Countering terrorism in transportation

Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 2002 by Downey, Mortimer L, Menzies, Thomas R

Unconventional thinking on threats

September 11 demonstrated that terrorists are able to appropriate transportation systems and assets in ways that can be difficult to conceive of and so are overlooked in day-to-day efforts to ensure transportation security. The advent of the TSA should be helpful in heightening the transportation community's attention to security, but perhaps not in overcoming the tendency to view transportation assets and operations within functional domains and securing them accordingly. The size, scope, and ubiquity of the transportation sector, coupled with its myriad owners, operators, and users, generate many opportunities for terrorists to exploit it in novel ways that may not be anticipated by those traditionally responsible for transportation security. By and large, transportation systems are regulated at the mode-- specific level, and the entities that own and use them are organized for the efficient provision of specific services. Terrorists, however, are actively seeking to exploit new forms of threat that are outside such conventional perceptions of order. Terrorists may not view individual transportation assets, infrastructure, and services in such self-contained and functionally oriented ways, but rather as components and tools of other systems, as they used jet airliners and letters as weapons last fall.

We need a broader-based understanding of terrorist threats that involve transportation and how to respond to these threats. A national entity outside normal organizational settings whose sole mission is to explore and systematically assess terrorist threats, probable responses, and ensuing consequences could go a long way toward meeting this critical need. In a nationally televised address on June 6, President Bush proposed the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security that would, among other things, gather intelligence and law enforcement information from all agencies and charge analysts with "imagining the worst and planning to counter it." The need for such systematic analysis has likewise arisen in discussions of the National Academies' Committee for Science and Technology to Counter Terrorism. We believe that such a dedicated analytic capability is critically important. It should offer a window into the mind and methods of the terrorist. It is also a prerequisite for keeping our transportation systems from being exploited again so tragically.

Recommended reading

E. Badolato, "Cargo Security: High-Tech Protection, High-Tech Threats," TR News, no. 211 (November-December, 2000): 14-17 (http://gulliver. trb.org/publications/trnews/trnews2 11.pdf).

A. Boyd and J. P. Sullivan, Emergency Preparedness for Transit Terrorism: Synthesis of Transit Practice 27 (Washington, D.C.: Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, 1997) (http://gulliver.trb.org/publications/tcrp/ tsyn27.pdf).

Computer Science and Telecommunication Board, IDs-Not That Easy: Questions about Nationwide Identity Systems (Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, National Academy Press, 2002) (http://www.nap.edu/catalog/ 10346.html).