TSA to lean on ITDS for domestic cargo data screening

TSA to lean on ITDS for domestic cargo data screening    The Transportation Security Agency has signed up to participate in the International Trade Data System, furthering the slow expansion of the information sharing project within the Department of Homeland Security and the federal government in general.
   DHS officials also said at Tuesday’s meeting of the Advisory Committee on Commercial Operations that they would soon brief Coast Guard officials on the benefits of ITDS in hopes of getting a formal commitment from that DHS agency as well.
   ITDS is a program to eliminate redundant filing of international commercial trade data to separate agencies by allowing companies to electronically transmit required information one time through a common portal that automatically distributes it in the desired format to relevant agencies. The system is being designed to piggyback on the capabilities of the modernized Customs and Border Protection trade data system, the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), under development. Many government agencies involved in regulating different aspects of international trade have been slow to gear up for integrating ITDS with their existing systems.
   Industry groups have complained for the past year that the White House has not pushed agencies hard enough to get on board the modernization effort and that DHS, at the very least, should have all its agencies committed to a program that can enhance information sharing and security. About two dozen agencies have committed to integrating their data functions with ITDS, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another DHS agency.
   Signing up TSA “underscores the importance of the use of this portal and we want our agencies to move down that road,” said Elaine Dezenski, deputy assistant secretary for border and transportation security.
   CBP is helping TSA field a pilot project to accept commercial shipping data from a couple of carriers and conduct risk assessments on domestic air cargo movements by letting the sister agency use its existing ACE/ITDS tools to capture the information and run it through its automated targeting system, said Lou Samenfink, executive director of CBP’s Office of Modernization. The work is part of the TSA freight assessment system that DHS proposed in the fiscal 2006 budget.
      TSA is modeling its risk assessment system on one employed by CBP, which uses an automated manifest system to get cargo information from international air carriers and then runs the data through sophisticated computers at its National Targeting Center to find discrepancies with predefined risk rules.
   “We’ll accept the information so you can play with it in your own risk management system or use ours,” Samenfink explained afterwards. “Ostensibly, you’d have one platform to give information to the government, whether its a domestic, international or outbound flight.”
   DHS officials have recognized CBP’s lead in the area of managing freight transportation risk and the collaboration is designed to help TSA get its system off the ground quickly without starting from scratch.
   CBP has also given a couple of officials at the U.S. Census Bureau immediate access to the ACE portal to let them sample the system’s capabilities, and is working to give the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration access to the electronic truck manifest now being tested as an ACE component, Samenfink said. The Census Bureau is one of the original ITDS supporters.
   Tim Skud, recently installed as chairman of the ITDS board, said his top priorities for ITDS are generating participation by other government agencies, international standardization, and production and publication for the first version of ITDS of a clear baseline data set common to all agencies.
   Skud, deputy assistant secretary for tax, trade and tariff policy, said he is “delighted that international standards of manifest reporting is one of the core elements of the World Customs Organization framework” for an international cargo security regime. Last year the WCO identified 27 data elements that customs administrations should collect at export and share in standard formats with their counterparts to eliminate redundant reporting by importers.