DHS Scraps Eye of Sauron Border Initiative

DHS had a whacky idea to ring the southern border with giant towers that would act as spotters to identify where and how many illegals were running across the border and would dispatch dudes with big butterfly nets to catch them. But when this 2 Billion dollar contract for a virtual fence almost doubled, it was scrapped.

From HotAir here:

“Not only do we have an obligation to secure our borders, we have a responsibility to do so in the most cost-effective way possible,” Napolitano said in a statement Tuesday. “The system of sensors and cameras along the Southwest border known as SBInet has been plagued with cost overruns and missed deadlines.”

With that in mind, Napolitano is withholding funding for the program’s first deployment until a review she ordered in January is finished. And she’s taking away $50 million in stimulus funds from the Boeing-managed program. Instead, that funding will be put toward “other tested, commercially available security technology along the Southwest border.”…

“But before we go across that border with this – these big towers, SBInet,” she added, “we are going to reevaluate how those technology dollars are used and whether there are other technologies perhaps that have been developed since SBInet was contracted that would be more mobile, better, easier to maintain and easier to operate.”

I said it before.  Beartraps.