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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 Immerman on Monday November 04 2019, @07:54PM (9 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday November 04 2019, @07:54PM (#915871)

    You're missing the point.

    *Every* wall is imperfect, unless it's well guarded. The absolute best that a wall can accomplish is to slow people down enough that guards have a chance to spot them. And that's rarely more than buying you a few minutes.

    As such it makes great sense to build walls for security in places where visibility is low or chaos is high and people could easily cross and disappear in a few seconds.

    That's not the reality along the Mexican border (except in a few areas, where there has already been a wall for decades). The border is mostly flat desert, where you can see people coming from miles away (quite often all the way to the horizon, =~50 miles), and keep seeing them for just as long after they've crossed. That gives you a half hour or more to spot them and intercept, even if they're driving very fast across rough terrain - slowing them down for a couple extra minutes as they cross the wall is wasted effort, and very expensive wasted effort at that.

    What you need is guard towers, drones, or some other surveillance to spot them coming, and watch them go, until guards can intercept them. If you have those, the wall contributes nothing. And if you don't have those... the wall still contributes nothing. So why exactly are we paying an outrageous amount to build a wall?

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 04 2019, @09:07PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 04 2019, @09:07PM (#915933) Journal

    That's not really clear...unless you are on a budget. I suspect that it would be quite possible to build a wall that would be difficult enough to penetrate that some other approach would be used. But it wouldn't be cheap.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday November 04 2019, @09:19PM

      by Immerman (3985) on Monday November 04 2019, @09:19PM (#915937)

      Some other approach than a ~$100 sawzall? Certainly. But in the absolute worst case they use a $50 ladder or grappling hook. Obviously that'd mean you can't drive through it, but if you don't have guards smugglers just transfer people from one vehicle to another waiting on the other side of the wall. Or just blow a hole in the wall and drive through - nobody has built a wall yet that can withstand a skilled demolition team with a few sticks of dynamite.

      Walls buy you time, nothing more. You can make them arbitrarily difficult to destroy, but destroying them will always be far, far cheaper than building them, so there's some severely diminishing returns to consider. And climbing over them will always be pretty easy.

      It's only the guards that make a wall secure. Without them a wall, no matter how strong and intimidating, is just an inconvenience.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:42AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:42AM (#916129)

    Look, there is no way the US is going to hire enough guards to really control the border. But we don't have to. The problem of denying access to large portions of land have already been largely solved.

    It's called a minefield.

    Build a fence on the border, hang signs up on it that say "If you cross this fence, you will die". Add pictographs for the illiterates. Behind the fence build a road (for access and maintenance). Then another fence. Then a two mile wide area filled randomly with landmines. Then another fence. Send copters over occasionally to replenish any mines that get triggered.

    This will never happen, of course, because Americans in general no longer have the willingness to kill to protect their land. This is why they will lose it, and be conquered by those who are perfectly happy to kill.

    • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:00PM

      by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Tuesday November 05 2019, @02:00PM (#916234)

      Goddam. Another advocate for MURDERING people fleeing from oppression.
      May you as well end up on the business end of your own suggestion.

      --
      Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:57PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday November 05 2019, @04:57PM (#916347)

      Build a fence on the border, hang signs up on it that say "If you cross this fence, you will die". Add pictographs for the illiterates. Behind the fence build a road (for access and maintenance). Then another fence. Then a two mile wide area filled randomly with landmines. Then another fence. Send copters over occasionally to replenish any mines that get triggered.

      This will never happen, of course, because Americans in general no longer have the willingness to kill to protect their land.

      And, y'know, because 4 fences, routine helicopter patrols, and a metric assload of mines is fucking expensive

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @03:31PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @03:31PM (#916287)

    Which is what the Dems were saying all along - a wall is fine but without supplementation it is useless.

    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday November 05 2019, @03:58PM (2 children)

      by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday November 05 2019, @03:58PM (#916305)

      As were left-leaning independents such as myself. Except that a wall is *not* fine - it's an ecological nightmare.

      I'm actually in favor of cracking down on illegal immigration - though I'd say targetting the illegal employers would be FAR more effective than trying to stop a flow of desperate people. Make it a felony with mandatory jail time to hire an illegal immigrant, and place a nice big bounty (perhaps a fast-track to citizenship) for proof of someone doing so, and you'd shut down the demand overnight. Very few people would sneak across the border if there were no money in it.

      But if you're going to try to stop the flow of people, then you need to do it right - with guard patrols. There's already a natural moat along most of the border, and no place to hide. A wall adds nothing, and does so at incredible expense.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:09PM (1 child)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:09PM (#916362) Homepage Journal

        Never happen. The economy depends on illegal, below-minimum-wage workers. If all illegals were rounded up and deported in less than, oh, twenty years, the US economy would crater even worse than the Great Depression and take even longer to recover. All the national level politicians know this, which is why Dems never massively raise and streamline legal immigration and Republicans never do anything truly effective to secure the border.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:44AM

          by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:44AM (#916676)

          I fear you may be right. Which makes it all the more horrific that we're putting desperate people's lives through the wringer for the sake of political theatre.