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Trying to Separate Fact from Smoke in Cargo Security The cargo security initiative is in the development and concept stages. Smoke and mirrors skew the discussions and recommendations presented by many of the experts asked to participate. People who are finally asked to decide on the correct system and course of action may not be intimate with the sciences or mechanics presented and predicate decisions on perceptions rather than facts which can cost everyone dearly. The approved plan will ultimately attempt to establish a level of container and content integrity as materials move to our shores by sea. The system should ideally be able to enhance homeland security, by reducing the threat of attack through cargo entering or leaving any port. By developing a workable security program we can identify possible terrorists cargo before it can be placed on a ship heading to the United States. The process will attempt to control access to our ports by terrorists through this vehicle without slowing commerce or adversely affecting shipper, carrier or port operating costs. Customs, who seems to be spearheading the project, has asked that the plan cover procedural security, physical security, access to ports and cargo yards both here and abroad, personnel integrity checks for cargo handlers, training of personnel on terrorists threats, awareness of the types of threat, secure paperless manifest procedures and conveyance security dealing with the vessels and ports handling and moving cargo. This is a broad-based plan, which requires a considerable amount of technology and refinement before a suitable solution can be found. Implementation must include those physical security products used to achieve containment and control of cargo. Such technologies must be suitable to the real world of container cargo shipping; cost effective for both ports and shippers and able to be readily implemented worldwide without development time. Training and refinement in a security plan differs from research and development when it comes to the urgency of this need. Systems that work now are the order of the day. Implementation of a system that requires a tremendous expenditure in infrastructure will limit approved ports, which will severely impact world trade. Such a system is both detrimental and prejudicial to shippers and ports who cannot come up to speed and is the antithesis of free and open trade. People whose jobs it is to secure cargo and whose goals it is to have a successful cargo security initiative are not the same people. Those who pay the bills to ship, carry, handle, receive or load cargo are truly ambivalent about the implementation of such a system as they see such implementation as an added cost, which serves to reduce their profitability, creates delays in cargo flow and increases their workload. Not that individually they are not concerned about Homeland security, but having 30+ years in speaking with these companies gives me that accurately skewed viewpoint. Shippers have always faced the threat of loss through theft. Shippers who know the score on cargo theft in the United States, which exceeds 25 billion dollars annually, most have inherently not used the simplest tools available to secure cargo or containers from theft or tampering, primarily because of the added costs, it is that plain and simple. The threat has never been higher for theft, tampering, smuggling or terrorism, yet the reluctance of most shippers remains consistently steadfast when it comes to the use of security tools at their expense. Even when confronted by a loss, most shippers complain vehemently about spending much more than a $1 on a bolt seal securing a container worth millions. Now that the threat has become more public and it has grown to include terrorism on the list of loss conditions, have shippers begun to recognize their participation in the cure process. Tampering, smuggling (piggybacking) contraband into legitimate cargo and the use of your container to ship bombs and people around the world is suddenly real. Those who decide how much to spend for protection need to get on board with these initiatives and work as a team with our government to accomplish the mission at hand. With that "penny wise dollar foolish" base mindset, let's look back at the Customs initiative question and how that relates to the available technologies and viable solutions. From the port prospective: In order for a port to offer any level of security containment they must open and inspect cargo before sealing it. Cargo in a container is just that, inside a steel box, not visible nor accountable and highly vulnerable. A total trust relationship must exist between the shipper, dry company, port and sea carrier, who in turn has an implied trust to the receiving port, dray carrier and ultimately to the recipient. If that viable at any level, there is a bridge I would like to sell to you! What must happen in any system requiring container security is that the person loading the container must be the one to apply the security control. The control element must preclude surreptitious opening en route and it must offer a formidable barrier to those trying to open it for any purpose. The most common element for securing a container is a bolt seal placed through the handle hasp. That product, regardless of brand, manufacturer, quality or features, has only ever been good as an audit tool and certainly never has offered or claimed to offer security. Seals are so easily circumvented that their utility as a security device is ridiculous. When dealing with a threat such as terrorism, expecting anything more from a seal would be ludicrous. Seals do a disservice to users who have a misconception of their value, besides being easy to replicate, commonly lose application and removal techniques and auditing errors, make them even more suspect. To the uneducated eye they represent strength and security which is dangerous. As a component therefore of an initiative dedicated to security containment they fall way short. Procedural security is next: When containers are loaded in facilities all over the world, the last thing on the ?to do? list is security. For a container of 40,000 pounds on pallets or 500 floor loaded cartons, shippers want to get it packed, close the doors and get it on the road. Who can verify the contents? Here the vulnerability is by far the greatest. A terrorist can easily be employed and replace jackets with grenades in just one box. An initiative such as this cannot address off site issues for obvious reasons. A known shipper program must be implemented such that when cargo is taken from a pre-certified shipper, we have done our best to transfer the containment and control issue to them and hope that they regard homeland security as much as we do. Shippers need to check out their personnel, verify contents before sealing and do what is needed and reasonable to assure the container is free of problems when it is packed and the doors are closed. With this in mind, once the container is closed, how does that shipper insure, (if he uses a bolt seal) that the doors remain closed are not re-opened and contaminated prior to the container reaching the port? This can only be accomplished by the use of a locking bar type system that precludes the doors from being opened. Only after appropriate security protocols are applied by the shipper at the time of sealing can anyone hope to achieve containment and control of the cargo? Security features and techniques not applied at the shipper level are always suspect. Once you have gone through the trouble to guaranty the integrity of the contents it is truly ridiculous to stop short of securing it when it leaves your control. The next area is the need for real time information on containers and their contents in a paperless environment. It is obvious to anyone that has ever seen a port or a container yard or a ship is that the environment that these containers move and are stored in, is hostile. Salt, cold, heat, water, shock, rough handling, stacking and truck mounting are hard on steel much less electronics. Most technologies that have been tried in the past to transmit information from containers fail because they either break down in salt, rust, become damaged and unusable and or they are broken off during transit. To think that a delicate RFID tag could withstand this environment is questionable. To then place that sensitive and expensive element into a port security system would be asking for trouble. Who will pay for it? Can it be recovered? Who is responsible to monitor it and where? How will we affix it to the containers? Can it stand up? What will it take to read it? Products such as active RFID tags have been touted as the coming technology for almost 3 years but they fall way short of viable. They offer no security at any level. They barely have been used in any industry because they cannot be read around metal, they cross talk, they break, the batteries wear out, they cannot take abuse, they are expensive and this just touches on some of their short comings. They are great in a lab environment but not at a port. RFID tags are expensive to use, to own, to verify, to get back and to audit. To analyze the RFID industry as it relates to security you need to understand very basic electronics. Radio signals are blocked by metal such as containers are made of. Hundreds of containers in a yard facing different directions require many expensive antennas and a costly system. Each system of each manufacture may be different so which will people use? Electronic readers needed to interrogate active tags are typically antenna based and must be deployed throughout a container yard. This infrastructure requirement would be extremely costly and provide little else than a scan but with these serious shortcomings. RFID tags can be removed and replaced, they can be broken off and therefore not read at all, making that container invisible without a physical check, which makes the need for RFID redundant if you have to go out and find it. The tags need to be applied at origin. Can you see shippers in Jakarta holding shipment because they need tags! RFID tags have no relationship to the lock mechanism hence they provide no security at any level just location and data if they were to work. Tags are expensive and must be funded by shippers who will get no tangible benefit from them and no possibility of recovery and re-use, hence no cooperation. The tags must be able to be read at every port and by every carrier in order to render any level of reliable real time information. The infrastructure of many foreign ports has not reached the computer level much less RFID readers. The information is only as good as the software and interfacing software between many companies and operating systems is a joke. Rights of authorship on the choice of software and hardware out of all of the existing tag manufacturers would begin WW#3 in the industry. The requirements of a port to implement a new infrastructure to accept all possible tags and integrate them to one common LAN to read them would be a 5-year project at best. To accept RFID information implies that the tags would solve some portion of the problem when in fact they would create a logistic nightmare. Without physical interaction with the container and its lock (lock bar) you can never be certain that the box was never opened only that the tag is somewhere in your yard hopefully still attached to the original container! Security can only be achieved when it begins at the beginning, offers the appropriate protection based on the threat and has audit characteristic and physical checks throughout the logistic cycle. The next few elements of the security initiative are systems training, threat awareness, paperless manifest procedures and personnel screening. These are the areas make the system work. If they are done in a hands off environment without interaction of people and the containers, the information cannot never be counted on as reliable. Terrorists are anything but dumb. They will easily circumvent security that is not going to be monitored by a person. Albeit people can be intimidated and corrupt where electronics is unshakable, the lack of interaction with a person makes any security system suspect. An RFID tag for instance in concert with a container lock bar can certainly provide enhancements for information sake but if no one is looking at the bar and relying on the tag for an integrity check it falls short of a the intended security goal. A sound security protocol needs to recognize basic principles of chain of custody and inspection practices. Repeated checks to certain predetermined specs make a security system work. Training that involves a person at a computer interpreting data will offer no such protection to the introduction of a bomb into a container. Money being allocated to ?yet developed? technology is money poorly spent. It goes without saying that too much people interaction with data is a bad choice. People make mistakes. A dock worker or security guard standing outside in the heat or cold and trying to update data by hand is a major cause of errors. Such transcription errors can result in containers being delayed, discarded, opened and examined or mis-shipped; all of which are bad news for shippers, carriers and receivers. What is needed is a system that has known reliability for the effective storage and unlinking of data. There are many companies that make suitable machines to audit data and link it by an existing LAN to a central computer. There are NO infrastructure requirements with this type of system and no need to develop software or to spend millions to make it work. There are systems that can be implemented in days not years and ones that can legitimately compete with one another rather than choosing one RFID supplier to cover the globe. Such a system is a passive memory button. The Navy has 500,000 of these in use. They work with readers from Compaq, Symbol, HP, LXE and many others. The memory button can not only correlate and transfer information through these "off the shelf" readers but do it reliably and accurately. They can be read anywhere without a need for a LAN and used simply in a laptop and e-mailed to the next stop for the box. These systems can be used, as they are by the military, on containers and on seals and lock bars. The systems are inexpensive, 1/10th the cost of an RFID and they meet MIL 801E, the most sever spec for outside use. They can act as a major security component in that they tie the container itself to the seal and the seal to the lock bar and at the same time they carry every needed document in a truly paperless environment. This device can be checked by a simple 1-second touch at the same time as the lock bar is physically checked for integrity. You get instant data in real time, no risk of data transcription errors and a physical security check all within a few seconds time. By having a forced template for interaction with the container, sea containers will move faster through ports and on ships. This type of system can be used from Zambia to Camden because everyone can get up and running in weeks not years. The last and final component is the container itself. It is my recommendation that each shipper and carrier be required to use a self adhesive door seal to show that the doors and hinges have not been manipulated and that numbered seal be recorded into the memory button to correlate that last security component into the system. When this is done at the shipper level, the dray company who may not have these readers can also assure himself, reasonably, that the door was closed by the shipper and that he is not moving a bomb to the port. Literally millions of these have been used throughout the world. Their cost is minimal yet their deterrent and inspection value far outweighs a bolt seal when directly compared. No system is perfect and no one can seem to agree on what to do. The only reasonable approach is the look for a secure quick fix that offers enough security now when we need it rather than have to allocate finds to some ?pie in the sky? venture that would take years to set up and debug. What we need in homeland security is a working plan that can be bought into by everyone. |
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