Port and Cargo Security: How Is the U.S.A. Doing Now?

Stephen E. Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations is the Ira A. Lipman Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and National Security Studies. Flynn recently spoke with CSO Senior Editor Joan Goodchild about how the US is doing when it comes to port and cargo security

By Joan Goodchild, Senior Editor

September 14, 2008 — CSO —

In a 2006 interview, you gave the country a D+ grade when it comes to the current state of port and cargo security. And that D+ was up from an F a few years prior. Where do we stand now in 2008?
We are moving probably to a C-minus. There are essentially three challenges in the area of port security and cargo security. The first is that potentially our ports can be used as a conduit to bring destructive things into country, such as a dirty bomb, a radiological device, or, in a worst case scenario, a nuclear bomb. So the first set of challenges is to figure out how do I find the needle in haystack in the tremendous volume of cargo and in a complex environment like our ports if someone wanted to smuggle something in.

The port environment itself contains tremendous critical infrastructure that is essential to our economy and puts at risk, particularly in communities like Seattle, where you have a lot of port infrastructure close to where people live, things like refineries, power generation plants, transportation hubs and bridges. There is a lot that is truly critical. A lot of our population was built around ports and a lot of the infrastructure is essential to our way of life.

The area where the government has the longest way to go is in creating a reaction where we basically shut things down to sort things out. That is, the need to see that the interval of transportation system itself beyond the port environment is a critical infrastructure. This is absolutely indispensible to our environment; potentially targeting that system verse exploiting it.

Weâ¬"ve made considerable progress from where we were before. We have a kind of framework thatâ¬"s been put in place since 9/11 ⬠from the pushing of borders out, to having customs agents overseas, to having efforts to get companies to be far more security minded than they were before with programs like CTPAC. But this last problem, the ability to recover and have a measured response, thatâ¬"s where efforts are close to failing and is something that should give all of us considerable pause.

It's been a few years since operation cargo safety commenced. With regard to that effort ⬠have we learned anything?
The results have not been widely published or shared. So most of us donâ¬"t know what we learned from running those pilots.

That operation goes back to an initiative that was launched after 9/11. A first shipment from Czech Republic was followed through to the United States through Vermont and New Hampshire. The results of that first effort in May 2002 spawned legislative action.

There were always pieces that I thought were essential to that early work. One was to get people to understand what we are really trying to manage as a challenge was more about global supply chain than it was about our borders. Immediately after 9/11, I was concerned the reflex would be: Stop everything and check it at our border crossings. We did that for a little while and found out it wasn't sustainable as everything was backed up at borders and in ports. Fundamentally, now happily, there is much great understanding that things arrive through a very complex cycle known as the supply chain. But people needed to understand that was ultimately the problem we were dealing with.

The second piece was to ID whether were new tools and technology that would give us better transparency for both combination of visibility and accountability of what was moving through the system. Were there tools out there that could be applied? My interest was driven through sensing there were tools out there, but also that there was a lot that would be oversold as a silver bullet.

When you are trying to sort out where to go, you need basic data. What's out there that sounds reasonable and what's out there that is still in the realm of science fiction? The goal there was largely educational. The real partners had to be non-government players.

I wanted to make sure we were going to be very open about what results were. The problem was there was opposite instinct, rather than create open and inclusive process. First responders are always going to be private players, members of the public. But the program ended up being managed as a closed government process. The results were sealed off and not well-shared. Most folks who would be part of the solutions have been mostly kept in the dark.

The opportunity for commerce is to ask: How have you developed tools to ensure you've minimized the risk of exploitation of critical lifelines by an adversary? That is not going to be an inherently governmental activity. What it is at its heart is a business continuity challenge for the inter-transportation system and those who rely on it. So what we have is problem that lies in the private sectors lap. They have to be at heart of tools to safeguard it.

We need a reorientation away from thinking the government will figure out what is going to make us secure and pass these tablets down and set reasonable deadlines and check in once in a while. We need to go in the direction of a true partnership that largely originates with those who operate the business and is validated by government.

How do we accomplish that?

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