It was a scam to shut down criticism from people who wanted a real border fence by wasting money and time on a virtual fence that did nothing but make some government contractors wealthier..
During the Bush and Obama administrations over a billion dollars were spent on electronic wizardry that didn't work.
After Boeing’s ‘Virtual Fence’ Flop, Security Towers Are Next
KQED News Staff | September 13, 2013
"The federal government is in the midst of purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of security equipment for the Southwest border. And Congress is considering spending tens of billions more. But the last time the government tried to go big with border security, it encountered some pitfalls. Federal officials are trying to learn from past mistakes as they shop for technology to secure a key stretch of the border."
"Those fixed towers were originally put up by Boeing, the contractor. They are still functional, but the bigger project Boeing tried to create — an elaborate virtual fence called SBInet that would have integrated radar, cameras and sensors all along the Southwest border — was deemed a failure. Thad Bingel, a Washington-based security consultant who used to be the chief of staff at Customs and Border Protection, explains the problems with the virtual fence like this: “The issue with SBInet was that it was overly ambitious,” he says."
"There were missed deadlines, system bugs and escalating costs. After pouring a billion dollars into it without success, then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano canceled SBInet in 2011. And it prompted the federal government to rethink how it approaches border technology. “It really caused an examination within the agency of going back and saying, ‘OK, we tried to design a system that did a lot of things, but didn’t do it all very well, so let’s focus instead on what do you actually need in these different places,’ ” says Bingel."
It worked.
New technology under development.
Worked out the kinks and had the system ready to be implemented.
When it was ready and capable of being implemented, Nappy Pants and the Big Zero cancelled it.