Technology Has Uneven Record on Securing Border

Agents also point to what they call the "skybox" -- a 25-square-foot room 30 feet above the border on a hydraulic jack, with top-of-the-line night-vision equipment. Agents say it's claustrophobic but has one redeeming virtue -- air conditioning.

Overhead, the border agencies use blimps, unmanned aircraft, Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.

"We are starting to see substantial improvements," said Chris Van Wagenen, a senior patrol agent assigned to Yuma, Ariz. "Now we've got sensors, cameras. We've doubled our manpower in a year, but we still need more."

Bush has budgeted $100 million this year for SBInet. But Chertoff's department declined to estimate how much the three-to-six-year contract ultimately will cost. Industry analysts expect at least $2 billion in spending -- and possibly much more over a longer period, based on the history of overruns in major Homeland Security technology programs.

By turning to contractors such as Boeing, Ericsson, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon to design the workings of the system, SBInet also marks a government reliance on private-sector partners to carry out missions without a clear idea of what the network will look like, according to experts and immigration officials.

"SBInet represents a potential bonanza" for tens if not hundreds of companies, said John Slye, senior analyst of federal opportunities for Input, a Reston-based federal contracting consulting firm. The project is the most anticipated single civilian information technology contract since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he said.

Skeptics in Congress cite a decade of frustration at the border.

Because of poor management, two failed border technology programs have cost taxpayers $429 million since 1998, the Homeland Security inspector general reported in December. Nearly half of 489 remote video surveillance sites planned for the border in the past eight years were never installed. Sixty percent of sensor alerts are never investigated, 90 percent of the rest are false alarms and only 1 percent overall result in arrests.

A 10-year, $10 billion system to automate border entry and exit data, US-VISIT, has yet to test security and privacy controls in its seventh year, congressional auditors reported.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), top Democrat on the homeland security committee, called the plan to solicit bids by May 30, pick a single winner and start to deploy by September "unrealistic" and filled with "too many questions."

"How is 'SBI' not just another three-letter acronym for failure?" Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee, asked at a hearing last month.

Chertoff deputy Michael P. Jackson said government is not the best judge of innovation in rapidly evolving technology and will benefit from the nimbleness of the private sector while conducting disciplined oversight.