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December 16, 2005

Congressional Hearings on Border Surveillance System

I ran across a press release on the congressional hearing concerning the border surveillance system. The hearing focused on the Inspector General's review of the effectiveness of border surveillance, remote assessment, and monitoring technology. The statement by the IG Skinner is here (which I refer to as a report), while a press release by the Committee on Homeland Security is here.
Update: The OIG report can be found at the DHS web site.

I am interested in this from the perspective of smart cameras and not going to discuss the procurement and management issues noted by the IG. I have only read the IG report, so I don't know what else happened in the hearings. But the IG report has some good information. For background, the agency is question is the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), who detects illegal entry into the United States and the hearing was titled "Mismanagement of the Border Surveillance System and Lessons for the New Secure Border Initiative."

The report notes that there are over 11,000 sensors (seismic and magnetic) that provide remote detection capability. These sensors are along both our borders. There are 255 camera sites (both color and IR) with 168 sites that are currently incomplete. The system includes a tracking component to ensure every alert creates a ticket and the result of the agent's investigation.

The IG found that the system is not well integrated (especially when you consider what was promised). For example, there is no integration between cameras and sensors. You would expect when a sensor alert is triggered that a camera would then pan to the area. Instead, this means a camera operator has to manually move the camera to find the cause of the sensor alert.

The IG notes the grand claims for the system and lack of quantitative data on the system.

But the bottom line is that 90% of the alerts were false alarms: something other than illegal alien activity, such or animals. On the southwest border, only two percent of sensor alerts resulted in apprehensions; on the northern border, less than one percent of sensor alerts resulted in apprehensions.

The report notes that despite claims by the agency, there was considerable manpower devoted to responding to false alarms. The IG also points out that without mobile surveillance, it will be difficult to respond the changing patterns of illegal aliens. (They will just route around existing camera sites).

The take away points for me are:
1. Contractors oversell
2. Integration is important - smart camera systems work best when components can interact with each other without human intervention
3. Quantitative data is important to evaluate systems - No one wants to collect that data (because they think it will make them look bad), and as a result its difficult to gauge the effectiveness of these systems.
4. False alarms are time consuming. It seems to me there needs to be a feedback loop from the users to the designers once the system is implemented to try to reduce these false alarms.

Update:
A story by FCW on the hearings
A story by Washington Technology on the report

Posted by rshah at December 16, 2005 08:50 PM

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