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A thin plastic security strip is sometimes all that protects a ship against the introduction of illicit materials.
Every day, 1,500 containers arrive at the port of Oakland, California, ready to be moved swiftly onto the rails and highways that will take their contents into the heartland of america. While they are being unloaded, a terrorist in a rowboat can paddle in uncontested, set off a bomb and rock the heart of the harbor with an explosion. Meanwhile, U.S. Customs officials, who have to verify the contents of those 19-ton packages of goods, in the end have to trust that the captains of arriving ships are telling the simple truth about whats on board.
Ray Boyle still admires the rugged beauty of the Port of Oakland. The harbor is filled every day with all manner of sleek vessels—from 10-foot kayaks, to 30-foot sloops, to oceangoing cargo ships that stretch almost 1,000 feet from stem to stern.
The wake from the giant ships laps lazily against the docks, where 200-foot-high cranes perch like giant heron ready to pick containers off their massive decks. Near the foot of the lifts, the Northern California sun glints off a small fleet of diesel-powered 18-wheel trucks, waiting to receive their loads.
Oakland is a productive port. Its mission is to move commercial freight “quickly, at the best possible cost, to generate the best profit,” as Boyle, the ports general manager of maritime operations, puts it. Last year, it handled more than 1.7 million cargo containers, trailing only the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Calif., and New York-New Jersey.
But security has never been part of its mission—or that of any port. The idea of slowing down cargo to check it for destructive contents, Boyle says, “is alien to a certain extent.”
That has left the nations system of seaports “very vulnerable,” according to Rear Admiral Larry Hereth, the Coast Guards director of port security. Much like airports were before Sept. 11, 2001.
No longer does Boyle—a 30-year veteran of the Port of Oakland—regard a kayak as simply a recreational craft. He wonders whether suicide bombers might be rowing underneath the docks. He thinks about Al Qaeda operatives being smuggled aboard one of those giant cargo vessels. If thats not enough to turn his gray head of hair white, he contemplates the possibility that weapons of mass destruction could be hidden in one of the approximately 1,500 containers that get trucked out of the port each day.
This kind of exposure at seaports puts a foundation of the U.S. economy at risk.
Ninety-five percent of the $827 billion of trade done with countries outside of North America comes in by ship. That is 7.6% of the $10.4 trillion of goods and services consumed annually in the United States. In addition, the $104 billion worth of oil imported annually to power factories, retail stores, schools and vehicles of all sizes and shapes comes in by ship.
If something was to happen to Boyles port, it would affect ports across the country. In the event of an attack, the federal government likely would order all the nations 360 harbors shut down. The ripple effects of such a move were seen last fall, when a 10-day strike by dockworkers at Oakland and 28 other West Coast ports cost U.S. businesses $2 billion a day in lost sales, according to the American Association of Port Authorities.
Next page: Oaklands blind faith situation and a Baseline investigation.
Oaklands Blind Faith
Port managers are working feverishly to prevent a dockside doomsday. For his part, Boyle is assessing port vulnerabilities and tightening up perimeter defenses with motion-detector equipped fences and surveillance cameras. Hes also looking at gate-control mechanisms that ultimately could include everything from smart cards to biometrics.
But Oakland needs to do a lot more—and Boyle knows it. He doesnt have the funds to set up an emergency communications network that would connect the 11 container terminals in his harbor with the Oakland Police Department. Nor does he have the money for a vessel that would patrol Oaklands 19 miles of waterfront. Those projects could run into the millions of dollars. Boyle says, “We dont have that much money.”
Oakland made what it says was a fair and accurate assessment of its needs and applied for more than $150 million in federal port security grants to pay for fences, barricades, surveillance cameras and many other projects. So far, the port has received just $6.4 million—$4.8 million in a first round of aid and $1.6 million in a second.
But securing the ports perimeters is only half of Boyles battle. The most worrisome threats wont be stopped at the ports gates nor its docks—if a container loaded with radioactive or biological weapons gets anywhere near the ports 35 container cranes, its probably too late for Boyle or anyone else in Oakland to do anything about it.
The ports only real defense against a weapon of mass destruction is to work with officials at the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard—the agencies most responsible for port security—to keep anything dangerous as far away from its anchorage as possible. That means knowing what ships are coming, whos on those ships, what those ships are carrying, and stopping them before they get close to the Golden Gate.
Take a look at how the Department of Homeland Security is combating cyber-terrorism.
Boyle and other port managers put their faith in Customs and Coast Guard to figure out whats in the 7.3 million inbound sea containers that 212,000 vessels bring into the nations ports each year.
But its blind faith.
A four-month Baseline investigation found flaws along the sea-based supply chain that include everything from data input to data collection to data analysis.
- Unchecked manifests. Every commercial ship transport must submit a manifest that lists all the cargo its carrying—from sneakers to cars. This is the primary document the Custom service uses to determine which ships it should ask the Coast Guard to stop at sea and inspect and which containers it should inspect upon arrival in a U.S. port. But its a system built on trust, and shippers can put down just about anything they like on this key report.
- Fictional crew members. Lists of a ships crew are often faxed to the Coast Guard a few days before a cargo vessel enters an American port. But, as in the case of any office fax, the words on these sheets of paper are often illegible—which means the names cant be input into any name-checking system, such as an immigration database. Like the manifests, the captain of the ship can submit any names—including fictitious ones.
- One-eye blindness. U.S. Customs and the Coast Guard each collect and store information on cargo and ship activity. But the two agencies dont have systems in place to exchange data so that either can instantly paint a single, computerized picture of the ships, crews and cargo heading toward a port.
- No sure alerts. Even when federal agencies have accurate information on a vessel and quickly assess a threat, Customs and the Coast Guard have no fail-safe method to alert Boyle and other port managers that they may be in harms way.
Next page: Modernization efforts at U.S. agencies versus flaws in current systems.
Modernization Efforts and Current
Flaws”>
Managers like Boyle in many cases have spent their entire careers administering the movement of bananas, coffee, steel, trucks, toys and other articles of everyday industry and life. Now, they have become the nations first lines of seaport defense, in many ways. They, better than anyone else, know the normal operations of a port and can quickly determine if something—a person, a vehicle, a piece of equipment—appears to be moving or working in a suspicious manner. They are the primary gatherers of local observations for law enforcement and intelligence officers. And, at so-called landlord ports such as Oakland, where shipping companies run their own loading and unloading operations in facilities leased from the port authority, the Ray Boyles of the port are the liaisons between shippers and federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard.
Open Borders
Port managers like Boyle also are the first responders to immediate threats. If a suspicious ship was coming through the Golden Gate, for instance, Boyle could help decide the safest place to dock the ship. He also can find room for inspectors and their detection equipment to operate.
But Boyle and the port he manages can be left adrift, when the information and communications systems that tie Customs and the Coast Guard to the professionals at the port are flawed.
Customs has embarked on a computer modernization effort to better capture and process information from manifests. But it will cost more than $1 billion and wont be finished for another four years. The Coast Guard has started on a massive upgrade to its fleet, which will include new onboard computer systems that will give ship commanders instant access to its ship registry and crew databases. It will cost $17 billion and take at least 10 and possibly 20 years.
Boyle doesnt have that much time. He has to defend his port today.
Boyles office building faces Oaklands Inner Harbor, where incoming ships turn around before unloading and heading back out to sea. A recent summer afternoon was like any other. One of the massive ships, its deck packed five containers high, was slowly spun by a pair of tugs. Neither Ray Boyle, nor local customs officials, nor the Oakland Coast Guard detail could say with absolute certainty what was on that vessel.
Worrying about container contents was not how the stocky Boyle expected to be spending his days. As a young man, he joined the military and pursued a career in the Army. A reduction in military forces after the Vietnam War changed his plans. A man with the solid frame of a longshoreman, he started at the Port of Oakland 30 years ago tracking tariffs and learned about the shipping industry. He worked his way up to Maritime Director, responsible for just about all port operations “There are a lot of people here like that,” he says. “You pick things up as you go.”
By summer 2001, he was ready to pick things up altogether. He wrote a book on port operations, planned to retire and figured he would work for a few years as a consultant. Sept. 11 changed all that. The new maritime director, Jerry Bridges, asked him to handle security and, the next thing Boyle knew, he had to pick up a lot of new things as he went along.
Now, Boyles days start as early as 6:30 a.m. and are fueled by bite-sized hits of candy from jars in his office promoted as “Sugar Central.” A typical day this past August began with a pair of discussions on security issues with Coast Guard and shipping-company reps. After the back-to-back meetings, Boyle raced to his office for an afternoon of writing applications for port-security grants. The deadline for the third round of grants totaling $104 million from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is less than two weeks away. Competition for funds will be fierce; the Port of Oakland by itself is seeking about $55 million.
In the first two rounds, Boyle won federal funding for basic perimeter security, including: digital cameras to observe what happens around the port; motion-detecting wires in chain-link fences around the terminal yards to catch intruders; an access-control system for port employees; and mobile barriers to divert vehicular traffic in case the Coast Guard decides the port is directly threatened.
But the port has a long list of projects that werent funded: an emergency communications network that would connect the marine terminals with the Oakland Police De- partment; an unmanned vessel that would patrol Oaklands harbor; a way to harden the chain-link fences to make them higher and more difficult to climb; and other projects. Boyle, for instance, wants to test the issuance of identity cards to transportation workers, so that a working system is ready to go when cards are required. TSA has yet to set a deadline, but Boyle expects the cards to be deployed within three years.
Next page: Funding favorabilty for aviation security and how to mitigate port risks.
Funding Favorability and Mitigating
Risks”>
Overkill? Hardly. This summer, a man on a bicycle was found roaming the grounds of the port, unchallenged. Similarly, in New York City, at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a college student and two relatives were able to walk uncontested beneath jet airliners, after their raft washed ashore in bad weather.
Borders of ports have never been sealed off. In fact, most ports are designed for easy ingress and egress. For instance, railroad tracks lead in and out of the Oakland port; beyond them is a network of freeways. Any dirty bombs or other weapons that can be smuggled inside a container could be moved within a few minutes onto the freeways or into downtown Oakland. Six blocks from Boyles office, one leg of that freeway system splits off and becomes the Bay Bridge, crossing about eight miles to downtown San Francisco.
“Its a little unbalanced,” Boyle says. “Theres been roughly $450 million allocated for maritime security, compared to billions in aviation. But when you have a lot of other ports asking for what are still basic needs, we didnt get as much.”
Funding Boyles security and information projects isnt going to be easy. The Oakland port is a department of the city, but receives no tax revenue. It is supposed to be self-sustaining; and its operations are profitable. But the amount of money needed to regenerate its facilities—and fund such things as camera and sensor networks—is stepping up sizably. In 2001, the Port of Oakland recorded $16 million in depreciation, the term for the money that should be set aside to restore assets, for its maritime operations. In the year ended June 30, 2002—the year of Sept. 11, 2001—depreciation went up 52.5%, to $24.4 million.
In August, for the first time in its history, the port laid off 41 employees to help make up a projected 2003 budget deficit of $17 million. To stay competitive, the port says it must modernize its terminals and rail yards and complete a $293 million dredging project to deepen its channels from 42 feet to 50 feet. This would allow the latest generation of 8,000-ton cargo ships to make Oakland a first port of call, potentially taking business away from Long Beach and Los Angeles.
But, ironically, more business will increase Oaklands security costs. The new ships—called Super Post Panamax vessels because they are too wide to fit through the Panama Canal—accommodate stacks of cargo 22 containers wide, holding more than 6,000 containers all told.
With so many containers coming into ports on a single ship, maritime security experts say the only way to really secure a port is to build many layers of defense. The layers include physical security, such as fencing, cameras and inspections. But they also include “business” intelligence and analysis: systems that compile information on ships, crews and cargo as they are being loaded overseas and that monitor the arrival of the ship and its contents in U.S. waters.
Port managers like Boyle will be called on to make this analysis work. “I dont know how you do [a layered defense] without having the port manager as a very active player,” says Stephen Flynn, one of the countys top seaport security experts and a former commander with the Coast Guard.
Next page: Reaching out to government agencies is a one-way street.
Reaching Out to Government
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Mysterious Manifests
Boyle already is active—or as active as hes allowed to be.
When it comes to working with Customs, for instance, collaboration is a one-way street. When asked how the department communicates with the port, Boyle says simply: “They dont … not unless they need our help.”
So Boyle has taken communication into his own hands. First, he reached out to Tom OBrien, who was in charge of San Francisco field operations for the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, until OBrien retired last month.
Boyle fought hard for Customs to relocate its Oakland offices into an old naval communications building on port land. That, OBrien says, allowed the agency to put all its staff in daily proximity with clerks and steamship company reps, so they will feel more comfortable calling if something seems amiss. An attempt to locate an outpost of the Oakland Police Department in a building across the street is still in the works.
“Rays not one of those camera-hungry guys whos got his eye on the next job,” OBrien says. “He always tries to do the right thing.”
Still, says OBrien, you can walk around and find shipments that appear suspicious—at any port, on any day. The manifests and the invoices might not agree, the containers might be damaged, or the importer might keep calling the steamship company, expressing “an undue interest” in the status of the shipment.
The hardest part is not sniffing out what “doesnt look right or feel right,” OBrien says. The challenge is having the analysts, databases and systems to cut through oceans of data and figure out what those anomalies mean. Do you have an importer thats consistently trying to give you bad information? If so, why? Are they avoiding tariff or import requirements? Or are they in a larger conspiracy?
The manifest continues to be the fundamental source of data about whats in ships—the focal point around which Customs anti-terrorist efforts revolve.
All carriers are required to electronically ship Customs an accurate manifest that details the cargos weight, its ownership, its shipper, its buyer and its port of destination before a ship can enter a U.S. port and unload.
The manifest has been in use for at least 200 years, but the document isnt more secure or accurate today than when merchant mariners sailed in front of the trade winds in the 18th century. It was then, and is now, a formality based entirely on trust. The carrier assumes the shipper is honest and Customs has little choice but to believe the information is accurate.
Customs officials prefer not to dwell on this troubling fact, but Sam Banks, a former deputy commissioner with the agency, doesnt mince words: “[Carriers and shippers] can lie. Thats a weakness in the system.”
After all, who is going to declare an illicit shipment of munitions, like missile launchers?
Next page: U.S. Customs current systems, processes and inability to share timely information.
U
.S. Customs Inability to Share Information”>
Customs does have a logging system—albeit based on an aging and inflexible computing platform—on which it can try to verify a manifest.
Customs main information system, the Automated Commercial System, though, is in the process of being overhauled. A $1.2 billion modernization of the agencys 18-year-old mainframe system, overloaded by a 45% increase in imports since 1996, wont be finished until 2006.
In the meantime, Customs will not receive the kind of detailed analysis it now needs. The system was set up around a ships port of entry, so broad-based information on where a container has come from and where it is going—how it fits into some companys supply chain—is currently not available, says Banks. Information from one port simply cannot be correlated with other ports or other shipments. Customs cannot electronically share suspicions about a shipment with the Coast Guard and other government agencies—or port managers like Boyle—which would allow them to build a clear picture of the cargo, ship and crew.
But this is the system on which Customs runs its Automated Targeting System (ATS)—a trio of databases in Virginia that scrubs manifests for anomalies against 1,000 weighted rules and helps the agency decide what cargoes warrant further attention.
On a recent sunny morning in July, OBrien is supervising five containers pulled out of the regular flow of traffic and lined up end-to-end by the waterside in a terminal yard at the Port of Oakland. The containers have been selected by ATS for closer inspection. ATS looks primarily for oddities. For example, the system recently noticed that an entire container of soap coming into Southern California was being delivered to a single apartment. Customs inspectors opened the shipment—and instead found a load of drugs.
The containers pulled at Oakland are to be inspected by one of two new Vehicle and Cargo Inspection Systems machines. The central features of these are scanners mounted on trucks, whose gamma rays can “see” through six inches of steel. Pointed at and crawling along the sides of a container, the scanners produce an image of the contents in less than a minute. By contrast, agents inspecting a container by hand would take four to six hours.
As the inspection truck drives slowly forward and the scanner moves across the containers walls, black and gray shapes of cargo emerge on the computer screen inside the truck. One, whose manifest is labeled “oil field equipment,” is leaking—a potential biohazard. But the container has a hole at the top where rain could get in. The leakage is water.
The other containers manifest is labeled “personal effects.” Its impossible to determine whats inside—other than partially filled boxes—even after lightening and darkening and tilting the image. OBrien says the container will be opened, and the shippers name run against more databases. What is found in the container will be classified information.
Still, Customs is not scanning as many containers at Oakland as it would like.
This is a good day—Customs will scan 100 to 150 containers of the 1,000 that move through the port. A really good day means 200 containers get scanned. And if unions agree gamma radiation is safe enough to allow workers to get close, the port could locate scanners at terminal yard gates and hit 300 to 500 containers as they pass by on trucks.
Even now, Oakland is doing better than other ports. Scanning 100 containers means the port is able to scan around 10% of the containers Customs receives every day. Ports without the machines inspect somewhere between 2% and 5% of containers.
This only heightens Customs efforts to improves its computer systems and institute new inspection programs—such as the Container Security Initiative, which calls for Customs agents to be posted at key foreign ports to scout for high-risk containers.
Of course, says OBrien, “no system is foolproof.”
Next page: Whos on board and a rejection of a better alarm system.
Whos On Board
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Whos On Board?
In addition to Customs, the Coast Guard has been given added responsibilities for border security with the advent of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Boyle confers often with Commander Greg Phillips, whos been charged with securing waterways and docks around the Port of Oakland. Commander Phillips office is nearby, on a 68-acre island in the Oakland Estuary. The two men take part in various monthly port-security conferences, and talk separately about security breaches, such as the curious bicyclist found circling the grounds.
But this also poses a problem. There is no automatic alert system for Boyle to notify the Coast Guard of a potential threat. If the biker had been a terrorist instead of a tourist, it would have been close to impossible to quickly muster all the port, law enforcement, and federal agencies responsible for defusing a bomb, gun, chemical, biological or nuclear threat.
The alert system? Phone, e-mail and fax.
But calling by phone is hit or miss. Other alternatives arent much better. “We can send out a fax, but does [the person] sitting at the fax know to look for something? We can e-mail something, but does that go into somebodys pager? Does someone know to go back and look at an e-mail? What are we doing with folks who are on vacation or not available? How do we know the next person down is getting key information?” Phillips asks. “Getting information out is not as difficult as making sure it gets in the right hands.”
As a result, the San Francisco Marine Exchange, a nonprofit group that provides shippers with forecasting and tracking information, asked the TSA for a grant to bolster Coast Guard communication systems so that warnings of threats could be exchanged quickly. The grant was turned down.
If the Coast Guard raises its estimate of the maritime security threat level, outlying ports might not hear about it for 24 hours, says the exchanges deputy executive director, Jeff McCarthy. A bigger problem for Boyle and his counterparts is just being able to effectively collect, record, and analyze the bits and pieces of information that the Coast Guard picks up on during patrols. Boyle needs telltale tidbits such as a watercraft hanging at an entrance to the port or a small boat circling the docks.
Getting a sense of whats going on in the waters around the nations ports is tougher than seeing beyond a ships bow in a typhoon, according to Phillips and other Coast Guard officials.
That proved painfully obvious when the Coast Guard got word one recent early morning that a man in a rubber raft landed at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge. A patrol was sent out.
“But they couldnt find the person,” says Boyle, “couldnt find the boat.”
Later that morning, according to accounts of the incident, the man turned himself in to local authorities. He said he was just out on the bay fishing.
Part of the reason the Coast Guard couldnt find the rafter is its crews information-gathering tools are still binoculars, a map and radar. Yet, radar, as Americans learned from the 2000 suicide-boat attack on the USS Cole, cannot detect small objects with low profiles traveling close to a ship.
“We are blind as to whats going on in maritime,” Commander Dave Vaughn of the Coast Guards Office of Command and Control told a TSA port security conference audience last month in Charleston, S.C.
Next page: “Cop on the beat” instincts for the Coast Guard and a new surveillance system?
A New Surveillance System
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Better equipment is needed if the Coast Guard is to have any chance of locating a motivated Al Qaeda operative quietly paddling the water of San Francisco Bay, much less communicate the operatives presence to Boyle or Customs officials.
Boyle had a plan to augment the Coast Guard radar system with a system of high-powered surveillance cameras positioned all around San Francisco Bay and its adjacent waterways to look at channel access to the Sacramento River and the three major Bay Area ports. Such a camera network may have helped the Coast Guard locate and identify the raft. He estimated the cost of such a system at $6 million and thought the government and other ports in the area could all pay for it. No dice.
Instead, the commanders and crews of Coast Guard patrol boats count on gut instinct. “The guys and gals out on the water patrolling rely—very much like the local cop on the beat—[on their] senses to get a feel for whats normal and whats out of place,” says Phillips.
Even though Boyles camera network hasnt been financed, deploying high-tech information and intelligence systems is part of the Coast Guards formal port security strategy. The program calls for the Coast Guard to gather information about the waterways, conduct surveillance of ships by air and sea; and constantly track vessels, cargo and persons around the nations harbors to identify vulnerabilities—and threats on the move toward them.
Get the details on how the speed of vessels of all sizes can represent a security risk.
“It goes to the heart of knowing whats going on. Which people, which ships, which cargo, is coming in your direction,” says Rear Admiral Paul Pluta, recently retired assistant commandant for Marine Safety and Environmental Protection.
Creating a network of shared data is at the heart of the plan. As called for in the Coast Guard Maritime Security strategy, which was published in December 2002, “databases used for law-enforcement, immigration, intelligence, defense and public-health surveillance will be connected through an enterprise architecture, and interagency intelligence fusion centers will improve information sharing.”
The identification system could be a valuable tool. With access to vessel registration and licenses, the Coast Guard would know instantly if a boat was allowed in a restricted area, such as the waters around the Coast Guard station on Yerba Buena Island, the shore around the San Francisco and Oakland airports, or the docks of the Port of Oakland.
Computer Sciences Corp. delivered a version of the identification system to the Coast Guard in 1998. But, according to the General Accounting Office, the system had trouble sorting out duplicate documents and tracking boats that were relocated from state to state.
The Coast Guard eventually took over the project, but in 2000 the system was shelved, according to the GAO. The Coast Guard isnt totally exposed. It has an intelligence center located at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Maryland.
Next page: Making sense of homeland security rhetoric and the blurry division of responsibilities.
Homeland Security Rhetoric
ONI is responsible for the collection, analysis and dissemination of “maritime intelligence”—anything pertinent to national security that happens at sea, including weapons proliferation, the transfer of components of weapons of mass destruction, technology transfer, terrorism, drug smuggling and illegal immigration. That means that the ONI serves not just the Navy and Coast Guard, but feeds intelligence information and analysis to the Department of Defense, FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
The Coast Guards intelligence center has access to the FBIs National Crime Information Center, which stores data on criminals, stolen property and missing persons, and can tap various terrorist watch lists. The Coast Guard has started to push ship arrival information to Customs. This helps build a more complete picture of vessel cargo and crew—although, says Richard Harding, chief of the Office of Intelligence-Systems and Security at the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard is still relying on ship captains to send it accurate crew lists. “Im not sure how we could verify it,” says Harding.
While Harding says the Coast Guard is starting to use computers to track people, many ships are still tracked by whats known as “dead reckoning”—taking the time a ship leaves a port, factoring its speed and direction, and then plotting its course based on those numbers, which probably wont do much to track terrorists who dont want to be found.
What the Coast Guard needs, across the board, is a way to collect and analyze that data instantly. Todays powerful container vessel can cut the water at an average speed of about 23 to 29 miles per hour. Which means even a giant tanker could be more than 50 miles away from a location given to a cutter crew by the time the Coast Guard arrives.
“We cant afford a maritime version of 9/11. Once you find out something you dont have a lot of reaction time to do something about it,” says retired Rear Admiral Pluta.
The Department of Homeland Securitys awareness of port vulnerabilities led it to issue guidelines for ship owners, terminal operators and the ports. It calls for national transportation worker ID cards, the installation of transponders on vessels so that they can be tracked, and tougher security measures around the ports. For Boyle, who already spends most of his days in meetings or poring over forms and documents, the guidelines are just another document to figure out. At the port level, the new policies call for the creation of security committees and the conduct of port vulnerability studies. Yet Boyle is still trying to make sense of portions of the government documents—in particular, the regulations that call for the creation of “security coordinators.”
Starting in July 2004, the Coast Guard will have the power to fine or shut down any port that doesnt comply with its security directives. So Boyle will have to figure out the new regulations soon.
“There is so much coming at all of us,” Boyle says. “Sometimes you almost dont know where to turn.”
Next page: Weaknesses run deep.
Weaknesses Run Deep
Weaknesses Run Deep
Its a nice goal, but the Coast Guard information and communications shortcomings run deep.
The Coast Guard already has the Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement (MISLE) database, which keeps track of commercial vessel owners and operators and ship-boarding at sea; and the Ship Arrival Notification System (SANS), which collects crew lists and other information, before a vessel arrives in the U.S.
But crew logs are often faxed and indecipherable, preventing Coast Guard personnel from entering the list into the notification system.
The Coast Guard can go out to sea to intercept a vessel if it believes the ship is carrying unwanted persons. But its not easy. On average, 15 to 20 commercial vessels arrive every day in the Port of Oakland. Each carries 25 to 30 crew members. Thats 375 to 600 names to check out daily—or more than 200,000 each year. According to the Coast Guard, 90% of the crews are foreigners. Right now, says Philips, “were relying on the credibility of the sender of the information.”
In addition, the Coast Guard does not have a system to keep track of small boats, which are registered by California and other states. The Coast Guard has been trying to develop such a program called the Vessel Identification Systems (VIS), which would give Coast Guard crews information on any of the recreational boats and other craft tooling in and out of the marina just east of the Port of Oakland. So far, it has failed.
Get more on sharing data effectively and the obstacles to sharing it safely.
The identification system could be a valuable tool. With access to vessel registration and licenses, the Coast Guard would know instantly if a boat was allowed in a restricted area, such as the waters around the Coast Guard station on Yerba Buena Island, the shore around the San Francisco and Oakland airports, or the docks of the Port of Oakland.
Computer Sciences Corp. delivered a version of the identification system to the Coast Guard in 1998. But, according to the General Accounting Office, the system had trouble sorting out duplicate documents and tracking boats that were relocated from state to state.
Next page: Getting Federal monies the old fashioned way: grant writing.
Writing Grants
Designated Hitter
But Boyle seems to be getting a better handle on it than most. In fact hes considered the local expert on federal funding.
On a Tuesday last month, Boyle was invited by the Coast Guard to explain to the full Bay Area port security committee how to write a successful federal grant application. Even though Oakland has gotten only a fraction of what it asked for, its better than nothing, which is what several other Bay Area agencies and businesses got. The whole Bay Area—which includes the ports of Oakland, Redwood City, Richmond and San Francisco—won less than $8 million out of the $170 million available in the second round of grants.
Scattered throughout the ports boardroom are around 30 people—from government agencies, port tenants and local businesses. Boyle stands to one side with his hands in his pockets, pacing to and from the coffee machine. When asked a question, he speaks calmly and deliberately. Dont be intimidated by the TSAs requirement to file grant applications over the Web, he tells the group. Dont panic if the Web site has glitches or your computers go down two days before the deadline.
“The big element you have to have is a clear insight into what your vulnerability is, and,” says the former English major and Chaucer fan, “to write that so they can understand it. Get everything they need to know in the first 500 words.”
Ultimately, Boyles job is putting out fires, doling out what money he does have to control the biggest ones. So far, the TSA has mostly funded basic perimeter security at ports—wire strung through chain-link fences to detect intruders, digital cameras, and access control mechanisms that will work with the worker ID cards. But even so, Oakland took a hit.
The port was awarded $4.8 million for a perimeter project it estimated would cost $14 million. So it dug deep into its own pockets for an additional $1.4 million to pay the tab of ADT Security Services, the lowest bidder. With Oaklands help, ADT scaled back the project to $6.2 million, exchanging 31 miles of fiber-optic backbone for a dedicated, encrypted wireless network, and relocating cameras so the port didnt need as many. “Oakland had to squeeze a quart-sized wish list into a pint-sized budget,” says Hobby Wright, ADTs manager of transportation systems.
Wright says ADT was able to add a “command-and-control platform” to the scaled-down project so Oakland could share information gathered from fences and cameras and building control systems with outside agencies such as the police. Right now, however, Oakland is reactivating a radio system that was used by the maintenance staff, so terminal operators can talk to each other on Motorola pagers if they see suspicious activity, and distributing radios to Customs and Coast Guard to improve communications with police. The Motorola pagers go for around $30,000, total. Its basic, Boyle says, but its a step up from making phone calls.
A bigger project is a portal that would integrate security into the ports everyday business—linking terminal operators, ocean carriers, railroads and trucking companies.
Parts of the project already exist. The terminal operators use various types of logistics software to keep track of containers and approve truck drivers for pickups. Meanwhile, Maritime Director Bridges has contracted with SynchroNet Marine for a portal called SynchroMet that lets trucking companies swap empty shipping containers online.
Such a portal could track the movement of cargo all through the supply chain, sending alerts when something is wrong, or verifying the identity of the truck driver delivering the container.
But right now, there is no funding.
Next page: Concerned Senators request examination of General Accounting Office of Homeland Security.
Senators Request Accounting Examniation
Money Time
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told the Senate earlier this year that he had “substantial money” to deal with port security and other defenses.
However, some other high-profile solons in Washington, including Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., feel seaport security is getting short shrift.
Hollings and McCain are so concerned that in May they requested a fresh General Accounting Office examination.
According to a letter the two wrote at the time: “The Coast Guard has estimated that it will require over $6.6 billion over the next 10 years for private port facilities alone to meet the baseline mandates, which will be final in October, in the new federal port security laws. The administration has awarded less than $500 million over the last two years.” The mandates refer to new Coast Guard regulations that require each port complete a vulnerability assessment, control access to its facilities, deploy security monitoring devices, and set up systems to check passengers and baggage coming into a port.
Read the Senators letter on inadequate seaport security funding and other required reading.
While $6.6 billion might seem like a robust sum, its not that big an amount for a nationwide security project. The U.S. government budgeted $10.6 billion this year and last for aviation security, and, according to estimates, is spending close to $1 billion a week trying to police Iraq and build a democratic Persian Gulf state. With just a fraction of that, Boyle could do a lot.
He could send a whole fleet of unmanned monitoring ships into the Oakland harbor; ensure screening of every container that comes through his port, link the port and shipping company terminals into the Oakland Police Department, and even establish the camera network around San Francisco Bay, so that he and Oaklands other seaport guardians could watch everything that moves man or material over water at any time.
But, to date, he hasnt found a way to foot the bill.
“I think [the federal government] is just trying to get the money spread out as far as possible, to cover the most risks possible—to establish basic systems and some consistent level of security they can rely on,” he says. “There are too many ports, too many entities, and not enough money.”