Feb. 27, 2006 – 7:39 p.m.
Aiming to plug a loophole in a 2002 port security law, one New Jersey congressman will propose legislation to require that security personnel at port terminals are U.S. citizens.
Rep.
LoBiondo’s bill is one of several proposed last week in the wake of a recently approved $6.8 billion deal that puts six U.S. port terminals in the hands of the United Arab Emirates-based DP World.
“There’s a direct connection to the Dubai Ports [acquisition],” LoBiondo, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, said. “When all of this broke wide open last week, we started to internally review in our office what we’d done with the Maritime Transportation Security Act.”
The result of LoBiondo’s “scrub” of MTSA yielded a bill that will be co-sponsored by a Democrat, Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr., N.J., and which has won the support of House Homeland Security Chairman
LoBiondo said that he has also discussed comprehensive port security legislation with King, Saxton and House Armed Services Chairman
LoBiondo’s proposed amendment to MTSA mirrors a requirement that federal security directors at U.S. airports hold U.S. citizenship. The facility security officer — hired by the owner of a port facility, such as a terminal — implements a security plan required by MTSA.
“The facility security officer is the point person that works with the Coast Guard,” LoBiondo said. “If there is an alert of some kind, or any interaction that goes through the Coast Guard, it goes through this person.”
LoBiondo casts his legislation as an easy passer of the “kitchen-table” test, answering common-sense concerns about the security of ports and the personnel working in them.
But, according to maritime industry experts, LoBiondo’s legislation only represents a small piece of the overall puzzle of securing ports from an insider attack.
Eric Bentzel, who helped draft MTSA as a Senate Commerce Committee aide working for former Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, has other concerns.
“I think the concern that I had when I was looking at this as a staffer, that all of the information about cargo, and where it's going, and who’s getting it, resides in computer databases,” Bentzel said, suggesting that a firewall might be constructed to keep a DP World-employed facility security officer from sharing manifest information with one of DP World’s nineteen other ports.
A classified security plan to which facility security officers have access can be shared on a “need-to-know” basis, but cannot be released publicly. But according to Rob Quartel, a former member of the Federal Maritime Commission and now CEO of the Virginia-based FreightDesk Technologies, DP World employees, even if foreign nationals, would have little interest in capitalizing on the information.
“Having Americans as proxies or agents, or in this case as a security officer — the only substantive aspect is that it gives the government someone to reach in a legal event,” Quartel said, citing the convenience of working with U.S. citizen if the government had to serve a subpoena.
An identification card for all transportation employees, known as the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC), has been in the works for years, but President Bush’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2007 would force the program to rely on user fees for funding — a clear sign that it lacks priority in the administration.
LoBiondo characterized the status of TWIC program as “delay, delay, delay,” and said that its actual implementation could be as long as a year away, with rulemaking coming in “April or May.”
Caitlin Harrington contributed to this story.
Patrick Yoest can be reached at pyoest@cq.com