Ground Sensor Technology Could be the Future of Surveillance on Mexico's Borders John Knefel - Inverse
go to original February 6, 2017

Perimeter Security via Expendable Unattended Ground Sensors (ARA Force Protection)

A soldier in Afghanistan kneels down, maybe to tie his shoe or set his gear on the ground for a moment. A minute later, he stands up and keeps walking. To the casual observer, nothing out of the ordinary just happened, but a closer look reveals that he just buried a coffee mug-size sensor in the dirt, one of several he will sink on this patrol.

The device, called an expendable unattended ground sensor (E-UGS), will automatically alert a workstation or mobile phone when a human walks within 30 meters of it. The UGS can act as an invisible trip wire, or a surreptitious doorbell, and can be linked to trigger cameras, drones, or remote-controlled weapons. The target would never know how he or she was discovered. It sounds like advanced combat, but in a few months, the person burying that sensor might not be a soldier, but a U.S. border patrol agent working on the  wall.

That’s the scenario put forth by Robert Jones, chief of the counter threat technology operations at Applied Research Associates, a major defense contractor. Inverse spoke with Jones at a security trade show called ISC East, and he says that ARA could be in for a windfall in government contracts, given repeated promises to ramp up militarization of the U.S.’s southern border.

...Pathfinders can either be scattered, like a minefield, or used in a targeted area – say a fork in the road. As a person walks down the path, the sensors go off like a game of connect-the-dots. When the path splits, the Pathfinder on the right detects movement, which lets observers know which direction the target is going and, over time, could reveal large travel patterns.

“What you do is put it in the known routes where the coyotes and the illegal immigrants are trafficking — DHS knows those routes, Border Patrol knows those routes, there’s not enough guys to get to them all the time,” says Jones. “What you can do it put these sensors in those known areas where they move, the wadis [dry ravines], the washes, the valleys, and you can map their movement. You can say, we just had someone come out of the Rio Grande using this particular wadi, and he’s gonna intersect I-8 in two hours. Let’s go get some lunch, we’ll come back and get him later.”

Read the rest at Inverse

Related: If Ikea Made the Border Wall for Donald Trump, It’d Look Like This (BGR)

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