Effectively Targeting Terrorist Threats on the Nation’s Shipping Docks
It is an incredibly complex task to identify high-risk cargo shipments, particularly when several different individuals and companies can be involved in shipping a single container. A federal law enforcement agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has developed an Automated Targeting System (ATS) to identify shipments that pose a significant potential danger. The challenge CBP faced, however, was that it had no way of knowing the effectiveness of this new tool.
To address this need, CBP engaged Noblis to develop a methodology to evaluate the performance of the ATS OCEN4 system, which is used to target terrorism threats in oceangoing containers. Noblis was able to provide demonstrable evidence of the current effectiveness of the ATS technology and, just as importantly, establish a performance baseline against which future improvements could be evaluated. Thanks to Noblis’ work, CBP is better able to perform future system improvements to identify potential threats to our national security.