All hands on deck: Securing overseas freight

by Michele Regenold

A terrorist group gets its hands on a dirty bomb and plans to smuggle it into the United States inside a shipping container. Sound like a Hollywood action movie? Maybe. But it’s also the kind of real-world scenario that transportation security experts are working to prevent.

Shipping containers, those big metal boxes that look like the trailers hauled by semi trucks, enter the country by the thousands every day through U.S. seaports. That adds up to more than 11 million in a year, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Is it possible to check every single one of them for nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons?

That’s what the United States and several foreign countries hope to find out. CBP (which is part of the Department of Homeland Security), the Department of Energy, and the Department of State are working together with the governments of Honduras, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom to test the first phase of a new container security project.

Puerto Cortes, Honduras, Port Qasim, Pakistan, and Southampton, United Kingdom were chosen because these ports handle lots of containers and lots of cargo transfers from one ship to another. Scanning systems have been set up at each port. As of October 2007, each of these ports scans every container bound for the United States for nuclear and radioactive materials.

How container scanning works

A truck carrying a container bound for the United States arrives at a foreign port. It drives through a radiation portal, which looks sort of like a toll booth, where it’s scanned for radioactive materials. Data from the radiation scan is sent simultaneously to security people at the port (including CBP personnel), the host country’s government officials, and analysts in the United States.

Containers are also scanned with X-rays or gamma rays to get an image of the contents. Officials review these images for anything unusual, like contraband, weapons, and even people.

If radiation is detected, an alarm goes off. The system notifies security personnel, both in the port’s own country and in the United States. If the image doesn’t resolve the radiation issue, the container is scanned with hand-held devices that can distinguish between naturally occurring radiation versus radiation emitted by radioactive materials used in weapons.

Detecting radioactive materials that are dangerous—like highly enriched uranium—isn’t easy. Other things, like granite, fertilizer, cat litter, and even potassium in bananas or avocados, naturally emit radiation and can trigger a false positive in the radiation portal.

If the container’s contents are still in question, they may be physically inspected. After inspection, if the container is still considered high-risk, CBP staff would ask that it not be loaded onto the ship.

Why not wait until the cargo arrives in the United States and then scan it? Because it’s better to catch security problems as early as possible.

CBP’s approach to security is like a series of fences. If you get inside one fence, there’s another to get over. If a bomb makes it past the advanced screening of a container’s electronic manifest (its list of contents), then the scan at a foreign port may catch it. If it somehow bypasses security at a foreign port, then the security at the U.S. port would probably detect it.

An example of supply chain security

Consider the shoes you wear for gym class or playing basketball or running. Before you bought those shoes, they had to find their way to a store. And before that, well, let’s take a look at the links in this supply chain from the other end:

• A factory in China gets an order for its athletic shoes.
• A truck hauls the shoes from the factory to a seaport in China. All the shoes are packed in a shipping container, which gets sealed and loaded onto a ship. The U.S. government has already received a list of the container’s contents. If a U.S. government official thinks the container is suspicious or high-risk, it gets examined.
• A container ship, loaded with 14,000 or more containers (at least 1 container has the shoes inside), and sails across the Pacific Ocean in about 11 days to a seaport in the United States. 96 hours before the ship reaches its destination port, the U.S. Coast Guard receives a report from the ship’s captain about the crew and the cargo. If the Coast Guard is suspicious of anything, it will board the vessel while it’s still at sea, miles from shore.
• At the American seaport, the container with the shoes is loaded onto a truck. The truck passes through a radiation portal monitor and heads on its way.
• The truck hauls the container to a distribution center that opens the container and sorts the shipment of shoes for multiple stores.
• Another truck delivers the shoes to individual stores.
• You go to your favorite athletic outfitter and buy a new pair of basketball shoes.

At what points in this supply chain do you think the container is vulnerable? If this were a movie, after the truck picks up its load of shoes from the manufacturer, it would probably be hijacked and its contents tampered with before it reached the seaport in China. In reality, any such tampering would likely be detected somewhere along the chain.

To learn more, view "From There to Here: Supply Chain Security to the Port of Tacoma" (6 mb pdf), a poster created by the Port of Tacoma, Washington.

About the jobs

If you’re interested in security, counter-terrorism, or law enforcement, there are many different jobs in port security and supply chain security, both with the government and with private companies. A few are described below. Education requirements range from a high school diploma/GED to a 4-year college degree.

U.S. Coast Guard

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. Coast Guard’s mission has expanded. As part of the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard is responsible for security on the water itself, away from shore. Jobs are available for people right out of high school and for people who go to college first. There are also part-time jobs available through the Coast Guard Reserve. See http://www.gocoastguard.com/.

Seaports

Seaports are separate jurisdictions from city and county police, so they have their own port police departments. The Port of Seattle Police Department, for example, has a dive team, a boat team, and a canine team. You have to be 21 years old to become a police officer with the Port of Seattle. http://www.portseattle.org/about/organization/portpolice/index.shtml

Private companies that operate terminals at seaports also hire their own security staff.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection

This government agency works every day with people traveling in and out of the country, people conducting legitimate business, and people trying to smuggle illegal things into the country. See http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/careers/.