Texas Border Watch
As part of the Virtual Neighborhood Border Watch Program, the State of Texas has been testing video surveillance cameras in different environments along the 1240 miles of Texas/Mexico border using the internet to transmit the images. The last stage of the test is to stress the system by providing public access to numerous surveillance cameras.
10 comments:
I wonder if lorna youngs, bill bradbury, and the poser in the mahonia hall will sign up......didn't think so.
This would be brilliant for New Mexico, Arizona, and California borders too.
I prefer something a bit more stand-offish. And a whole lot deadlier. You really don't want any of these hard workers to die slowly in the desert - at least I don't. I just want them to stay in their own damn country.
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/samsungs-200000-machine-gun-sentry-robot
"Texas Border Watch: I watched the cameras for about 10 minutes early this morning during the dark. There are only nine camera thumbnails showing today. Two cameras are apparently down from yesterday. Same issues as reported yesterday . . ."
Source: http://faultlineusa.blogspot.com/
Actually, as I noted earlier, they presently have cams at what have been identified as most active sites - but they plan to ramp up to as many as 70 cams - some of which will have focus and thermal-imaging capabilities. It must be remembered that they just turned the system live - and having built such systems, I can tell you from experience that a whole lot of unanticipated issues arise once you open it up.
That's why they call it a stress test. But we do know that cameras are effectively used by Glen Spencer's ABP group because they regularly guide Border Patrol agents to the location of illegal border crossers.
YEE-HAW!
Anytime you open up a formerly closed system whicn you think you've got tested and thoroughly debugged, Daniel, you find that an amazing number of problems crop up. That's why they were smart in opening the system with only 7 to 9 cams online. That's when the debugging and system strengthening really comes into play. Lessons derived from the first set of operative cams play a huge role in getting others online with minimal troubleshooting. It seems easy, but it ain't.
In an interview at University of Illinois (a supercomputing center and birthplace of Mosaic/ Netscape/Mozilla) I was asked why I didn't simply turn over camops to inbound users. My reply was brief: I'm not handing that kind of control to the general public.
I believe that the gradual rollout of bordercams is a reasonable approach. The first thing that happens is that nutballs try to override your control systems. Once you harden the systems to control for that activity, it becomes somewhat easier to deploy additional cams into the network.
Maybe Saxton will sign up...so he can see who he wants to be living in the shack in his backyard?
it really does not make any difference what we do at the border as long as we have a SAFE ZONE in the US.
Post a Comment