Containing containers
With roughly one million containers coming into Australia each year and one million headed out, it's perhaps not that reassuring to hear that only 100,000 of them are x-rayed, and 10,000 searched. However, the Australian Customs Services insists a risk management approach to securing the country's ports is the way to go.
The trick is knowing which containers need to be inspected in the first place, according to the Australian Customs Service Director of Sea Technology Strategies, Glenn Lyon. "We require brokers and importers to disclose what's in the container ... they're risk assessed and run against profiles," he told ZDNet Australia.
Dr Nick Cutmore, CSIRO
The risk assessment profile is, for the most part, a computerised and automated process. "Every container coming into the country is risk assessed. We do some analysis and profiling of export cargo as well ... looking at the information chain," Lyon says.
In addition, Customs intelligence officials work in the background, identifying suspicious organisations or individuals who may be seeking to bring dangerous or illegal goods into the country. High quality and reliable information is the first tool Customs uses in its fight against the influx of nasties.
The technology effort doesn't stop there. Worldwide, there has been an effort to make the transportation of some dangerous goods easier to detect. Explosives manufacturers, for example, have deliberately altered their products to make them more difficult to clandestinely transport. "There are international efforts underway to put chemical markers in all explosives," Lyon says.
In layman terms, a chemical marker in an explosive compound will make it "smell" unique, so a trace detection device can easily identify it. For the most part, manufacturers have been cooperative. "I imagine the international community would have concerns about an organisation that didn't want to cooperate," Lyon says.
Customs is also looking at investing in radiation detection equipment. Currently, its staff use handheld scanners to sniff inside containers during manual inspection, but it's clearly a capability the service wishes to expand.
One maker of radiation detection technologies, the confusingly named US-based outfit Canberra Industries, was recently awarded a US$11.7 million contract to provide Advanced Spectroscopic Portals to the US Department of Homeland Security. In Australia, the company's equipment is sold by Nu Scientific. Its managing director, Graeme McDonnell, says the technology has come a long way.
Traditional solutions have reliably detected radioactive material, he says, but haven't been able to reliably detect which type of radioactive material it might be with an appropriate degree of certainty. Now, highly accurate sensors can detect and identify radiation emanating from containers that are simply driven through a portal. "A truck or a parcel would go through it ... in a big port they may have five or six alleys with these things, it goes past, and if it gets nothing, it goes through," he says.
Why bother with radiation detection? Before the events of September 11, 2001, you could be forgiven for not knowing what a "dirty bomb" was. Today, hearing those two words combined are enough to scare the willies out of most sensible people.
Dirty bombs are designed to spread radioactive material across a wide area, rendering it uninhabitable. It's not designed to destroy or kill, it's designed to disrupt, causing mass panic and disrupting the target country's economy.
However, unlike crude, conventional bombs which can be made from standard chemicals and fertilisers, it's not that easy for the average Australian to wander on down to the local 7-11 to pick up a few kilos of deadly radioactive material. If a dirty bomb goes off, it's likely the material used in the device came from overseas, purloined from an insecure facility.
This is just one reason that Australia's port security has been tightened, but the list of materials the government wants to keep out is a long one. Conventional explosives, drugs, biological and chemical agents are others.
While McDonnell himself says the likelihood of a dirty bomb attack in Australian is quite low, the consequences of it happening make the detection equipment a worthwhile investment. "It is a major problem if this goes off," he says.
Glenn Lyon's colleague Adam Friederich, Border Technologies manager, says it's a good time to be in the market for technology, with private sector research and development at fever pitch. Still, he concedes his dream technology may still be some time away. "We'd like to have a machine that you hold up next to a container that tells you if there's anything in there you need to know about," he says. "But I don't think that will ever exist."
Glenn Lyon, Customs service director, Sea Technology Strategies
Nonetheless, the private sector has responded well to world events, he says. With so much private research and development going on, all the Australian Customs Service needs is to purchase solutions, not do its own development work. "We're always looking for new technologies ... we look to the suppliers, we don't do the R&D we look to providers who can do it for us," he says.
Lyon agrees. He says the commercial drivers for innovation in homeland security technology are significant. "If someone gets groundbreaking technology it will be worth a fortune. There are a lot of commercial drivers for this stuff," Lyon says.
One of the more interesting technologies being considered is currently being trialled by Customs at Brisbane airport. It's a cargo scanner developed by the CSIRO that uses neutron beams to peek inside packages. Unlike x-ray technology, the new type of scanner will give Customs officers a much more detailed view of what's inside a parcel. "It's doing air cargo containers, which are smaller, but certainly we're seeking to test whether the technology is worth being taken to other operating environments," Lyons says. "It certainly could be used in sea cargo."
Dr Nick Cutmore, CSIRO Minerals' program manager, Online Analysis and Control, is in charge of the neutron-scanning technology's development. The project has been going for four years, he says, with the Brisbane scanner brought online last year. He says the images displayed by traditional x-ray machines, like the ones we see at the airport scanning our hand luggage, are coloured by software. The CSIRO's approach is to use Gamma radiation to measure density and shape, much the same way as an x-ray does, in tandem with a neutron scan that reveals much more about materials being scanned.
"They're [x-ray machines' outputs] artificial colours, we combine gamma rays ... and then we use the neutrons to get a measure of the material class," Cutmore says. "A lot of different explosives are in a different material class, as are drugs."
The coloured picture a Customs officer sees is not a false-colour picture, but the real, unadjusted output of the device, he says. As for whether it will work in container-scanning applications, it's too early to tell, he says. "You can scale to that size, but what we need to look at with sea cargo is what additional benefits it gives you," Cutmore says.
The scanning technology, which is patented by the CSIRO, could be a real money spinner. But Cutmore says the commercial viability of good technologies isn't always predictable. "Technology always appears valuable to its inventors, but how valuable it is, is best judged five to 10 years later," he says.
But anything that can prevent an attack could be worth its weight in gold, literally. Athol Yates, a director of the Australian Homeland Security Research Centre, thinks he knows what's at stake if lax port security facilitates a terrorist attack.
Such an event in a Western country could have a dramatic impact on the world economy, he says. The reaction of the US government would be to close ports, in much the same way as they shut down air travel in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
"You could imagine the ramifications will be absolutely enormous," Yates says. "They shut down the airlines, they'll shut down the ports."
