The Federal Government is trash-canning the highly talked about $20 million techy gadgety “virtual fence” on the Arizona-Mexico border. Get this, because the system is failing to alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings.

A glaring shortcoming of the project was the time lag between the electronic detection of movement along the border and the transmission of a camera image to agents patrolling the area, the GAO reported.

Although the fence continues to operate, it hasn’t come close to meeting the Border Patrol’s goals, said Kelly Good, deputy director of the Secure Border Initiative program office in Washington.

“Probably not to the level that Border Patrol agents on the ground thought that they were going to get. So it didn’t meet their expectations.”
The Border Patrol had little input in designing the prototype but will have more say in the final version, officials said.

This all comes after many in Washington, notably Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, announced approval of the fence built by The Boeing Co. Now they will be scrapping this design for a newer more expensive and previously untested model.

So when will we get the wall built as congress promised? You know a less glamorous series of physical barriers and high double-layered fencing. Where we have them, they seem to work.