WASHINGTON, April 4 (UPI) -- X-ray images of the contents of 1.5 million shipping containers, ripe for intelligence analysis, are sitting on a computer server in Hong Kong unused.
The imagery has been collected over the past year in a pilot program run at the Port of Hong Kong, the busiest in the world. It is a program that a shipping executive said Monday proves every container coming in or out of a port can be screened for contraband, narcotics, humans and weapons without slowing down global trade.
It could be a treasure trove of data for U.S. Customs, the Defense Department, the Homeland Security Department and the CIA to identify smugglers and dangerous cargo before it gets to the United States, but most of the data has not been scrutinized. The Customs and Border Patrol is looking at a sample of about 20,000 images, culled in January to determine how a system like the one in Hong Kong might improve the security of the global supply chain.
"If no one wants to use it, then scrap it," said Gary Gilbert, senior vice president for Hutchison Port Holdings, one of the port terminal operators in Hong Kong, of the imagery.
He is a strong advocate for using it. Gilbert said Monday at a discussion on port security organized by Montana Democrat Sen. Max Baucus that the program should be mandated worldwide.
Gilbert said shipping companies and port terminal operators' bottom lines make such a system imperative. If there is a terrorist event at a port -- or nuclear or radiological device is found to have moved through a port -- it is likely to foul maritime shipping for days or weeks, costing billions. Minimizing the chances of a terrorist attack or the shipment of illegal weapons and providing a way to quickly track shipments back to their port of origin will minimize the disruption and safeguard their bottom line.
The Hong Kong pilot program, the Integrated Container Inspection System, was the brainchild of Stephen Flynn, a maritime security expert and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Flynn has no financial interest in the program.
The pilot program uses no government funding; it is carried out with funding and by the cooperation of American contractor SAIC and the Hong Kong Terminal Operators Association.
"That's what made this almost impossible to get someone to pay attention for it," Flynn said.
Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff was in Hong Kong over the weekend learning about the pilot project. DHS and Customs had the technical information about the pilot program a year ago, but have done little with it, Flynn said. It took the controversy surrounding the Dubai Port World takeover to refocus the U.S. government and public attention on port security issues.
Flynn brought SAIC and the Hong Kong port authorities together in 2004. SAIC had the equipment, and Hong Kong the test site to prove whether 100 percent of shipping containers could be actively screened at a reasonable cost without slowing down commerce, with sufficient quality of imaging to detect weapons of mass destruction, Flynn told United Press International Monday. The two port terminals involved in the project move 12 million containers a year, more than arrive in the entire system of U.S. ports.
The United States Customs and Border Patrol only physically inspects 5 percent of the containers that arrive at U.S. ports.
ICIS marries three commercially available technologies: the VACIS gamma ray imaging system, which provides radiographic images of container contents; the Exploranium Radiation Portal Monitor, which provides a graphic reading of radiation inside a container; and Optical Character Recognition portal system technology, which automatically identifies containers and allows the collation of data on each container.
The breakthrough in the pilot program is using the technologies in concert. Used alone, a radiation portal monitor has troubles. If it is set to catch low levels of radiation, it often yields false positive readings, forcing many containers to be pulled off line for further inspection and slowing port operations appreciably. Set at a less sensitive level to decrease false positives, it is apt to miss the very weapons it is searching for. At higher levels the monitor is easy to defeat, according to Flynn: all a determined terrorist would have to do is encase a dirty bomb or plutonium in lead and it would not trip the device.
But if a gamma ray imager is used in concert with the radiation detector, the radiation monitor could be set to detect low levels of radioactivity. Containers that set off the alarm would be automatically scanned with the gamma imager, which would show whether there is a dense object -- lead casing, for instance -- that requires further scrutiny.
"It seems like a very basic concept but we can't get any traction on it with the U.S. government," Flynn said.
Hutchison's Gilbert said Monday the cost of installing ICIS should be borne by shippers. The imaging process takes less than 30 seconds and would add only $10 to $20 to the shipping cost of each container at smaller ports, and only $6 a container at ports with higher volume, a tiny percentage of the roughly $2,000 cost to move a standard container on the sea.
However, it has to be mandated in every port, or vessels will just choose ports that don't use the technology and therefore don't charge the added fee, Gilbert said.
To make it worth port terminal operator's money to install the monitor, however, the U.S. government would have to invest heavily in Customs and Border Patrol to have enough analysts to use the imagery.
According to Flynn, there are about 80 CBP agents now dedicated to overseeing the port security program nationwide. He estimates between 300 and 400 would be needed to review every image of every container as it is loaded, assuming agents give five minutes of scrutiny per photo and have software tools that marry the images with manifests and company history.
Baucus, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, announced Monday he will call for a funding increase for the Bureau of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol when legislation to reauthorize the agency is considered later this year.
