SFI déjà vu

   I thought the Secure Freight Initiative had faded into the past. Apparently not. At the annual Trade Symposium in Washington on March 6-7, U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel in the exhibit area were handing out brochures about SFI.
   SFI was a limited-run pilot last decade that was designed to test whether 100 percent inspection of inbound containers could be done at foreign ports. It essentially was a tactic to forestall Congress from forcing CBP to go ahead with implementation of a new scan-all law by showing that it was nearly impossible to do from a logistics, financial, diplomatic, and technical standpoint.
   The program ran at several ports for a year or so and then it ended with a report to Congress. One site, Karachi, Pakistan, however, remained in operation. Karachi is a high-risk port because of terrorism and its volumes to the United States are relatively low, so CBP believes non-intrusive inspections of all containers makes sense. The agency has an arrangement with Pakistani officials for all containers to get routed through X-ray imaging machines and the images are uploaded to a secure website for CBP analysts to look at. Pakistani customs will open and inspect any containers that appear to have contraband and CBP can supervise the process by video. 
   CBP ultimately folded the Karachi inspection program into its Container Security Initiative, which has CBP officers stationed at 58 ports around the world. Pakistan is too dangerous, so CBP does joint inspections in a virtual environment. 
   Karachi is called “CSI Plus.” I guess the folks passing out a five-year-old brochure describing how the SFI pilot programs will be set up didn’t get the word.