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Graham Kee: The Mediator

To get the job done at a major seaport, Graham Kee convinces dozens of competing stakeholders that collaborating on security helps everyone succeed

The approach eventually worked, and the 65 to 80 members of the committee grew to trust him as a mediator. The ID card program that the team developeda smart card that uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to transmit data to security access pointswas better than what Kee could have done on his own, because everyone played a role in developing it and had a stake in its success.

"My boss will kill me for saying this, but we're very fortunate that it was illegal for the federal government to give us money," he says. "Say I got a $10 million grant. Can you imagine the mess I would get into? I wouldn't need anybody, right? I would try to do it all myself, and the local salesman would tell me I could do this and that, and I'd be issuing cards, and it would have been a mess."

Here's how it works instead. The port authority issues blank cards, and the port's various employers issue the personalized cards and have the power to revoke them. If somebody loses or misuses his card, he has to answer to his bossnot Kee. And the port authority paid for very little of the programabout $80,000 up front, with almost no ongoing costs. The associations who actually issue the cards pay for them or pass the costs on to cardholders.

When asked about the system's payoff, Kee leads this reporter to a common area of the port authority offices, where four large screens display mostly truck traffic making its way into and out of the secure areas of the port.

This is where Kee gets excited. Before, he says, access to the road was unrestricted, and the public used it to skirt past downtown traffic. Now, as part of another perimeter protection program, only authorized vehicles are allowed in. The port is operating at its lowest security level, Marsec 1, so one guard is monitoring 12 access points remotely. When a trucker whose RFID card grants him port access approaches the gate, the gate goes up, and the tire shredders stay down. The trucker barely slows down.

Kee cites the costs and benefits of this setup (here, in Canadian dollars). "It costs $125,000 a year to have someone sitting in that booth. So I'm saving $125,000 there," he says, starting to point at several computer screens. "I'm saving $125,000 there. I'm saving $125,000 there. There, there, there. There." He pauses to watch a truck pass through a gate, then continues, almost conspiratorially. "See that? The truck doesn't stop. When that truck stops, it costs them $3."