International Consensus on Small Boats

DHS policymakers spend a lot of time worrying about threats that haven’t happened yet. We also take a lot of grief from people who think that all our worrying is a waste of time—or, worse, an intentional strategy of fear-mongering. So it’s important to note those occasions when our worries have turned out to be on target.

The most recent such confirmation comes in the context of small boat terrorist attacks.

Two weeks ago, in Mumbai, India, terrorists seized a fishing vessel, killed its crew, navigated to Mumbai, and used small inflatable boats to come ashore for their attack.

DHS spent much of the last year on measures to reduce the risk that terrorists will be able to use small boats in an attack on this country.

In April, 2008, the Department developed a Small Vessel Security Strategy. The strategy outlines the goals and objectives that the Department component agencies, especially the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection, will work toward. Supporting the strategy an interagency working group has been developing an implementation plan which in the coming weeks will outline the Department’s specific intentions. All of this effort has been done in coordination with the owners and operators of small vessels, including American fishing fleets, recreational craft associations, and commercial passenger and cargo vessels.

And less than a week ago, on December 5th, an international effort led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, resulted in the approval by the International Maritime Organization of new guidelines for small vessel security.

A year in the making, the new guidelines provide recommendations for governments and the owners and operators of small vessels and related facilities such as marinas. The recommendations encourage the registry of vessels and the sharing of such registry information between governments, the installation of access controls at marinas and on small commercial craft, as well as guidance on how to conduct vessel searches.

Numerous delegations at the International Maritime Organization meeting expressed their intent to implement the guidelines within their domestic security programs.

Getting the international community to focus on terrorism, and especially on new terrorism threats, is not a job for the impatient, but this is a case where DHS was both patient and ahead of the curve, and the reward is that we were able to move swiftly once an international consensus emerged.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary, Policy

Yes We Are Safer

Last week, the nation marked the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in solemn fashion, focusing on memorials and reflection, rather than on point scoring. Too bad Richard Clarke couldn’t manage to do the same.

Clarke, the official in charge of antiterrorism efforts before 9/11, commemorated the anniversary of the attacks by publishing a finger-pointing screed in U.S. News and World Report.

Clarke’s argument went something like the following: Here we are, seven years after 9/11. We haven’t been attacked. But we could be. Al Qaeda still exists, Bin Laden remains at large, and terrorists still commit terrorism. We’re backsliding, and no safer now then we were then. On the home front, our borders are still porous, we’re still not screening people, and security grants are too much about pork and not enough about real risk.

Clarke is mostly wrong.

In fact, we are safer today than we were seven years ago. We haven’t been attacked since 9/11 in part because we have destroyed al Qaeda’s headquarters, enhanced our intelligence assets across the globe, captured and killed terrorists on nearly every continent, and partnered with our allies on information sharing and other security-related efforts.

Today, al Qaeda no longer has a state sponsor. Contrary to Clarke’s claims, most of its original leadership has been captured or killed. It is losing in Iraq -- thanks to the surge and to the Awakening movement among the Sunni tribes--and its savage attacks on innocents have reduced its popularity there and across the Muslim world. Muslim scholars and clerics are increasingly condemning its beliefs and behavior as a desecration of Islam.

This progress has come because we abandoned the practice of treating terrorism solely as a criminal matter – exactly the kind of September 10 policy that Clarke celebrates in his article.

Closer to home, the Department of Homeland Security has made clear progress that belies Clarke’s claims.

At the border that Clarke thinks is so porous, DHS has built hundreds of miles of fence and will double the size of the Border Patrol. We’ve also deployed fingerprint-based screening and radiation portal monitors at all of our border entry points.

To protect against a repeat attack, DHS has built nearly two dozen layers of security into our aviation system, and it has developed comprehensive security plans for other critical infrastructure.

Clarke claims that the executive branch has proved incapable of managing new terrorism programs to success. Tell that to US-VISIT – a massive government IT project that compares fingerprints of travelers to a database of millions and does it in 30 seconds for officials all across the country and the world. We got it up and running from scratch, despite the doubters. And it’s so successful that we’re expanding it to collect all ten prints and to compare them to prints found in terrorist safe houses around the world. We’ve done all that since Dick Clarke left government – and without a word of support from him.

Despite his claims of backsliding, it’s DHS that has been battling complacency, and Clarke who seems to have been sitting on the sidelines.

We’re the ones who’ve been fighting for the carefully targeted, risk-based homeland security grants he favors. It’s Congress that has added billions and made them less risk-based. Has Clarke criticized Congress or praised DHS for our risk based approach? If so, I missed it.

On our southern border, DHS’s fence-building and increased border enforcement have been hampered by local NIMBY (“not-in-my-backyard”) forces and advocates for illegal immigration. Did Dick Clarke speak out against them? Not so I’ve noticed.

To secure our northern border, we’re implementing tougher document standards, and we were ready to require all travelers to produce a passport or passport-equivalent by the end of this year. Where was Dick Clarke when Congress decided to push back that deadline to mid-2009? I don’t remember an op-ed then complaining about how porous this would make our Canadian border.

Clarke says that terrorists who look European have been trained by al Qaeda and may have European Union passports and clean identities unknown to intelligence agencies. He thinks such people could enter the United States almost as easily as did the 9/11 hijackers. It’s indeed true that during Dick Clarke’s tenure, Europeans could come to the US without any opportunity to screen them before they were in the air. As of this January, though, no foreign travelers other than Canadians will be able to come to the US without supplying -- in advance -- the information we need to screen them. At last, we’ll have the time and information we need to investigate risky travelers (and to prepare a rude surprise for terrorists who try this route). That’s all happened since Dick Clarke left government, and without any support from him.

There’s no question that Dick Clarke contributed to strengthening our national security, but his recent assertions are not only incorrect, they disrespect the work of many national security professionals he once called colleagues. That is indeed unfortunate.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy

Clear Benefit

As reported in today’s Washington Post, two recent Congressional reports claim that our Department lacks a comprehensive strategy to protect the American people from the threat of nuclear and radiological weapons and materials, and that our efforts to guard against biological threats are poorly coordinated and have “unclear benefit.”

While we welcome Congressional oversight and thoughtful, balanced recommendations and even criticism, these reports and comments widely miss the mark. They are based on outdated and incomplete information.

Far from lacking a strategic plan or clear goals, the Department, in cooperation with federal, state, local, and international partners, has developed and is implementing a comprehensive Global Nuclear Detection Architecture to prevent the entry of radiological and nuclear weapons or materials into the United States. This architecture is intelligence-driven, and built around a multi-layered strategy that starts overseas, continues at our borders, and is maintained within the U.S. interior.

It begins with securing the international supply chain and working with our partners overseas to prevent illicit nuclear or radiological material from being smuggled into the country. Through programs such as the Secure Freight Initiative, our officers are working with their foreign counterparts overseas to scan U.S.-bound containers for radiation as they move through international ports.

At home, we are scanning cargo at the ports of entry and closing gaps along the land, air, and sea borders. We now scan almost all incoming containerized cargo for radiation at our major seaports. We also scan 100 percent of truck cargo entering the United States from Mexico and more than 90 percent of the truck cargo entering the United States from Canada. Just a few years ago, we didn’t scan any of this cargo for radiation.

But our efforts do not end here. To counter the threat of terrorists attempting to smuggle material aboard small planes, last year we launched an initiative to begin scanning trans-oceanic general aviation aircraft arriving in the United States for radiological and nuclear material. We also recently completed a Small Vessel Security Strategy to address the risk of small boats smuggling dangerous material, and we have been testing radiological and nuclear detection equipment in various maritime locations on the West Coast. This is in addition to equipping every Coast Guard boarding team with radiation detection equipment.

To protect the interior of the country, our “Securing the Cities” initiative is integrating radiation detection capabilities within the New York City urban area, and we are testing fixed and mobile radiation detection systems for commercial trucks traveling on U.S. highways.

Finally, we working with the Department of Energy, industry partners, and others to enhance security for licensed, high-risk radioactive sources, and we are promoting the design and production of non-nuclear alternatives for industrial devices that currently use radioactive sources.

To be sure, these efforts are not complete. But they do reflect a balanced and strategic defense designed to identify and address remaining gaps and vulnerabilities in our detection capabilities and make wise investments of taxpayer resources to draw down the risk of WMD.

Beyond radiological and nuclear threats, we also have made strides to improve our detection of dangerous biological agents. Our BioWatch program is now deployed in more than 30 major cities nationwide to monitor the air for harmful biological agents, giving us a robust detection capability. BioWatch works hand-in-hand with our new National Biosurveillance Integration Center, which analyzes data to quickly determine potential health and security threats.

Under BioWatch – which did not exist before 2001 – the Department has provided guidance to all participating jurisdictions on preparedness, response, and environmental sampling so that they can build their own concept of operations and operational plans around BioWatch. We have specific cooperative agreements with each of the participating laboratories to use their space, but we pay for our staff, test equipment, and chemicals used to analyze the BioWatch samples. And we are now beginning to deploy our next generation of quicker, less expensive BioWatch detectors.

Perhaps those who say that BioWatch has “unclear benefit” need reminding that our nation already suffered an anthrax attack in 2001. Our ability to quickly detect and characterize these kinds of biological agents is critical to saving lives and minimizing the impact. I think most Americans would agree the benefits of such a system are indeed clear.

Michael Chertoff

A Fresh Look at Port Security

It often amazes me how certain myths about our Department’s efforts continue to endure despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Take port security, for example. I regularly see stories in the media asserting that our nation’s seaports are insecure as if we’ve done nothing since 9/11 to protect them. Just yesterday, a columnist for the New York Times casually repeated that claim.

I suspect a lot of this venting is simply intellectual laziness by those who prefer to recycle old sound bites rather than do their homework. In some cases, a deeper misunderstanding is taking place about how ports function in the real world. I’m referring to those who contend that because we don’t physically inspect every one of the 11 million shipping containers arriving at our ports each year, our entire system of security is compromised. Incidentally, those same individuals never explain that if we did open every box, there’d be a line of ships stretching across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans waiting to enter our country.

As we approach our Department’s fifth anniversary, I’d like to step back for a moment and take a fresh look at what we’ve done since 9/11 to protect our ports and maritime commerce, and hopefully dispel some of the stubborn inaccuracies that continue to persist.

First of all, it is factually wrong to suggest we’ve shortchanged funding for our ports. In fact, we’ve invested more than $16 billion to date. This includes funding for the Coast Guard’s port security operations, deployment of our personnel and equipment overseas, research into science and technology development, $1.39 billion in port security grants to states and port authorities, and hardening of physical assets and infrastructure.

Second, we’ve pushed our security perimeter outward so that we can identify and interdict suspicious cargo before it even has a chance to threaten our country. We now require information and intelligence on every single U.S. bound shipping container before it’s loaded onto a foreign ship. We’ve stationed CBP officers at 58 overseas ports accounting for 86 percent of the container traffic that comes to the United States. We’ve deployed equipment overseas to scan cargo for radiation before it leaves for our country. And we’ve proposed new regulations to collect more commercial data from the private sector so we can better track international shipments.

Third, we’ve taken common-sense measures to protect our ports here at home. Every major port and maritime facility in our country must now file a security plan with the Coast Guard that identifies its vulnerabilities and sets a plan to address them. We’ve enrolled close to 80,000 maritime workers into our Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, which provides secure identification to workers who pass terrorist and criminal background checks. Most significantly, we now scan virtually 100 percent of containers for radiation upon their arrival to prevent the entry of potential weapons of mass destruction. Prior to 9/11, we scanned zero percent of such cargo.

Have we achieved perfect security at our ports? Of course not. No human endeavor will ever achieve perfection and no system of security is infallible. But we have dramatically elevated our protection and built successive layers of security that have made our ports more secure than they have ever been. And we’ve done this without destroying the underlying reason for having ports in the first place – the efficient movement of people and commerce.

Those who don’t put in the effort to get their facts straight, or who use misinformation to suggest we are ignoring our maritime sector, are not serving their readers or the American people. They also do a disservice to the men and women who stand watch over our ports and our frontlines every day.

Michael Chertoff