Bankers, Fingerprints and Truck Drivers

By James McGinnis

A recent Homeland Security initiative is the introduction of the Transport Workers Identification Credential (“TWIC”). For many years, security experts have cited the nation’s ports as a key vulnerability. The TWIC program is designed to address this by controlling access to commercial port facilities. The program provides for a biometric identification card to be issued to everyone who has to have access to port facilities. This includes, truck drivers, stevedores, longshoremen and ship’s crews. Persons holding Coast Guard issued licenses are also required to obtain a TWIC. Sailing is a passion of mine. As a way of improving and documenting my navigational skills I have obtained a Coast Guard Master’s license. Thus is came to pass that one morning I found myself queued up with a group of truck drivers and stevedores to apply for my TWIC card.

The biometric feature of the card intrigued me. Based on the TSA’s description of the program, I didn’t know whether to expect DNA samples, retina scans, or something else. It turns out to be a picture and fingerprints. A little disappointing perhaps for the high tech aficionado, but the card is interesting in that the picture and fingerprint data is captured on a digital chip imbedded in the card itself. Presumably this allows a suitably equipped security guard to actually compare the fingerprints of the person resenting the card with the prints recorded in the chip. This would be more reliable than a picture comparison, and much harder to falsify. Links with the central database would pretty much preclude forgery entirely.

For a nominally honest investment banker, I have actually had quite a bit of experience being fingerprinted. Most banks fingerprint all of their employees and the SEC requires people holding licenses to be fingerprinted. Traditionally prints were taken by spreading printer’s ink on the fingertips which were then “rolled” one by one onto a paper form. Thus a 180 degree image of the fingertip is captured. The process is surprisingly intimate. The subject has to relax and allow the operator to manipulate each finger individually. With an operator of the appropriate gender, it is not an unpleasant experience. What it is like at a police station, booking the participants in a local bar fight, I can only imagine.

The first technology improvement to the process was the introduction of heat sensitive invisible ink, which has to be developed on a hot plate. That way the ink can’t ruin your clothes. This has now been mostly replaced by electronic scanners. You place your fingers on the platen of what looks like a miniature copy machine and an electronic image is captured. The image can be transmitted easily by wire. More importantly it can be electronically compared with other images, reducing the involvement of highly trained technicians and making programs like TWIC possible. The error rate is also reduced. My experience with firms using paper prints is that perhaps 10% were returned as illegible and had to be resubmitted.

One of the ironies of the use of fingerprints in the financial service industry is that prints were taken for new employees, sent to the FBI for screening, and returned to the employers Human Resources files. Generally they were not screened again for the duration of the individual’s employment. For example, I worked at the same institution for 19 years. When I started my prints were screened and it was determined that I had no criminal record, (at least not in the system, the accuracy of which is subject to debate). During the following two decades I could have compiled a rap sheet as long as my arm without my employer knowing about it. At least as long as I managed to schedule court appearances, parole officer meetings and jail time within my vacation schedule. The industry generally relies on self reporting to monitor its employees after hire. I am required to notify my employer and the regulators if I have been charged with, or convicted of a specified list of offenses; namely, those involving fraud, theft, wrongful taking of property or any felony. Drug related or violent misdemeanors don’t count.

The TWIC card on the other hand must be renewed every 5 years. Since the TSA has the electronic image they may also repeat the fingerprint screening in the interim. They also ask a series of self disclosure questions. Have you ever been convicted of committing a terrorist act? Treason? Etc. At first blush this seems a little silly. Who would answer such questions in the affirmative? But just like the securities industry questions, I suspect these are not really designed to identify the undesirables, but rather to allow a convenient means to prosecute those folks who lie. In my experience with employees who were found to have a criminal justice problem, the lack of disclosure made it easy to deal with them. We didn’t have to discuss the merits of their case. Non-disclosure is reason enough for termination.

The TWIC program also requires positive identification documents; passport, green card, etc, effectively preventing undocumented workers from participating. Although the folks I was sharing the waiting room with when I was applying for my card might have been expected to be behind this aspect of the program, most seemed to think it was only an excuse to extract an additional fee out of them. The card costs $135. It will probably also make life for trucking companies more difficult. They will have to make sure that drivers heading for port facilities have a card.

Of course you don’t need to work at a port facility to get something into the port or onto a ship. That is after all the whole point of the shipping industry. Third parties who don’t own ships, trucks or ports, consign stuff to shippers who do that for them. Think about the questions you are asked at the airport, in the context of commercial shipping. Has anyone given you anything to carry? Has anyone else packed your bags? Answer: “Sure thing. I have a sealed container of 35,000 pounds of something that strangers paid me to bring here. Is that a problem?”

So, will the TWIC work? If used effectively, it will certainly make it much harder to slip undetected into a participating port facility. Scenarios involving hijacking trucks will be made significantly more complicated in that the hijacker will have to have a valid TWIC card. If an incident does occur, there should be a complete record available of who entered a targeted facility.

No single measure can insure against an attack. In fact, no reasonable combination of measures can do so. The goal is to complicate the bad guys’ lives enough to create additional opportunities for them to slip up and be caught. The TWIC program will be one of these complications. I do miss the printers’ ink though.

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