CSI expansion nears its limit

CSI expansion nears its limit    U.S. Customs and Border Protection will stop expanding the Container Security Initiative to more foreign ports after the overseas inspection program reaches a cap of 58 participating ports next year, Assistant Commissioner Jayson Ahern said Thursday.
   The program, under which U.S. customs officers are stationed in foreign ports to sort out high-risk containers for non-intrusive inspection by local authorities, now operates in 50 foreign ports. The agency plans to conduct targeted outbound inspections in eight additional ports in fiscal 2007.
   The 50 ports in the CSI network account for 82 percent of all containers arriving in the United States, and the eight new ports provide an extra 3 percent coverage of the inbound container population.
   “We’ve hit that point of diminishing returns,” Ahern, who heads the agency’s field operations, told a federal advisory panel of industry experts meeting in New York on Thursday.
   CBP is targeting CSI at ports that do the most volume of trade with the United States.
   Sending teams of CBP officers to all 704 ports that ship containers to the United States and requiring foreign governments to have X-ray and radiation detection machines for scanning containers at those locations doesn’t fit the agency’s risk-management model and would be very expensive.
   Ahern said CBP would leave the door open to expanding CSI if intelligence indicated a particular port posed a potential threat for being infiltrated or used by terrorists.
   An alternative to having a physical presence in foreign ports is to use technology to monitor the outbound inspections conducted by foreign governments on the United States’ behalf.
   CBP announced in March that Pakistan Customs joined CSI and will use live video monitoring to ensure the integrity of the cargo exam process. Under a pilot program to start later this year, CBP will receive remote video feeds of the scanning process at the Port of Qasim, Ahern said. CBP targets specific containers for inspection based on intelligence and red flags in shipping documents, although not all suspicious containers are inspected before loading on a vessel as the program was designed.
   The Port of Qasim only handles about 3,000 U.S.-bound containers per year.