THANKS nw.
REMARKS SNIPPET from your link in post no. 80 nw:
"So let me talk about some of the things we are looking to do. In the area of port security, we are looking at, in particular, risk management focused on high-consequence events. Everybody's nightmare scenario is a weapon of mass destruction, radioactive or a nuclear device, coming in through a container, coming in to one of our ports. Now if we believed in absolute security at all costs, we could easily deal with this problem. We would simply stop containers from coming into the ports, or we could take a solution that actually has been suggested by some people, which is a physical inspection of each container. But I want to suggest to you that either of these approaches would have such a destructive effect on the American economy that we would be handing the terrorists a victory on a silver platter.
What we want to do is be intelligent and risk-focused. That means we want to use intelligence-driven analytic tools to target those containers which based on their history and the history of the shipper and the consignee we ought to worry about. We want to continue to deploy radioactive scanning machines, looking to by the end of this year get two-thirds of the containers coming into the country scanned through those machines, and almost 100 percent by next year.
We want to go to the investment of technology for the next generation. We want to work with our overseas partners building on some projects such as the pilot in Hong Kong, which would actually have x-ray machines scanning containers before they get into the queue for being loaded onto ships that come to the U.S. All of these approaches, which are well underway and which Congress has been very supportive of, are ways of managing risk by focusing on the high danger elements of what comes in without fundamentally impeding the flow of the system.
Likewise in chemical security, as I've indicated previously, the time has come to have a chemical security bill that gives us the tools to have intelligent regulation of the chemical industry, particularly with respect to those high-hazard chemicals. And the approach we've suggested that Congress take, and we are working with Congress on this, is to tier, by risk. Look at the high-risk areas and the high-risk chemicals, set performance standards that don't micro manage how one achieves good performance, but is very clear about the performance that we're going to insist upon, and then builds in incentives and, frankly, sanctions if those performance standards are not met.
And this is an approach, by the way, that I hope to see us deploy across all of the sectors of critical infrastructure. We're starting to do it with our new air cargo rule. I anticipate soon we'll be doing a similar proposal with respect to rail transportation of hazardous materials.
What we need to be doing over the next year is continuing to build on this model of intelligent, cost effective, and risk-based regulation and market-driven incentives to generally raise the level of all of our infrastructure security without fundamentally compromising the way our economy works.
Finally, I have to talk a little bit about preparedness, and that's preparedness to respond not only to the terrorist event, but to respond to the natural hazard."