VIRTUAL FENCE TO LINE B.C. BORDER

Provincial Crossings Vulnerable To Smugglers And Terrorists

WASHINGTON -- Sections of the Canada-U.S. border in British Columbia
and southwestern Ontario -- areas deemed most vulnerable to drug
smuggling and terrorist infiltrations -- are likely the first
locations where American authorities will deploy a "virtual fence" of
high-tech monitoring equipment to stop illegal crossings, Homeland
Security officials said Thursday.

Detailing plans for an array of sensors, infrared cameras,
watchtowers, and drones that will eventually stretch across America's
entire 8,890-km border with Canada, U.S. authorities said their goal
is to have the world's longest undefended border under surveillance
within three to six years.

"We are looking at making it just that, making it a guarded border,"
U.S. Border Patrol chief David Aguilar told reporters.

His comments followed a Department of Homeland Security announcement
that Chicago-based Boeing Corp. has been awarded an initial
$67-million US contract to begin work on the project, known as the
Secure Border Initiative.

Starting with a 45-km section of the U.S.-Mexico border south of
Tucson, Ariz., the project will expand along both the Canadian and
Mexican boundaries based on evaluations of the threat posed by illegal
immigrants, drug smugglers and terrorists.

"What we are looking to build is a virtual fence, a 21st-century
virtual fence," said U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

"The border is not just a uniform place. It is a very complicated mix.
. . . What applies in one stretch of the border is not going to be
what applies in another stretch."

U.S. officials said their priority is to gain operational control of
its southern border with Mexico, where more than one million
immigrants are caught sneaking into the country every year.

Fewer than 10,000 people were detained trying to enter the U.S.
illegally from Canada in 2004, but American officials have struggled
to prevent the flow of narcotics across its northern border. It has
also identified Toronto and Vancouver as hubs for the smuggling of
Asian immigrants into the U.S.

"We will expand rapidly to take on the task at hand," said Michael
Jackson, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security.

"Our preliminary focus is on the southwest border but from the very
beginning we will be looking at the northern border and trying to
define the right [surveillance equipment] to do the job there."

Aguilar identified border areas stretching from Detroit to Buffalo,
N.Y., the area surrounding Blaine, Wash., and remote stretches in
Vermont and Maine as the areas most in need of high-tech
surveillance.

It was at the Port Angeles, Wash., ferry terminal, west of Blaine,
that border agents apprehended would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam
arriving from Victoria in December 1999.

In 2005, U.S. agents discovered a 120-metre-long smuggling tunnel
linking a Quonset hut in Aldergrove to the living room of a house in
Lynden, Wash.

"Those are basically your lay down areas of interest to us," Aguilar
said. "We don't ignore the others. But based on a risk-management
prioritization, those are the ones we take a look at."

Boeing's initial contract proposal had called for a total of 1,800
high-tech surveillance towers along both the Mexican and Canadian
borders, but Homeland Security officials said Thursday they "had not
reached a decision" on the final number to be erected on either boundary.

The towers would be equipped with a gaggle of heat and motion sensors
and infrared cameras that could be controlled remotely by U.S. Border
Patrol agents.

Boeing will also employ a system of ground-based radars,
"smart-fencing technology," unmanned aerial drones and even
subterranean scanners aimed at helping border agents properly identify
who -- or what -- is crossing into U.S. territory.

The information gathered by the surveillance equipment will be
available in real-time to border agents.

"We don't want to send the border patrol chasing coyotes ...that are
coming across the border," said Chertoff. "We want them chasing people
coming across the border."

Homeland Security refused to speculate on the ultimate cost of the
Secure Border Initiatives, but industry officials have estimated it
could reach $2.5 billion US.

Plans for the "virtual fence" are separate from efforts by Republicans
in Congress to build more than 1,100 kilometres of double-layered
security fences along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The congressional plan would also require Homeland Security to study
the feasibility of erecting physical barriers along the Canada-U.S.
border as a complement the surveillance technology.

The U.S. surveillance plan has drawn no protest from Ottawa, which is
far more worried about a plan to require Canadian travellers to have
passports or another approved secure documents at land borders by 2008.

Still, there is concern among Canadian and U.S. business interests
that the Secure Border Initiative will draw precious funding away from
the construction of border infrastructure to help speed commerce
between the two countries.