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Despite the complexity of this shipment process, the U.S. approach to monitoring the flow of boxes is startlingly simple. U.S. customs inspectors divide the universe of containers into two categories--trusted and untrusted. A trusted container is one being shipped to an importer or by a consolidator known to customs inspectors. Essentially, they are repeat customers who have no history of smuggling or trying to violate other U.S. laws. These boxes are cleared by customs officers without any examination. Untrusted containers are those that come from the world's trouble spots, from new importers who have no established record of clearing customs or who trigger some other alarm, suggesting that an inspection is warranted. Rather than loading a weapon in a first-time shipment from a company in Afghanistan, which will almost certainly be examined by U.S. inspectors, terrorists are likely to take the time to figure out how to target the shipments of an established company. In fact, in the post--9/11 world, we should assume that bad guys will target a trusted box first.
What should a new transportation-security regime look like? It turns out that the problem is more manageable than the numbers suggest. This is because virtually all boxes will pass through just a handful of seaports if they are going to find their way to the U.S. In fact, approximately 70% of the 8 million containers that arrived in U.S. ports in 2002 originated from or moved through just four overseas terminal operators: Hutchison Port Holdings, P&O Ports, PSA International and Maersk Sealand. The fact that transportation of maritime containers is concentrated in so few places and managed by so few hands makes it an extraordinary pressure point. The major terminal operators should be the gatekeepers who ensure that only secure boxes will be loaded onto ships that cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
To guarantee that a container belonging to a trusted shipper has not in fact been compromised, we should insist that it be loaded in an approved secure facility at its point of origin. A digital series of photographs, each with a time signature, would capture images of the loading process, including when a security seal is activated. All these images would be stored on a data chip with the container or be transmitted electronically to the appropriate authorities in the loading port. The container should be outfitted with light, temperature or pressure sensors that could detect an unauthorized intrusion. Additionally, there should be an internal sensor that could detect indications of gamma and neutron emissions associated with a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb, prohibited chemicals and biological substances or CO2 generated by a stowaway. A container-tracking device could keep a global positioning system (GPS) record of the route that the container travels.