One of the 14
contractors working on the Seam Line Project is the American company DeTekion
("dee-TEK-shun"), based in Vestal, N.Y. DeTekion, a sensor-fence company,
has done extensive work for state and federal prisons, including Sing Sing,
as well as for nuclear facilities in Egypt and military sites in Mexico.
For the Seam Line Project, DeTekion supplies its electronics to an Israeli
company called Elbit, which is completing the installation -- an installation
that includes four feet of concrete underneath the fence so that nobody
can dig beneath.
Tampering in any way with any part of the fence will trigger an alarm in a control room, alerting an analyst and indicating exactly where the intrusion is occurring. Cameras on the fence will immediately swing in the direction of the intrusion, and closed-circuit television in the control room will show the site of the disturbance.
DeTekion first built sample test fences in Israel to bid on fencing to protect Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. "It was the most stringent testing that we've ever been involved with," says DeTekion president James Walsh. "They had to have very close to 100 percent probability of detection: someone trying to climb over it, someone cutting through it with bolt cutters, someone cutting it with a blow torch."
By the time DeTekion's fences passed three years of testing, Israel decided to build the Seam Line Project. "I don't want to call it a border, because I don't know if it's a border," says Walsh. "Obviously, the Israelis are not saying it's a border, and we're just selling equipment, so we're not saying anything."