Although more than 500 million maritime containers move around the world each year, accounting for 90 per cent of international trade, only 2 per cent are inspected. Strengthening customs and immigration systems is essential.
The reason we are doing these types of pat downs and using the advanced imagery technology is trying to take the latest intelligence and how we know al Qaeda and affiliates want to hurt us, they want to bring down whether it is passenger air craft or cargo aircraft.
You can have the best technology, but you if have a corrupted, radicalized, bribed official that has access to the plane to put the bomb in the cargo, as what happened in Sharm el-Sheikh, that's a real problem.
I will continue to push for doubling the strength of the U.S. Border Patrol, and to make sure that every cargo container that enters this nation is screened for radiation and potential weapons of mass destruction.
Seven million ship cargo containers come into the United States every year. Five to seven percent only are inspected - five to seven percent.
Last year, customs officials screened only five percent of the 11 million cargo containers entering the United States. That rate is both unacceptable and dangerous to our national and economic interests.
When approved, the SAFE Port Act will make progress toward protecting the physical infrastructure of our seaports as well as our national economy which is so clearly dependent on the commercial shipping business.
I've been focused on detecting nuclear terrorism at ports, in cargo containers, and I developed and built detectors that are extremely cheap and also very sensitive. My other big development is a system to produce medical isotopes that are injected into patients and used to diagnose and treat cancer.
Although Customs and Border Protection analyzes cargo and other information to target specific shipments for closer inspection, it still physically inspects only a small fraction of the containers under its purview.
Terrorists can utilize any vulnerability in the system and that would include outbound shipments.
We recognize that it is not only inbound but also outbound (cargo) that can pose a risk as well.
