. As Adolf Hitler showed the world, no matter how big, advanced, and battle hardened your army is, a war on two fronts with natural barriers will grind it down.

I was too stunned for words when I watched this segment. I didn’t know if I was more stunned that a full tactical unit from Homeland Security wasn’t coming in and confiscating the video, or that the Jerry Springer Network had been this desperate for ratings. Maybe the two guys doing the report thought that if Robert D. Novak and the Washington Post could blatantly breach national security without receiving death sentences that they had no fear of prosecution either.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

Since neither of these guys understand anything about the cost of security upgrades, let me ’splain a few things to them.

1. National Security is only as strong as its weakest point. This is especially true when we are talking about border crossings.

2. Getting reliable high speed Internet to a remote location isn’t cheap.

While there may very well be only 5 vehicles per day crossing at one of those points, it only takes one van full of fertilizer getting through and meeting another van with barrels of diesel fuel in the back to create something like Oklahoma City (Yes, that particular bombing had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, but you can all remember seeing the pictures of the damage from about that much homemade explosive.)

To the guys who have apparently always lived in huge cities and complained about having to drive over 5 hours to get to the border crossing, let me throw some realities out for you. Trenching nothing more than regular phone cable costs about $8K per mile. Dial up isn’t good enough when you want a 360 degree camera system feeding live high-res photos back to some central Homeland Security location where a massive computer system with complex facial recognition software can scan and identify detainees in a matter of seconds, at most 1 minute. That is the required response time. Your agents can bobble around for at best 3 minutes over at a terminal or walking around with a camera, but you have to try hitting a 1 minute window for transmit+process+response.

Don’t even think you can do this with the lower cost satellite Internet service providers. I had a Satellite provider for years. I finally got rid of them and went with Verizon Wireless. Regular retail satellite service fizzes out when it gets cloudy. It doesn’t have to be raining or storming, just heavy clouds. Anyone who has ever had a satellite ISP knows this. You don’t really want to have security on all but cloudy days, do you? There is a bandwidth problem with retail satellite ISP service. While they could probably tweak a few things for government accounts, they can’t get around current physical limitations without new equipment in orbit.

Maybe they could get a wireless company to build cell towers out there, but I’m guessing they would want the feds to pick up the tab on that. We all saw the video, there’s nothing around. Wireless service is also susceptible to jambing. It is, after all, a very low powered radio. All you need is a transmitter with more power.

That leaves us with trenching a cable. In this day and age, I would hope that they bust for a fiber optic cable big enough to provide phone and TV service to all of the communities along the route. It’s not that I want someone free loading on my tax dollars, just that copper eventually rots and glass doesn’t. You should od things right the first time. 5*70*8000 = 2,800,000 just for the trenching costs. That doesn’t include the equipment needed at multiple points for tapping stations/hubs, or the price of the cable. That is also assuming you could trench straight through without having to route around an oil or other pipe line. Now we need the hi-res high speed all weather camera equipment, secure routers, etc. Let us not forget also that one of the buildings shown had a roof which obviously wasn’t holding back water anymore and the fact there were no visible concrete barricades or other breaching defenses to stop people from driving around the crossing.

Do I believe the political banter about all of the jobs the projects will create? Nope. Not one of those jobs is permanent. In less than a year each of the projects should be completed and all of those people will be looking for work again.

I do believe, however, that if every border crossing is upgraded, we can then turn our attention to other methods of entry.