Good fences, good neighbors: Saudi Arabia securing its borders with sensors and software.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.

LONDON -- Saudi Arabia two years ago sought to fortify its northern border with war-tom Iraq by installing a razor-wire fence and an integrated electronic surveillance system. This summer, the nation decided to expand the effort to all its borders. It awarded lead contractor EADS another program--reportedly worth billions of dollars--to secure the rest of the country with a virtual high-tech fence.

"The fence is very important to Saudi Arabia, which has long borders that run across all types of geographical areas, and it will add to the efforts of the border guards to ensure the safety and security of Saudi Arabia from all criminal activities," Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, told reporters in July. "Of course terrorism is important, but there is also drug and weapons trafficking, and we also have to consider illegal immigrants."

With an area of approximately 2.2 million square kilometers, Saudi Arabia is roughly one-fifth the size of the United States. The border security contract is the largest program of its kind in the world, said Mike Simms, vice president of solutions and services for EADS Defense and Security Systems Ltd., a subsidiary.

"There's a lot of interest in these types of programs," said Simms. The potential market is huge, with nations in the Middle East, Asia and South America all eyeing the progress on the Saudi Arabia project.

The company says it is benefiting from the expertise gained from similar security contracts in Romania, Qatar and ongoing work on Saudi Arabia's 1,500-kilometer northern border. The kingdom's remaining 9,000 kilometers of mountain, desert and sea borders will be connected through an integrated system of fixed sensors, mobile platforms and software.

The plan is to use the same technology that was installed along the nation's northern border--a combination of radar, imagery and infrared systems.

"A lot of what we were doing was not only putting the sensors in, but also having the ability to integrate them," said Simms. Protecting borders with sensors can be problematic because of false readings that are triggered by innocuous events, such as a camel wandering across the landscape or sandstorms. "If you have a radar track, or something moving, you can put a camera on it and check whether it's legitimate nomads or a covert intrusion or a sandstorm ... When we say, 'this is something you need to go investigate,' we're fairly confident that it's worth looking at...