A congressional mandate requiring all maritime shipping containers be electronically scanned at foreign ports prior to departing for the United States needs to be “thoughtfully reconsidered,” the acting commissioner for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told Congress this week.
Those remarks by Jayson Ahern follow testimony in February by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who said that meeting the 2012 deadline for screening 100 percent of all U.S.-bound sea containers would be unlikely (Defense Daily, Feb. 26). However, Ahern’s remarks before the House Appropriations Homeland Security committee appear to go a bit further than saying meeting the deadline is doubtful by saying that the “100 percent requirement needs to be thoughtfully reconsidered.”
Earlier in the hearing, Ahern said that the 2012 deadline appears to be “unobtainable.”
CBP is still working to meet the deadline, Ahern said, “but our concern is to ensure that this focus does not negate the effective layers of the risk-based strategy that is currently now in place. And as you’ve heard me say before…no one should be misled that 100 percent scanning equals 100 percent security.”
Ahern listed a series of challenges, all of which have been mentioned before, to meeting the screening deadline. These include costs and who incurs them, technology, political, environmental and legal. There’s also the likelihood that U.S. ports and terminal operators would also be required by a number of foreign governments to scan shipping containers bound for their respective countries.
On the technology side, Ahern pointed out that there still isn’t a way to efficiently screen transshipped cargo, which basically is unloaded from one vessel onto another.
Ahern also mentioned that in addition to the approximately 10 million shipping containers arriving at U.S. seaports annually, there are 11 million trucks crossing the borders from Canada and Mexico and another 2.7 million rail cars.
Ahern’s comments appeared to have a sympathetic reception from some of the committee members.
“From previous testimony before this subcommittee, and our own observations from subcommittee visits to Container Security and Secure Freight Initiative ports, it has been clear that the sheer scale and the technical and diplomatic complexity of the project made this target hard to meet,” Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), chairman of the subcommittee, said in his opening remarks.
The legislation mandating the screening of cargo containers overseas is contained in the SAFE Port Act, which Congress approved and then-President Bush signed, in Oct. 2006. The idea behind the mandate is to have containers screened for potential weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear or radiological, before arriving in the United States when it might be too late. The types of screening technology involved include X-Ray imagers, which provide a view into the contents of a container, and radiation portal monitors, which alarm on the presence of radiological material.
As CBP and former Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff have maintained previously, Ahern said that the likelihood of a nuclear weapon being smuggled into the U.S. on a sea container is very low.
Price agreed but said the consequences would be “extremely catastrophic.”
Regarding the challenges of implementing 100 percent cargo scanning overseas, Ahern mentioned some of the lessons learned in the Secure Freight Initiative (SFI), which is a pilot project required under the SAFE Port Act to test the ability to screen at foreign ports.
CBP initiated SFI at three ports: Cortes in Honduras, Qasim in Pakistan, and Southampton in the United Kingdom. All three included willing partners that either had electronic scanning equipment in place or made real estate available to install equipment.
Highlighting the challenges, Ahern noted that at Southampton the U.K. customs office made the initial investments as a partner and in hosting the pilot “but not one they wanted to continue to make.”
Ahern also noted that while Qasim ships relatively few containers to the United States, about 3,000 annually, Pakistan is a high-risk country.
“We need to look if that’s the right investment at that [container security] protocol and place so that we can secure that trade lane,” he said.
CBP, with aid from the Department of Energy, has also deployed scanning equipment to a terminal in Hong Kong. The agency has also begun an SFI operation in Port Busan, South Korea, and will soon have an operation in place in Salalah, Oman, Ahern said. CBP is also working with customs in Pakistan to bring SFI to the Port of Karachi this year, he said.