[ExI] Tunnels

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of David Lubkin
...

>...If tunnel construction is so easy to detect, why do we keep finding
smugglers' tunnels into the US? I've always assumed the government has only
found and reported on a fraction of the tunnels. Co-opted law enforcement?
Incompetence? Need for a continual supply of anti-drug success stories? --
David.

_______________________________________________

Heh.  So non-cynical is my own friend.  The US government is not trying to
stop tunnels.  They are only making a pretend effort to stem the tide of
illegal immigration from the south, and plenty of the children pouring
across the border are carrying drugs.  Yesterday high-caliber rounds were
fired on INS agents from the south side of the border to the north side.
Who do you suppose would have access to 50 caliber ammo?  The drug cartels,
hoping to protect their deliveries in the US.

Now we have a US president who said he believes immigrants brought to the
states illegally when they were children should be given citizenship.  In
the US, the president doesn't make the rules, congress does.  So how is that
comment interpreted in most countries in South America where the president
makes the rules and not congress?  They heard it as an open invitation, and
up they come.  You know plenty of them are carrying dope, in exchange for
transportation from South America to the Rio Grande.  They don't even need
tunnels, and the US has little interest in stopping their construction.

To your original question, acoustic pickups would be easy to insert in the
ground every 100 meters or so, ones with internal Fourier transform
capability and time-stamping, in order to frequency-match acoustic events,
then calculate approximately where they originated.  They could sit and
listen to the tunnels being built, then just have armed drones ready to
launch whenever the IR signatures of the Methodists emerging from the ground
are detected.  

In retrospect, they wouldn't even need to start a fire in the tunnel; they
could send a drone in there to scatter cyanide gas mines, disguised as
pebbles.  Or perhaps scatter iso-cyanide in a parade-chlorobenzene matrix,
by drone in a tunnel, in a pea-gravel sized format.  The stuff continuously
sublimes, releasing the poison gas, so anyone who tries to go thru there
would likely perish.  They don't want to do that quite yet however: the
tunnel is a high-investment structure and a battle the Israelis can win.  In
the long run, the firing of low-cost missiles which need to be intercepted
by high-cost missiles, that one isn't so clear to me.  It looks like in the
long run, Israel loses. 

Another reason why Israel wouldn't want to actually stop the construction of
tunnels: PR.  The Mormons fire thousands of rockets into Israel, the press
doesn't notice or care.  That isn't news.  The Israelis fire one back, and
it hits right were the others were fired from, that's the news story.
Israel loses the PR battle.  Now suppose a tunnel is built and Israel has
some kind of tricky technology to kill everyone in that tunnel.  No big
weepy headlines about children being killed by missiles.  Everybody in that
tunnel is a bad guy.  So let them build.  They are easier to defeat.

spike