Congress and homeland security legislation: A different view // Ben Frankel

the report do not address is the issue of how to make maritime and air cargo safer. Five comments here:

• The continuation of the status quo — in which only a tiny fraction of maritime and air cargo is screened — is unacceptable. Leaving the United States, its people, and its economy exposed to WMDs smuggled in cargo is irresponsible.
• Letting the industries involved create and implement their own security measures, and expecting them to monitor compliance with these measures, is not going to work. The events of 9/11 tell us how effective airport security is when it is entrusted to the airlines, and the chemical plant safety measures passed by Congress last year tell us how much confidence Congress — and the chemical industry-friendly Bush administration — had in the chemical industry’s attention to safety. That industry managed to delay government regulation of chemical facilities’ safety for years by creating what was euphemistically (and charitably) called “voluntary, industry-developed” safety measures (the “charitably” applies to the safety measures, which chemical industry insiders called “window dressing”). The charade went on long enough for Congress finally to say that enough was enough, and now there are federal standards for chemical plant safety.
• In any event, it is unfair to burden the industries involved in cargo shipping with paying for public goods. Safe cargo is a public good, and public entities, not private ones, should be in charge of formulating and enforcing measures to protect and enhance public safety, and the public, not private industry, should shoulder the burden of paying for it.
• The technology for effective screening of cargo is not yet where we want it to be. It is too slow in some instances, and there are too many false alarms which cause further delays. All we need to know, though, about any given technological solution to a problem are the answers to two question: Does the envisioned solution violate the laws of science? Is there a willingness to pay for it? Effective screening of cargo does not violate any law of science. It can be done. The real question is who will pay for it. It is a question of priorities.

Cargo screening and ballistic missile defense
By way of concluding our comments, we may want to compare cargo screening to ballistic missile defense. The United States toyed with idea of defense against ballistic missiles since the early 1960s, but then, at the end of the decade, determined the technology was not there. In 1983 Ronald Reagan