By Calvin Biesecker
After nearly a year of consensus building around the globe on new aviation security standards and practices led by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.N.’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the agency’s general assembly will convene in September to conclude the effort, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said yesterday.
The international aviation security system has been a focus for Napolitano following the failed Christmas day bombing attempt aboard a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Following the incident, she dispatched key DHS executives on a 12-day trip around the world to meet with various ministers in different governments to begin to forge a new consensus on global aviation security.
The result has been several declarations related to aviation security between DHS and regional partners in Europe, Asia, the Western Hemisphere and Africa that include closer information sharing, better use of screening technologies, improved passenger vetting and modern security standards, Napolitano said at a National Press Club luncheon. In the coming weeks, DHS and ICAO will be meeting in the United Arab Emirates with partners in the Middle East “to forge” another international consensus on aviation security, she said.
With the meeting of ICAO’s general assembly in September, “we will have gone basically in nine months from zero to a revised global consensus on what we need to do to not only react to the threats that we know exist but build capacity to be proactively dealing with the safety and security of global aviation,” Napolitano said.
ICAO’s general assembly consists of the approximately 190 countries that are contracting states of the body.
Napolitano said that the ongoing consensus building efforts take into account that “not every country has the same kinds of resources” to deal with the changing and evolving threats to the international aviation security system.
Yet the there has been a common understanding of what needs to be done, she said.
“But I think it is highly significant in all of our discussions with all of the issues involved and possible tensions that could have arisen, it is remarkable to me anyway on this issue the need to have a safe and secure global aviation system that allows people and goods to travel the globe with every bit of safety and security we could have there’s been no resistance or pushback whatsoever,” Napolitano said.
Of the evolving threat, Napolitano said that it isn’t just a product of “large conspiracies” that take a long time to plan out, but just relying on individual persons to carry out an attack as in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber.
Al Qaeda is “making greater use of individuals who don’t fit what we think of as a terrorist profile,” she said. “They may have no derogatory information about them in any intel file, for example. We are seeing the use of women, the recruitment of women for these kinds of missions, which is also a change. So it’s an ever evolving world that we deal with, and an ever evolving threat situation.”
On top that is the types of threats and how they are deployed. Napolitano pointed to explosives that can be detonated on an airplane yet can’t be detected by metal detectors at security checkpoints. And the terrorists are “putting those materials in harder to find locations,” she said.
What hasn’t changed is “the fact that aviation continues to be the target of threats,” Napolitano said.