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posted by martyb on Monday November 04 2019, @05:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come...and-cut-through-it dept.

Smugglers have found an easy way to get through the vertical steel tube Mexican border wall. From https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/smugglers-are-sawing-through-new-sections-of-trumps-border-wall/2019/11/01/25bf8ce0-fa72-11e9-ac8c-8eced29ca6ef_story.html

The breaches have been made using a popular cordless household tool known as a reciprocating saw that retails at hardware stores for as little as $100. When fitted with specialized blades, the saws can slice through one of the barrier's steel-and-concrete bollards in minutes, according to the agents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the barrier-defeating techniques.

After cutting through the base of a single bollard, smugglers can push the steel out of the way, creating an adult-size gap. Because the bollards are so tall — and are attached only to a panel at the top — their length makes them easier to push aside once they have been cut and are left dangling, according to engineers consulted by The Washington Post.

The taxpayer-funded barrier — so far coming with a $10 billion price tag — was a central theme of Trump's 2016 campaign, and he has made the project a physical symbol of his presidency, touting its construction progress in speeches, ads and tweets. Trump has increasingly boasted to crowds in recent weeks about the superlative properties of the barrier, calling it "virtually impenetrable" and likening the structure to a "Rolls-Royce" that border crossers cannot get over, under or through.

In other words, no one did any serious pen testing on the wall design, or it would have been obvious that with all that leverage, the top tie-in was easy to flex.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04 2019, @07:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04 2019, @07:23PM (#915850)

    As the article discusses, this installation is a compromise between cost and function. The border patrol strongly requested a see-through wall to audit the other side, so rigid concrete is largely unfeasible. Apparently during testing all prototypes could be defeated with the proper application of power tools.

    Just so. This is why all the people who actually knew the situation and technology (*insert political commentary here*) disagreed with the idea of a wall.

    The big trick is that walls never STOP things, they slow things down. The goal is to allow more time to respond to the situation.

    It's just like a safe in your house. It makes turns the 5-second grab-and-go into a 5-minute grab-and-go, or the 2-second swipe to a 30-minute use a drill to get through the metal.

    So walls make sense in a city, where people can cross the street in 15 seconds, put a wall there so they now need to take 3 minutes. Now you can set your patrols to be 2.5 minutes rather than every 10 seconds, and now humans can deal with the border crossings much more efficiently than before. The Berlin Wall wasn't effective because of the barbed wire and the high cement walls; it was effective because there were guards who shot people trying to cross it and the time-to-cross was long enough that the guards could catch them before they escaped.

    In a wide desert, though, when the travel time is already 24 hours, adding another two hour means you can turn your 23-hour patrol cycle to be a 25-hour patrol cycle. That is negligible, especially in terms of cost to build, maintain, and the environmental impact of a wall.

    But I guess seeing how Mexico is paying for the wall, the cost is minor. Mexico is paying for it, right?

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