Border Patrol takes possession of Project 28

Better late than never. Nearly six months after it was scheduled to occur, Border Patrol officials got the keys to the Boeing’s high-tech prototype system of camera towers in the Altar Valley southwest of Tucson, Arizona. DHS on Friday took “conditional possession” of the system, dubbed Project 28, and Border Patrol agents in the Tucson Sector will have forty-five days to test it, said DHS secretary Michael Chertoff. “We want to work with it on a day-by-day basis,” Chertoff said. “I liken it to, right now we’ve taken the car out for a test drive with the salesman, now we are taking it home. We are going to drive it around for 45 days.”

The nine towers which are scattered along a twenty-eight-mile stretch of border that flanks Sasabe are equipped with cameras, radar and sensors that gather information and send it to command centers and monitors in agent vehicles. Officials say the system will provide complete sensor coverage of the area. The Arizona Star’s Bray McCombs writes that Boeing, which is being paid $20 million to administer the test project, was scheduled to hand the system over to the Border Patrol on 13 June but software glitches delayed the launch. Boeing officials have spent the past six months problem-solving, spending more than twice the money Boeing is contracted to receive for the job. The testing was finished this month, prompting the move to the next phase of testing, which falls to agents in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. They will try out the system in one of the busiest smuggling corridors on the Southwest border. Chertoff said, “I’m going to let the Border Patrol guys, over 45 days, come up with a list of things that they say would make it a better tool.” They have already discovered, for instance, that they want to make the “common operation picture” — the way the information is displayed on screens in command centers and vehicle monitors — more fluid and user-friendly, Chertoff said.

Customs and Border Protection has already given Boeing a $64 million contract to design, develop, and test an upgraded “common operation picture” for command centers and vehicle monitors.

After the forty-five days, officials will put in orders for additional changes, Chertoff said. Full acceptance of the system depends on the results of the test run. Despite the delays in the launch of Boeing’s pilot project, he said, the department is not worried about Boeing designing and implementing similar systems along the rest of the border. “We picked a particularly demanding area of the border, with a lot of ground clutter,” Chertoff said. “So it should be a good kind of challenge,and some other parts of the border should be easy.”