Secure the southern border? No thanks...
My latest story on CBN news is about a new technology that its inventors say could help seal our southern border with Mexico.
Dan Hammons has been in the fiber optics business for decades. He's successfully installed hundreds of miles of security cordons in and around Arlington, Texas, and built a system that saved the city millions of dollars per year.
His idea for securing the southern border is simple: lay a fiber optic cable underground along the border and with it install hundreds of node towers that would carry a wide array of sensing equipment, from high-definition cameras to laser and radar and underground sensors.
The exact types and capabilities of these must remain confidential, but suffice it to say that these towers would form a cordon along our southern border into which nobody could venture without being seen and tracked.
The government has tried high-tech solutions before, but the difference here is bandwidth. Dan says if the current data "pipe" being used were the size of a penny, the data he'd be able to move would be the size of a swimming pool.
With that kind of extreme bandwidth would come the ability to monitor high-definition cameras in real time, to see exactly who is crossing the border and where they are headed. This would drastically reduce the danger for border patrol agents in the field, who often respond to intrusions without knowing whether they are migrant workers or armed drug smugglers.
To top it off, Dan's system would be cheaper than the existing fence, which is proving more and more each day to be a waste of money. With Dan's system, the land owners along the border would be compensated for the towers placed on their land, and the overall cost to the government would be millions cheaper than the current plan.
So why isn't the government even interested in a test run of Dan's system? Could it be that if the American people knew exactly how many persons were illegally crossing our southern border, the DHS claims that "the border is safer than it's ever been" might be proven false?
Ranchers along the border know the truth - the border is not safer than it has ever been. The makeup of those crossing the frontier today has shifted to a much more brutal criminal element, even as fewer migrant workers are making the trip.
That doesn't bode well for America, and it should be a top concern of the federal government. Instead, the Obama administration seems bent on maintaining the status quo at all costs.
Dan Hammons hopes things will change for the better this November.