by Greg Schneider, The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Security for cargo carried on passenger planes is “easily circumvented,” the Transportation Department’s inspector general has warned in a draft report that has yet to be made public.
The risk of a terrorist bomb in air cargo has increased because the federal government is focused almost exclusively on screening passengers and luggage, Transportation Security Administration staff members and consultants concluded in similar reports.
Both sets of documents, obtained by The Washington Post, describe an air-cargo system that includes no routine scrutiny of packages and serious gaps in efforts to make sure shippers follow security procedures.
The inspector-general’s draft report was completed in January but has not been issued to Congress. TSA staff members followed up in March by laying out urgent plans for improvement, according to the documents and interviews.
But the steps they outlined have not been put into action as the agency scrambles to meet congressional deadlines for screening passengers and luggage.
“Cargo is likely to become — and may already be — the primary threat vector in the short term,” one of the internal TSA reports said.
The agency needs to “improve (cargo) security and reduce risk as soon as possible,” the TSA’s “Cargo Security Discussion Document” said, boldfacing the last four words.
The most obvious solution is to physically inspect all cargo as it comes into an airport, but both the inspector general and the TSA determined that would be impossibly expensive and time-consuming and could cause widespread disruption to U.S. business.
The TSA documents lay out a series of less-disruptive steps to begin addressing cargo security, including high-profile “blitz audits” of lax freight companies and immediately subjecting 5 percent of all air cargo to physical searches.
Instead, agency leaders decided to pursue a more methodical route, devising methods for measuring cargo security, painstakingly building up a staff of inspectors and awarding contracts for developing databases to monitor companies.
“There is certainly no hesitation or lack of intent or even moving slowly on the part of TSA on cargo security,” spokeswoman Mary Kay Eder said. “It is a high priority for an agency that is brand new and has multiple high priorities that it is addressing simultaneously.”
Almost all passenger flights carry cargo alongside luggage in the belly of the plane. Roughly 22 percent of all air cargo loaded in the United States in 2000 was carried on passenger flights, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The air-cargo system involves numerous participants that all require some level of security oversight. Generally, a shipper takes packages to a freight forwarder, who consolidates packages from many shippers into containers. The forwarder then uses trucks — his own, or hired — to deliver the bulk freight to commercial air carriers for transport.
The government oversight system is based on something called the “known-shipper” regime, which means the person or business sending a package has an established reputation.
The government banned unknown shippers from commercial airlines immediately after Sept. 11. Inspector General Kenneth Mead told Congress that was a significant step, but he has urged the TSA to go further.
The problem with relying on the known-shipper regime, according to the inspector general’s report, is that it allows approved cargo to fly on passenger planes with only a “visual inspection of the package exterior for tampering or leakage. ... We found that a terrorist could easily circumvent known shipper policy and ship cargo such as explosives and incendiaries on commercial aircraft without being identified or the cargo being screened.”
It’s up to the freight forwarder to certify that all the cargo came from known shippers, so the reliability and truthfulness of the forwarder are crucial.
But the inspector general’s office found it would be easy for a terrorist to actually become a government-approved freight forwarder. In May 2001, the inspector general’s office posed as a bogus company and was approved as a freight forwarder within 15 days.
Even if a freight forwarder is fully inspected and compliant, the forwarder can hand the shipment over to an unknown trucking company to take to the airport. There is no requirement for background checks of truckers — or, for that matter, of employees at freight-forwarding companies.