Four New York-area airports install virtual fences

Four New York-area airports are being equipped with virtual fences, consisting of heat, movement, and video sensors to detect and deter terrorists. The fence is modeled on systems at Israel’s Ben-Gurion and Baghdad’s airports.

The 57-mile system will be in operation early next year, and is supposed to tip off police to a plot such as the one discovered Saturday which aimed to blow up a fuel line inside the airport. “If you can’t breach the perimeter of the airport, you can’t reach the fuel farms,” one official told Newsday’s Carol Eisenberg.

The project is etimated to cost about $138 million, and it is being built at Kennedy, LaGuardia, Newark, and Teterboro, New Jersey, airports. As far as we can tell, it is the first of its kind to be installed in the United States.

The system is designed by Raytheon, and it is composed of strategically placed sensors, including radar, video motion detectors, thermal imagers, and CCTVs, which would send round-the-clock information to a central Port Authority Police station, as well as to a command post at each airport. The system will also be able to send instant video to first responders to stop an intruder in real time, La Vorgna said.

While some homeland security experts praised the system, other security experts, including the former head of security at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport, said that the technology was valuable only if paired with an ample and well-trained police force. “The question is not only detecting an intrusion but being able to respond to it in due time,” said Rafi Ron, a former Ben-Gurion security director who now heads New Age Security Solutions, a Rockville, Maryland-based transportation security firm. “I think that most U.S. airports are relatively quick to invest in the technology, but fail to provide the human resources to respond to the detection when it occurs.”

Billie Vincent, CEO of Chantilly, Virginia-based ASI, an aviation security consulting firm and former FAA security chief, said the system could be hugely beneficial — or “worthless without a response force that can get there before the adversary gets to one of your critical facilities, or to an airplane at the end of a runway…. Without deploying sufficient response teams,” he said, “all you’ve done is raise your level of anxiety if you can see the adversary, but you can’t get to him in time.”