Well, we all bitched and moaned when the TWIC program came around. We whined and stamped our feet, but in the end, we all complied and paid our fees and made multiple trips to the TWIC centers. We asked “why” and never got a very satisfactory answer, so we manned up and went with the program.
There were many licensed mariners who just couldn’t believe that they were going to be required to get some kind of secure area pass/ID just to keep running a 6PAC fishing boat, or the Block Island launch for instance. Even more confused where the poor bastards with a license and no job; why would they need access to secure port areas when all they did was a few yacht deliveries every year?
“Because everyone has to have one” was the answer. The TWIC was forever connected to your Master’s License. No TWICie, no laundry.
Last week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report of their investigation into the overall effectiveness of the TWIC program. Here is the very first sentence of the report;
Internal control weaknesses governing the enrollment, background checking, and use of TWIC potentially limit the program’s ability to provide reasonable assurance that access to secure areas of Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA)-regulated facilities is restricted to qualified individuals.
further down, in the second paragraph-
Further, DHS has not demonstrated that TWIC, as currently implemented and planned, is more effective than prior approaches used to limit access to ports and facilities, such as using facility specific identity credentials with business cases.
D’OH!
Allow me to translate the government speak into plain old sailor talk; “The TWIC program was never properly designed to do anything other than piss off a bunch of licensed mariners. The assholes who set up TWIC were underway, not under command – and rushed the whole fucking program. Furthermore, as far as we can tell, the entire thing has done nothing but flood the bilges of DHS subcontractors with taxpayer money and hasn’t made our ports any safer than the way we used to do it.”
You can read the entire report if you have an hour and some good wine. If you don’t have that kind of ambition, just read the page of highlights, which begins “What GAO Found” on the second page.
Here are just a few of the choice words from the body of the report, with my comments in blue:
…our investigators conducted covert tests to assess the use of TWIC as a means for controlling access to secure areas of MTSA-regulated facilities. During covert tests of TWIC at several selected ports, our investigators were successful in accessing ports using counterfeit TWICs, authentic TWICs acquired through fraudulent means, and false business cases(i.e.,reasons for requesting access). It was easy to sneak in.
…the TWIC program’s internal controls for positively identifying an applicant, arriving at a security threat determination for that individual, and approving the issuance of a TWIC, are not designed to provide reasonable assurance that only qualified applicants can acquire TWICs. This is actually huge. This doesn’t say that mistakes were made by employees of the TWIC program. This says that the program itself is not designed to assure only qualified individuals can get a TWIC. I find this the most damming sentence in the entire report.
As confirmed by TWIC program officials, there are ways for an unqualified individual to acquire an authentic TWIC. According to TWIC program officials, to meet the stated program purpose, TSA’s focus in designing the TWIC program was on facilitating the issuance of TWICs to maritime workers. Don’t worry about the background checks; just get the cards issued!
…TWIC program officials told us that control weaknesses were not addressed prior to initiating the TWIC program because they had not previously identified them, or because they would be too costly to address. “How the hell were we supposed know how to accomplish what the program is designed to accomplish? You know how much that would cost??”
…according to TSA officials, a primary reason for not requiring employer information be captured by applicant processes is that many applicants do not have employers, lots of self-employed captains out there and that many employers will not accept employment applications from workers who do not already have a TWIC… footnote on same page: TWIC is unlike other federally-sponsored access control credentials, such as the Department of Defense’s Common Access Card—the agencywide standard identification card—for which sponsorship by an employer is required. For these federal credentialing programs, employer sponsorship begins with the premise that an individual is known to need certain access as part of their employment. Further, the employing agency is to conduct a background investigation on the individual and has access to other personal information, such as prior employers, places of residency, and education, which they may confirm as part of the employment process and use to establish the individual’s identity.
I could go on and on, but it’s too depressing. Read as much as you can stand below.
Final note. The GAO blasts the DHS and TSA in the report, leaving the USCG treading water on this, and correctly so; the USCG didn’t screw this up, TSA did.
Update: U.S. Rep. John L. Mica (R-FL), the Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, testified at a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing today during which the GAO report was released. Chairman Mica, one of the requestors of today’s GAO report, said,
“TWIC is turning into a dangerous and expensive experiment in security.”“Nearly half-a-billion dollars has been spent since TSA was directed to issue biometric security cards to transportation workers,” said Mica, who was chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee in 2001 when the 9/11 terrorists attacks occurred, and is one of the authors of the legislation that created the TSA. “Yet today, ten years later and with no approved biometric reader, TWICs are at best no more useful than library cards,”
Except, library cards are free….
