In the first part, we talked about the unintended consequences of the TSA cracking down on flights from Europe. The second part covers the things we’ve overlooked and will probably bite us sooner rather than later.
Cargo is the lifeblood of the world economy. Be it cargo on ships, trains, trucks or aircraft, cargo makes the money go from A to B and back again carrying, well, everything. Except for the lettuce you pick locally, it was cargo at one time or another.
Air cargo is a huge industry, flying everything except bulk commodities like coal or potash, anywhere in the world. Passenger airlines love cargo as it is found money. The aircraft is going there with people in it, so why not make some money off the storage space under the floor, as long as the gas is paid for by the passengers upstairs. Cargo doesn’t need much in the way of food, beverages or even oxygen. Cargo doesn’t get a safety briefing or needs to be reminded to put on its seatbelts for landing. The ramp rats are at the destination to unload the bags, so keeping them busy for another twenty minutes to unload a bunch of cargo is good business.
Where things fall over with cargo, specifically air cargo, is the security of the shipment. To quote the TSA “All air cargo is screened”. Don’t press for a definition of the word ‘screened’, as you might not sleep tonight. Here is what ‘screened’ means: Air cargo is not x-rayed or imaged. Individual boxes in a shipment are not opened. Bomb-sniffing dogs do not run over the cargo before it is loaded on the plane. There is no hand inspection of the components in a shipment. The sole screening of air cargo consists of the cargo company or middleman knowing the originating shipper, called a ‘known shipper’ in the Known Shipper program. Nobody from the TSA or CATSA goes to the originating warehouse to check what is being put in the boxes. It is all up to the shipping company to vet the originating shipper.
The shipper promises the airline that the boxes contain what they say they contain on the paperwork. The airline looks at the bill of lading and says “It ain’t labeled nuclear waste or live snakes, so let it fly.” Often the shipment comes in, prepackaged for a unit-load container, those big aluminum igloo shaped things, and gets put in the unit load along with other shipments. Truly smart shippers have their own igloos that they preload at their own shipping dock away from the airport. All they do is roll off the unit load container and put it on a trolley to drag out to the plane. As long as the weight and dimensions match what was planned for, the air cargo people don’t get involved.
Technically, TSA and CATSA physically inspect a percentage of the air cargo shipments. That specific percentage is not publicly available, as it is a question of ‘security’. I’ve talked with enough ramp rats over the years to know that the TSA, CATSA and the police have little or no presence on the ramp or the loading areas, unless a load of diamonds or cash is being transferred via air cargo. Only then will the uniforms make their faces visible.
On arrival at the destination airport, the unit-loads are pulled off the aircraft and trolleyed to the loading dock for breakdown, if the unit load contains several shipments, or cross-dock, if the destination receiver is going to pick up the unit load in their own truck. Roll it off, then roll it on.
The real number of inspected shipments traveling by air cargo, according to several sources including CNN, is around 5%. This means that 95% of shipments are not physically inspected in any way shape or form. Unless the cargo is actively ticking and smoke coming out of the boxes, there is no way to know if that unit-load is full of computer parts or explosives.
Shipping a load of badness is much easier that attempting to convince a young man to smuggle things on board an aircraft and blowing himself up in a sacred explosion. If the cement-heads need martyrs, then put the badness in a piece of cargo and phone it from the airphone in the aircraft, setting off the detonator: The end result is still aluminum rain and the usual terror.
Truck and sea shipping is just as porous. Sea containers, or cans, to use the industry term, can easily hold a couple of cars worth of badness. Again, the only screening the TSA and Canada Customs does is to look for suspicious shippers and contents. Some freight is x-rayed, but more than 90% is merely screened, with the shipping companies doing the vetting. Again the vetting consists of asking “Do we know these guys?” from the Known Shipper program.
As long as the paperwork for the truckload or can doesn’t say “Heroin from Afghanistan” or “Fuck You Infidel Zionist Bastards” the shipment goes into the system. A small piece of explosive trivia. The Timmy McVeigh fertilizer bomb that took out the Murragh Federal Building in Oklahoma City weighed about a ton and a half and fit nicely into a Ryder truck. A full-sized sea container will hold up to 40 tons. You can see them stacked double on rail cars leaving ports, traveling across country on high-speed freight trains. For that matter, you see cans on truck trailers being delivered to warehouses all over the place.
Getting on the Known Shipper program is about as easy as buying lottery tickets. The company I used to work for was on the TSA Known Shipper Program because we actively sought to get on the program through our shipping company. We sent big foam-lined cases full of laptop computers all over the continent as part of doing the Hands-On Labs in hundreds of cities. Each case was a bit smaller than the size of an adult coffin and weighed 150 pounds each. Most shipments had four cases. Those cases had flight stickers from all the airlines in North America with the exception of Aloha Airlines. The cases were always locked by us and sealed, so we would know if the contents had been tampered with, as each case held about $30,000 worth of laptop computers. The cases were never opened.
The reason the TSA, CATSA and the rest are fixated on airline passengers is simple enough. The original 9/11 attacks were passenger aircraft taken over by terrorists inside the aircraft, but that horse has already left the barn. The public face of TSA and Homeland Paranoia is focused on being seen to be doing something with their hundreds of millions of dollars of budget. Hassling air passengers is an obvious ‘doing something’. Spending time away from the public, checking more than 5% of the cargo shipments coming into and moving around North America is not an obvious ‘doing something’ as nobody can see it being done.
We have a couple of huge legally empowered agencies purportedly protecting us from terrorist threats who are more concerned with x-raying Grandma Hazel’s aluminum walker than doing the unglamorous work of opening boxes in warehouses and running bomb dogs over the cargo igloos at the airport. The TSA will argue that they are trying to find a “technological solution” to examine all the shipments without causing undue delays in the system.
We don’t need a technological solution, we need an agency with the commitment to say “Your shipment is going to be taken apart and everything checked by hand because we bloody well want to know what is in the boxes”. Then, have the manpower to do it. It doesn’t take high technology to check the contents of a box against the list on the bill of lading. Reseal the box with TSA tape that says “Opened and verified by TSA” Check more than 50% of the shipments moving around and you have actually done something useful.
If the TSA and Homeland Paranoia were truly committed, then any complaints from the shippers would be answered with a simple “Screw off and shut up” Oh, wait a moment. Interrupting the making of money and business in the interests of actual, real, Homeland Security is simply not acceptable is it? Sorry, I just got the memo. Hassling people in public is good. Interfering with business is bad.
If the cement-heads want to create some real terror in North America, the easiest route is not smuggling small quantities of binary explosive onboard aircraft in Gatorade and hair gel bottles. The easiest and forgive me for the pun, best bang for the buck, is to make every truck, rail car and delivery van an object of fear and terror. Cargo in transit is everywhere. You can build bombs big enough to take out bridges and buildings across the continent. Plus you don’t have to mess with the ideological and security problems of training martyrs.
All it takes is a warehouse. TSA, CATSA and the Department of Homeland Paranoia have left you a 95% open door.
RoadDave 