Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., increasing the safety and security of U.S. ports became one of the many areas the federal government began focusing on to help ensure national security.

A project gaining more traction is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security‘s Operation Safe Commerce program, “an effort to look at the security involved with the entire cargo supply distribution chain,” Steve Coleman, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey told Satellite News. “We are looking for ways to better secure cargo containers from their point of being loaded overseas somewhere until they finally reach their destination here in our port.”

Under this federal program, the Port Authority is testing a variety of different technologies, including a satellite-based solution offered by Iridium Satellite LLC and Impeva Labs. The system includes an Iridium modem, a GSM cellular modem and a sensor suite that detects events such the opening and closing of doors, vibration, heat and other [key details] that would help determine intrusion and location information, Don Thoma, executive vice president at Iridium said. Impeva Global Sentinel and Device Management Center products then transmit short bursts of data through the Iridium constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to allow authorities to monitor the condition of containers in transit. The system can notify the PANYNJ within minutes if a container experiences an abnormal event, such as unauthorized entry, mishandling, changes in environmental conditions, route deviations or unscheduled delays.

During phase one of the program, a single container was tracked in June 2002 as it made its way through international trade lanes from Slovakia to New Hampshire. The second phase, in November 2002, involved testing various technologies to determine the effectiveness of security measures on supply chains. Information gained during that phase has aided in the development of “a set of rules that would be used to determine if a container has been intruded upon without generating a substantial number of false alarms,” Thoma told Satellite News.

The Iridium/Impeva solution was among the solutions that moved into phase three of the trials, which began earlier this year. Under phase three of the program, the Iridium/Impeva solution was run through a series of stress tests at Sandia National Labs and will be deployed throughout a number of supply chains later this year. “The purpose of this test is to really fine tune it and bulletproof the technology for monitoring the security of containers in transit,” Thoma said.

–Gregory Twachtman

(Liz DeCastro, Iridium, 301/571-6257; Steve Coleman, PANYNJ, 212/435-7777)