Analyst: Congress could draw wrong lessons from Secure Freight pilot

The Secure Freight Initiative underway at a handful of overseas demonstration ports will provide some technical insight into the effectiveness of systems for automated inspection of all ocean containers. But Congress is likely to incorrectly interpret process achievements as validating a full-scale scanning policy, according to a prominent homeland security expert.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is conducting pilot projects to test 100 percent image capture and radiation detection of all U.S.-bound containers moving through truck gates at three small ports. The department is also testing the approach in limited areas at four high-volume ports. Despite stiff opposition from international business groups and foreign countries, Congress last summer directed that all U.S.-bound containers undergo non-intrusive exams by 2012. The move came even before pilot tests it previously ordered had been completed.

CBP is scheduled to provide Congress a final report on the program's results in April.

Carafano  

Everything we are learning about SFI is extremely tactical, said James Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, following a presentation at a maritime and border security conference organized by Homeland Defense Journal.

The test projects are expected to provide data on command-and-control capabilities, container flows, equipment operating ratios, the information technology network for electronic transmission of readouts, and other factors. The limited nature of the experiments mean they won't tell much about the scalability, cost, potential of cargo diversion and actual vulnerability reductions associated with an inspection regime that covers the entire universe of imported containers and hundreds of foreign ports, Carafano said.

DHS limited the size of the pilot project to keep the process manageable and prevent glitches that disrupt commerce. Industry officials say infrastructure, labor, technology, volumes, weather, congestion, government authorities, dock layout and space are among the variables that make each port different. Replicating an inspection program at the Port of Southampton in the United Kingdom, for example, may be difficult at many other ports, Carafano said.

Southampton processes in six months as many U.S.-bound containers as Port of Hong Kong handles in a week, he noted. Radiation portal monitors have triggered 700 nuisance alarms for naturally occurring radiation --in products such as clay tiles and scrap steel -- since the integrated inspection process began there last fall. That compares to about 500 such alarms resolved per day at the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach, the largest U.S. port complex.

Another challenge that is manageable on a small scale is that the terminal operator has to place the boxes arriving by rail on trucks to run through the system at the gate because there is no system for radiation detection on rail. CBP officials said earlier this month that the pilot program has added two to three minutes to the container cycle time at Southampton. The inefficiency introduced for the pilot project could become a major problem if applied to all container throughput, Carafano suggested.

A small terminal at the Port of Hong Kong is also participating in the scan-all pilot with traffic scanned at the primary truck gate. Expanding the program port-wide would require Hong Kong Customs to deploy about 500 agents to man the equipment and resolve anomalies through secondary inspections, Carafano said.

Other ports, such as Busan in Korea, pose challenges because the vast majority of traffic arrives by feeder vessel instead of trucks.

The policy expert, who visited Southampton last week, said the recent crane accident there has not impacted the SFI project. The Southampton Container Terminal has sharply curtailed activity after a crane crashed down on a vessel last month, and other units were pulled out of service for safety checks. The terminal is operating with five out of 11 cranes, but many shipments are being diverted to other ports.

CBP Deputy Commissioner Jayson Ahern said at the conference that he plans to visit the port next week but is pretty confident that the project team has adapted to the operational difficulties and will be able to report results to Congress on schedule.

Ahern said it costs several million dollars to outfit each truck lane with drive-by X-ray and radiation detection machines. The costs of a global inspection regime would be multiplied across hundreds of ports and would require redundant systems to keep cargo flowing in case of breakdowns, Carafano added. Who would pay for implementing such a mandate is unclear. The United States is funding the pilot program, but the 9/11 Implementation Act that requires comprehensive inspections in five years does not spell out who pays for purchasing and operating the equipment, although DHS officials have signaled they expect port operators to pick up the tab and share the data with customs authorities.

Carafano said the 100-percent inspection mandate amounts to a blatantly unfair non-tariff trade barrier ?because you can't make an argument that there are not other better ways to secure the supply chain ?You can't look another country in the eyes and say this is the only way because it's politically expedient and they may prefer to face the threat with other solutions.

The policy undermines U.S. encouragement of developing countries to embrace free trade and globalization because then we make the entry barriers so high that they can't trade with us, he said.

Industry consensus favors enhancements in the existing risk-management model under which advance electronic shipping data and intelligence are analyzed by computers to determine suspicious containers that are selectively culled for inspection. CBP inspects roughly 6 percent of the 12 million containers that enter the United States each year.

Carafano said scanning every container is a poor use of limited resources to go after an over-hyped threat. Terrorists are not likely to jeopardize their single nuclear weapon by placing it in a shipping container that is out of their control and subject to multiple handoffs, damage, radiation detection, inspection, missed schedules and other delays. The mindset differs from that of drug smugglers who don't care if half their shipments are intercepted because their margins and supplies are so high.

He argued that a terrorist would be more inclined to simply place a weapon of mass destruction directly on a vessel or carry it in on a private craft, truck or in a suitcase.

So the logic of the nuke-in-the-box scenario almost defies common sense, Carafano said.

Chertoff  

Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff echoed that idea Wednesday, saying in a breakfast meeting with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor that while I understand that containers are a potential vulnerability, there's a little bit of a tendency in the media to treat it as if it's just the only threat. I think small boats are a potential threat. I think general aviation coming from overseas is a potential threat. To be perfectly honest, I think that if you had a nuclear bomb, it might make more sense to bring it in with a private airplane than to stick it into a container.

A strategy of absolute prevention can quickly suck up resources at the expense of other threats, and misses the point that the best deterrence is building a resilient society and infrastructure that can brush off a terrorist incident without going into an economic shell until the perpetrators are found, Carafano said.

Residents and businesses continued to function after last year's gasoline tanker accident and fire that led to the collapse of a San Francisco area highway overpass, the recent explosion that destroyed a sugar factory in Savannah, Ga., and the shootings at Northern Illinois University. People didn't overreact because they viewed these accidents as the price of living in a free society and knew they could still get sugar from alternative sources and could function even if a freeway ramp was closed for several weeks, Carafano said.

America isn't going to stop terrorists by bubble wrapping our highways or factories, he added.

Hardening the borders makes you weaker because you keep pouring dollars into these Maginot Line defenses that terrorists can circumvent and drain the treasury, he said.

SFI could provide useful security if targeted at a few high-risk, low-volume ports, but it doesn't make sense to apply it all over the world, Carafano emphasized. One such port in the program is Port Qasim in Pakistan. Pakistani officials have previously stated that the Karachi-area port has seen an increase in U.S.-bound traffic at the expense of other ports because shippers like the reassurance that they're vetted cargo will not be delayed for inspection at the port of entry.

Meanwhile, the Container Security Initiative is an effective tool for engaging most high-risk containers before they arrive in the United States, Carafano said. Through 33 bilateral arrangements since 2002, U.S. officers stationed in 58 foreign ports electronically review data to target containers of concern and request that the host customs service conduct a non-intrusive exam before it is placed on a vessel. Although the actual number of inspections conducted overseas is still very low -- reported as less than 1 percent of the total volume a couple of years ago -- 86 percent of U.S.-bound containers move through CSI ports where the potential for early detection exists. Carafano said the program has deterrent value and works well combined with other layers of security such as advance manifest and import data, pre-screening importers and their suppliers through the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, and radiation checks at U.S. ports on all departing containers.

If the report is taken as a first step in a discussion on how to secure the global supply chain, then that's fine, Carafano said. Insisting on full deployment would signal that Congress is not serious about risk-based solutions but still prefers to use homeland security as bumper sticker for political advantage, he said.

Source: American Shipper