DAILY NEWS Aug 3, 2007 11:01 PM - 0 comments

VIEWPOINT: Now you see it, now you don’t: Will TWIC ever become reality?

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Last year around this time we were cautioning shippers with hauls into the US of yet another looming border legislation deadline. Canadian truck drivers working out of American ports would soon be expected to carry the Transportation Security Administration’s new Transport Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) or be denied access – or so we were led to believe.

“We go to press awaiting an imminent announcement of the final rule by the Transportation Security Administration,” we wrote in a special supplement on cross border legislation, adding that the TSA soon expected to have 750,000 transport workers (110,000 of them truck drivers and a significant number of them Canadians) holding TWIC cards. Eventually, the TSA was planning to expand the program to include up to 10 million transport workers.
Live and learn, I guess.

To a journalist, a deadline is a deadline. To the bureaucrats at the TSA, one of the first US security agencies born after the 9/11 attacks, a deadline appears to be nothing more than a suggestion – even, it seems, if it concerns an issue of international security and risks the ire of Congress.

At a hearing last month, TSA managers had to confess that enrollment for the TWIC program, expected to have begun by last spring, would be pushed back to the fall. To say that US legislators are frustrated by the latest foot-dragging is quite the understatement. Consider the words, repeated in the media, of Rep. Frank LoBiondo, a senior member of Congress: “They’re really inept, or they don’t care. They just don’t seem fazed by this at all. They’ve run out of time, and they keep coming up with these lame excuses.”

Legislators may be frustrated but they certainly can’t be surprised. TWIC has been a tale of blunders, questionable decisions and missed deadlines since the US Congress legislated the need for TWIC into existence as part of the Maritime Transportation Security Act. TWIC was initially supposed to be running by the end of 2003 and it was sure to have an impact on Canadian carriers moving goods into to and from the US. To begin with, 70,000 to 90,000 Canadian truck drivers cross the border each year and many work out of North American ports on both coasts. Eventually, as TWIC expanded to other sectors, these cards would become an almost mandatory tool for drivers operating into the United States, it was expected.

There were some positive spin-offs too: When implemented, TWIC was to make container moves into and out of US ports more streamlined. Also, TWIC-carded drivers would not need to worry about ethnic profiling. Two integrated circuit chips were to be imbedded in each card containing a digital photograph as well as biographic and biometric data (a record of fingerprints), which would also make the ID very difficult to forge.

Drivers requiring unescorted access to port facilities, i.e. those picking up or delivering containers, would swipe their card through a reader at designated gates and submit a fingerprint sample. Those workers who required access to more secure areas would be issued PIN numbers. TWIC ID was to be considered enough to assure any law enforcement of the genuine identity of the driver and the fact that he or she is not a security or immigration threat.

But TWIC was never going to be the one-card system that industry groups in Canada and the US had been advising. It would have made more sense for the TSA to expand the FAST program to include a biometric measure and make those cards interchangeable with TWIC. But no one said government agencies operate on common sense.

But it’s the delays that have really hurt the credibility of the TSA in the eyes of Congress and led to questions whether the biometric technology behind TWIC can really deliver. Consider the comment of Rep. Rick Larsen: “There are a number of programs that involve biometrics, that are supposed to makes us safer, and they can’t get anything right…. I’m not yet convinced that all the time and pain that TSA has put in, and all that cost is going to give us all that much security benefit.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement for a program and a technology that is supposed to play to key role in securing the North American supply chain. Makes me wonder whether TWIC, if it ever does get off the ground, has any long-term future.
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