[Shermy]

“I guess that whole ‘building a wall’ concept is far too complicated to work in reality...”

Building a real fence is too cheap. Boeing saw an opportunity in the push for a fence and offered an expensive facsimile from which it could profit with building costs and decades of maintenance contracts. It presumably pushed politicians to support this boondoggle and voila, we have the ironically named “virtual fence”.

[kinoxi]

Yeah, a (properly built) masonry wall would last hundreds of years and require very little in the form of upkeep. Why use what’s been proven to work over thousands of years when flashy graphics can net millions (billions?) off the government teat?

[Brad from Tennessee]

Apparently when this “virtual fence” reacts to an intruder, “non-virtual” personnel have to respond. It seems like smugglers could hire any number of human decoys to probe and activate this system simultaneously and overwhelm the responders.

[Redleg Duke]

"Boeing saw an opportunity in the push for a fence and offered an expensive facsimile from which it could profit with building costs and decades of maintenance contracts."

You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. I worked the proposal for this contract on another team, and this is what the government wanted! Don't go blaming the contractor.