This week, the Department of Homeland Security announced it will start checking the names of hundreds of thousands of port employees against a terrorist watch list.
The announcement took us by surprise, not because the government decided to do the checks, but because it didn’t do them sooner.
A federal law passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks required airport, rail, port and pipeline workers to undergo background checks. While 2 million airport workers have been screened, port workers haven’t. The checks announced this week are just a step toward more thorough background checks that will lead to introduction of special ID cards for some 750,000 port employees.
Port security has been ignored for far too long, given the potential danger of terrorist materials, such as a “dirty bomb,” being smuggled in shipping containers. Only about 5 percent of the containers passing through U.S. ports are opened for inspection. Efforts to scan more cargo for dangerous devices are just getting started. Security at some foreign ports where U.S.-bound cargo is loaded has been improved but needs more beefing up.
Port security made headlines a couple of months ago during the uproar over the proposed transfer of several big American port operations to an Arab company, which was buying a British firm that ran the ports.
Strident opposition in Congress led the company, Dubai Ports World, which is owned by the government of that nation, to promise it would sell the U.S. port operations to an American country. (However, no sale has yet taken place.)
Among the fears raised at the time was possible infiltration of foreign workers into sensitive port jobs. That worry may have been overblown, and in retrospect it’s surprising that more concern wasn’t raised about the fact that existing port workers hadn’t already been checked.
That’s a relatively simple task, at least as compared to expensive projects like obtaining high-tech machines to screen shipping containers, and the government should have done the checks much earlier.
Union representatives are concerned that the watch-list check could snag workers who aren’t security risks and force them out of jobs because of past criminal offenses. That isn’t the purpose of the checks, and the government and port operators should take every precaution to ensure that due process and privacy rights are protected.
And members of Congress should keep up the pressure for increased overall security at American ports.
