Posted on 09/05/2005 11:11:47 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Ocean-going cargo is the critical link in the United States' economic supply chain--as well as the most effective delivery vehicle for a terrorist-inspired weapon of mass destruction.
A WMD-laden container ship entering Los Angeles, Seattle or New York would be enough to bring the entire U.S. economy grinding to a halt--whether successfully detonated or not. Either way, the impact would be devastating economically and politically both here and abroad.
Alas, ocean-going cargo is also the least secure. Despite efforts by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, to randomly check the manifests of containers overseas that are destined for U.S. ports, only about 6 percent of the containers entering American docks are actually X-rayed or physically inspected prior to their departure from foreign ports.
Concern over the vulnerability of the nation's ports to terrorist attack comes at a time when U.S. companies rely on international transportation for an increasing share of foreign manufactured goods and raw materials. The combined value of U.S. exports and imports totaled $2.23 trillion in 2004, according to the World Shipping Council, a Washington, D.C., trade group representing liner shipping companies serving international trade. Roughly 11 million ocean-going cargo shipping containers are expected to be offloaded at U.S. ports this year, a number that may reach 12 million containers next year, according to council president Chris Koch.
The answer to this very real threat is to use active radio frequency identification devices, argues Gary Gilbert, senior vice president of Hutchison Port Holdings, the world's largest container port operator and a unit of Hong Kong-based conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa. A host of RFID designers and manufacturers, many backed by venture capitalists keen to invest in one of the latest VC trends--homeland security--fervently agree with Gilbert.
Lani Fritts, chief operating officer of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Savi Technology, a 16-year-old contractor to the U.S. Department of Defense, is one of those eager technology suppliers. In April, Fritts began supplying active RFID tags to Hong Kong-based Hutchison Port Holdings. Fritts boasts that his joint venture project with Hutchison will result in an active RFID-based information network that can track and manage container cargo to provide better visibility of goods traveling through the ocean-going supply chain and play a role in providing some level of intrusion detection as well.
"The value proposition is still very much inventory management, supply chain efficiency and adaptability," Fritts says. "But active RFID tags also happen to be tags that can supply some kind of security as well."
But some national security experts disagree. Roger Johnston, who runs the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, Calif., says his team has evaluated RFID devices, among other proposed cargo security technologies, and says his personal view is that RFID technology has benefits for inventory control. Still, he questions the technology's use in security applications. "The idea that you are just going to buy one thing that is going to do everything is not plausible," he says.
Adds John Hill, a principal at Esync, a Toledo, Ohio, consultancy specializing in supply chain and logistics: "From the point of view of security, I can encrypt an RFID tag. I can ensure that the tag has not been tampered with. But the tag itself is not going to do a lot to prevent a guy from penetrating the container."
The two men's skepticism is shared by others inside and outside the national security arena but is rebutted strenuously by active RFID tag developers who believe the dual use of the technology is the best answer right now to securing the nation's littoral from terrorist assault and its economy from serious dislocation. The Bush administration's Department of Homeland Security apparently agrees. It thought enough of RFID to test it under the Operation Safe Commerce initiative, a program funded by U.S. Customs and the U.S. Department of Transportation as a test-bed for security technologies to improve container security.
Who's right in this debate is hardly academic given the proven adaptability of al-Qaida and al-Qaida-inspired terrorist groups to target the U.S. and its allies abroad. The complexities of RFID technology itself--alongside various efforts now afoot to settle on a uniform standard for the deployment of the tags--only add to the confusion about what needs to be done to secure America's ports. The challenge of integrating any RFID supply chain technology into a workable security system will be daunting. Here's a look at what's been accomplished to date and what's over the horizon--for better or worse.
The complexities of RFID
Randy Koch, head of the cargo security group consulting unit at Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys, is publishing a road map for secure commerce put together with input from importers, carriers and port and terminal operators that want to establish effective policies to secure procedures for loading containers, and for container checks that comply with actual security initiatives from various U.S. agencies, such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But Koch notes that the technology part of the balance is still evolving.
RFID technology uses radio waves to identify or convey other information about an object that consists of a tag and a reader. RFID devices use either passive (meaning they have no power and must be activated by a reading device) or active tags, which boast a power supply and are much more expensive. Active tags are the focus of cargo container security because they are battery powered, memory-enabled and have a range from 100 to 1,000 feet.
Joe Leone, chief technical officer of RFID Global Solution of Rogers, Ark., a systems integrator of RFID technology, says that active RFID technology can help deter tampering of shipping containers, especially when combined with sensors and locking mechanisms. Leone thinks that active RFID technology to secure cargo shipping containers is not yet where it needs to be, but it is getting closer to that goal. "It's going to take people with creative minds to understand how they are going to tie all of these different sensor devices and RFID tags together with software and communication systems," Leone says.
But that's a complex task, notes Craig K. Harmon, the CEO of consultancy QED Systems of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the chairman of the RFID working group on supply chain applications for the International Organization for Standardization. He says that in the near future there will be three possible active RFID tags associated with freight containers. All are still being worked on; none have yet been issued.
One is a read-only technology that can be written to once and read many times, much like the bar codes used in supermarkets only smarter, capable of identifying individual items instead of categories of items, which would be permanently affixed to a container. Another is a supply chain tag--a so-called read-write tag that could contain manifest information of the contents of the container. Information can be uploaded to the tag when loading the container and downloaded to the receiver at the container's destination.
The third is a so called electronic seal tag, or a read-only tag intended for single use. Such a tag would be used to indicate any tampering with the contents of the container. Tying these RFID technologies together into an integrated system would be a demanding challenge, says Hill of Esync, but there is no shortage of active RFID equipment suppliers that see cargo security as a significant market and are trying to capitalize on it.
Among them is RF Code of Mesa, Ariz., a supplier of active RFID tags and data management software to manufacturers, container companies and amusement parks. The venture-capital-backed company (it boasts Intel Capital as one of its investors) in the fall of last year participated in a test project under the auspices of Operation Safe Commerce, an industry- and U.S. government-led initiative to test cargo security devices. Among its products is its "secure strap" monitoring and electronic seal, which the company developed in league with Avery Dennison of Pasadena, Calif., which is manufacturing the actual pressure-sensitive tapes and seals.
RF Code's secure strap contains electronic seal technology to monitor the exact location of containers and any evidence that they have been tampered with during transit. The company's technology consists of an active RFID real-time locating device that is attached to a fiber-optic tamper sensor cable. If the cable is compromised, RF Code's secure strap sends out a radio signal.
Armando Viteri, president and CEO of RF Code, says the device was tested successfully on various trade lanes over a period of five months in early 2004. There are currently three pilot programs, says Joe Miglionico, business development manager for Avery Dennison's industrial and automotive products in the North America division. One is on an intermodal ocean-going cargo container, the other two are on over-the-road trucks.
Avante International Technology, an active RFID equipment supplier in Princeton, N.J., takes a different approach. The company claims that, rather than monitor the lock and seal on containers, its system monitors intrusion from inside the container. Avante has developed a system in which several active RFID "Zoner" tags are placed randomly inside a shipping container. Each tag emits a burst of 433 megahertz signals at several discrete power levels every few seconds.
A network of RF readers outside the container monitors signal changes that would result from intrusion through any surface of the container. A secure on-board communication system would report intrusions or tampering while in transit to customs officials or port authorities.
None of these RFID security technologies have been commercially deployed, however. That's not the case with Savi Technology's active RFID-based network, which under the auspices of Operation Safe Commerce and Smart and Secure Trade Lanes has already installed its technology at Hutchison Port's terminals in Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Felixstowe in Britain, and Shenzhen and Yantian in southern China, according to Savi's Fritts.
Essentially, Savi and its JV partner Hutchison are investing in a common network infrastructure at public choke points where cargo converges. A shipper can connect to the network much like a cell phone user dials up the cell phone network, Fritts says. The network will be deployed according to ISO standards, he says.
Fritts says the move by Hutchison is significant because it is a major commitment to build an active RFID infrastructure around port operations. Adds Hutchison Port's Gilbert: "Each box that comes into our terminals we consider a potential Trojan horse, because we know where it came from, but we can't verify where it has been or verify if it has been tampered with."
Gilbert believes in layers of security, from closed-circuit TVs and fencing around terminals to radiation portals and X-ray equipment to screen containers. He says active RFID could provide added security through container tracking and transmitting tamper evidence, noting that most major transocean carriers have sophisticated systems to trace shipments--but that many small, coastal carriers do not have sophisticated tracking systems. An active RFID network could help trace cargo shipments through areas of potential unrest, he argues, as well as be a means of verifying that mechanical seals on containers are intact.
The role of the government Yet David Schrier, an analyst with ABI Research of Oyster Bay, N.Y., who recently authored a report on cargo security, does not expect to see wide implementation of RFID on shipping cargo containers without a push from the U.S. government to establish a U.S. standard and then an international standard. Chris Koch of the World Shipping Council expects U.S. Customs to issue a rule sometime in the next year that would require carriers to verify seals on all boxes before they are loaded on a ship in a foreign port to be brought to the U.S. But he does not expect the mandate to specify technology.
"RFID could provide a more efficient way to meet the requirement than a manual process," says Koch, without getting into a debate about the competing RFID technologies now in the marketplace. Currently, however, the thinking in the industry is that U.S. Customs will require a fourth type of security technology, a decidedly mechanical barrier seal on containers. Mandating mechanical seals suggests that they will have to be inspected--a job that would require tremendous manpower.
Such a move could open the way for the use of the RFID electronic seal, however, which could be checked automatically rather than manually. The impetus to adopt the use of an electronic seal is probably going to be a result of the labor required to inspect mechanical seals.
Today, however, there is currently no legal requirement that an ocean-going cargo shipping container be sealed at all. Worse still, none of the major government port security initiated since 9/11 include container seals. The Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Customs Office failed to respond to repeated requests for comment by press time, though a recent report by consultancy A.T. Kearney noted that Customs and Border Protection commissioner Robert Boner has hinted that low-risk containers (those using technology that can detect or record that tampering has taken place) could be expedited at the port of destination.
But even if the technology is put to use swiftly by carriers, port operators and their corporate customers, skeptics of active RFID tags say more has to be done. Roger Johnston's team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has tested the security effectiveness of devices that profess to prevent tampering with containers or intrusion detection. His team has evaluated RFID devices, tamper-indicating seals and the Global Positioning System satellite system, among other technologies, and found that the RFID manufacturers are not thinking about security at the most basic level.
Johnston says his team has been able to demonstrate that active RFID tags are easy to steal from one container without detection and then attach to another container, or counterfeit, or spoof. He notes that RFID manufacturers have made attempts to design security features into the active tags, such as through cryptography, to deal with potential adversaries. But for the most part, those attempts have not been effective on devices he's tested. "It is relatively easy to tamper with these devices," he concludes.
Johnston also draws a distinction between the tracking and tracing of products in the supply chain and national security. He sees confusion in the market between devices used for security and for inventory control. "Unfortunately, there is a long history of systems and devices that start out for inventory applications and quickly become touted for security systems," he says.
Previous Next Esync's Hill adds that active RFID tags could help contribute to cargo container security but only when used in tandem with other technology, such as X-ray detection portals and other types of sensors for chemical, biological or nuclear materials. Getting those technologies to act in harmony, however, is a massive integration challenge, he says.
That kind of effort is not even being contemplated by the U.S. government because not enough attention is being paid to defeating terrorist adversaries, argues Johnston. "Piling on" features to active RFID tags, such as GPS tracking, really does nothing to enhance the physical security of the containers, he notes, and inventory tracking is different from actual container security.
The upshot--whatever one's view on the efficacy of RFID technology--is that more needs to be done, and the sooner the better, to secure container cargos from terrorists.
Relying on the RFID tag to identify the contents of a shipment is preposterous. We might as well go by the Bill of Lading.
A nuke on a container ship is one that concerns me. I don't believe there are any terrorist nukes in the country due to the problams of keeping them viable. A nuke in a container only needs to get into a major port to kill thousands and render the port useless hundreds of years.
I'll take Bush's approach. Eliminate the opposition and eliminate the threat. Kill the opponent and their weapons are mute. Allow personal freedoms to the opponet and they'll busy their lives improving their circumstances through legitimate endevor.
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