U.S. now focusing its efforts on both borders

The Canadian border has become the target of new security measures.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
WASHINGTON -- More experienced patrol agents. Radiation detection at ports of entry. New rules that require entrants to produce identification, where they once might have been just waved through.
A list of actions taken on the southern border of the United States? Nope -- the northern one. Over the last five years, while attention has centered on the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico, the United States has also tried to plug the holes in its leaky boundary with Canada as much as it can.
But given the northern border's length (4,000 miles), its remote terrain (forested wilderness), and the value of trade that travels between the two nations ($500 billion), sealing it remains a daunting task. Canada's recent arrest of alleged Islamist bomb plotters may be just a reminder that terrorists could penetrate the United States from many directions.
& quot;Threats posed from the northern border may not be any less than from [the] southwestern border, & quot; concludes a draft study of border vulnerabilities from the University of Southern California's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events.
Arrest and aftershocks
Last Saturday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced the arrest of 17 people who had allegedly plotted to explode fertilizer-based bombs at important sites in Canada.
Officials alleged that the group was a homegrown terrorist cell of Islamist extremists who had even trained together in a field north of Toronto.
Some of the detainees may also have had U.S. connections. Several of the Canadians allegedly met with two U.S. citizens from Georgia -- Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed -- who are currently facing federal terrorism-related charges in the United States.
U.S. authorities charge that Sadequee, 19, and Ahmed, 21, made videos of the Capitol and other Washington sites to assess them as targets. The pair deny this, and so far there's no further evidence of a U.S. connection to the alleged Canadian plot.
But the U.S. border patrol says that it has still stepped up its vigilance, putting agents on the northern border on high alert and increasing inspections of incoming traffic.
& quot;There is definitely a rampup of operations, & quot; said Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar.
Still, the vast majority of border patrol agents are oriented toward the south, where the U.S. last year intercepted more than one million people attempting to illegally enter the country.
About 1,000 agents are spread out in a thin line along the north, as opposed to over 10,000 in the south. But that 1,000 represents a three-fold increase over the number that guarded the 4,000-mile border with Canada in 2001.