- Truck drivers across the country will soon be keeping
their eyes peeled for more than just the right exit sign: They'll be looking
for signs of terrorism which they can report to Homeland Security officials
through a national hotline, thanks to a $21 million dollar federal grant
announced on Tuesday.
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- The American Trucking Association, which runs Highway
Watch, says the program's main focus is making sure no commercial truck
is used as a weapon of mass destruction.
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- "You don't need to look any further than Oklahoma
City to see what a truck full of explosives can do," ATA spokesman
John Willard said.
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- The program has been around since 1998 in various states,
but prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, it focused on creating
a way for truckers to report accidents to police more quickly.
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- In 2002, the ATA instituted a national program with an
increased focus on antiterrorism, and the Department of Homeland Security
got involved in 2003 by giving the industry group a $19.3 million grant
for 2004.
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- Somewhere between several thousand and 10,000 truckers
have signed up for the program and been trained using the ATA's two-and-a-half-hour
PowerPoint presentation already, according to Willard.
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- The group hopes to register 300,000 transportation workers
by March of next year. Enrollees who spot an accident or a suspicious individual
at a rest stop call a toll-free number answered by a national call center
in Tennessee. Operators there then patch routine calls about unsafe traffic
conditions or an accident directly to local authorities and dispatchers.
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- Ninety-nine percent of the hotline's calls are routine,
safety-related incidents, according to Willard. But when a trucker calls
in about suspicious behavior, such as someone taking pictures of vulnerable
transportation infrastructure, the call center operator transfers the call
to the Highway Information Sharing and Analysis Center, co-run by the ATA
and the Transportation Security Administration.
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- Officials there can then ask the driver for more information,
pass along the information for further investigation and use the information
to issue alerts. ATA is using the second round of grant money to upgrade
its call center, publicize the program and update its training.
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- Highway Watch is also expanding under the new grant to
include other transportation workers, including tollbooth agents, school
bus drivers and highway maintenance workers.
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- Some civil libertarians are more than wary of the idea.
Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the program "TIPS
for Truckers," referring to the widely maligned Operation TIPS program
that was proposed by the Justice Department in 2002.
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- That proposal would have created "a national system
for concerned workers to report suspicious activity," which privacy
advocates denounced as reminiscent of snitch brigades in Eastern Europe.
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- "I'm curious whether it is worth it and what kind
of limits there are," Tien said. "These type(s) of programs are
susceptible to abuse. So, if someone wants to make trouble for someone
else, they call in a tip that makes a problem for that person."
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- Willard says comparing Highway Watch to TIPS is "irrelevant."
"Drivers are in sole possession of their load the vast majority of
the (time) so there is really no way of addressing terrorism and trucking
without the participation of the truck driver," Willard said. "Our
training focuses specifically on (the) transportation industry and we ask
our drivers to focus on what is going on around them when they are on the
road."
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- Willard noted that truckers using the system have already
saved lives and improved emergency crews' response times.
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- The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to
a request for comment.
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