Second attempt: Border Patrol to receive next generation surveillance system.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: SECURITY BEAT: HOMELAND DEFENSE BRIEFS

Customs and Border Protection is making a second attempt at deploying a high-tech camera system south of Tucson, Ariz., that is designed to help agents guarding the area interdict illegal migrants and drug smugglers.

"This is the real, no kidding production version of the system," Mark Borkowski, executive director of the Secure Border Initiative, told National Defense.

Project 28, a $20 million technology demonstration program that began in 2005, hit several technical snags and thus fell into disfavor on Capitol Hill. The project aimed to use radar, high-resolution cameras and other sensors to spot incursions near the remote Sasabe border crossing.

Along with problems employing the radars, the program could not deliver on its promise to send images gathered from camera towers directly into Border Patrol vehicles in real time. Initial attempts to use satellites as the project's communication backbone failed, and there were no commercial wireless systems in the remote desert area capable of carrying the data.

"We oversold it essentially. We said, 'This is great. You're going to love it. It's going to be a perfect system.' And when it didn't work we had to do some backtracking and say, 'Wait a minute. It was a prototype,'" Borkowski said.

Nevertheless, that prototype system does currently provide some capability to agents. The "Block I" system will replace it, he added. The towers and sensors for the new version are in place at Sasabe and will undergo testing over the next few months.

There will be eight communications towers along the newly expanded area. They will transmit images back to Tucson Sector headquarters, where dispatchers will verbally guide agents to targets, Borkowski said.

Twenty-three miles of the Sasabe area is covered. Work is underway to install sensor and communications towers along a 30-mile stretch of the Ajo district to the west. The plan is to roll out the technology in 25- to 40-mile swaths to cover all of Arizona's border with...