Can smuggling be tackled with IMO SOLAS container weighing?

In Italy’s Gioia Tauro port, it had been reported that the Ndrangheta crime syndicate relies on men whom it has placed in key ports along cocaine trafficking routes. A ‘Ndrangheta member strategically placed at a port who opens up a container bound for Gioia Tauro, and hides cocaine parcels inside it. His counterpart in Gioia Tauro is then informed of the container’s number. When it arrives at the Italian port, the crime syndicate rushes to empty it before customs or police are able to check it.

Police in the Netherlands and Belgium in 2012 discovered a container computer hacking scheme where criminals smuggled two tons of cocaine and heroin, a machine gun, a suitcase stuffed with $1.7 million, and hard drive cases turned into hacking devices inside containers.

A mix of international drug gangs and digital henchmen actually started this plot in 2011.

Drug traffickers first recruited hackers to penetrate computers that tracked and controlled the movement and location of shipping containers arriving at Antwerp’s port.

The simple software and hardware hacks—using USB keyloggers and more sophisticated purpose-built devices—allowed traffickers to send in drivers and gunmen to steal particular containers before the legitimate owner arrived.

The scheme was first noticed in 2012, when workers at a container terminal in Antwerp began to wonder why entire containers—said to contain cargo like bananas and timber—were disappearing from the port. In January 2013, the plot appeared to culminate in a daring raid in the province of Limburg, near Antwerp. A truck that had left the port and was unwittingly carrying containers stuffed with drugs was attacked by suspects armed with AK-47 assault rifles. According to police, the gang had assumed the driver, who was not killed, was from a rival drug gang.

In June 2013, a joint operation by Belgian and Dutch police resulted in raids on more than 20 homes and businesses, where they seized six firearms, bullet-proof vests, and 1.3m euros in cash inside a suitcase. Fifteen people are now awaiting trial in Belgium and Holland, including two suspected hackers. Police did not say where the containers originated.

Most cargo owners or shippers don’t have a clue as to what to do to secure a container from tampering by smugglers and terrorists, who, could possibly use them to conceal dirty bombs.

The cyber attack began with simple social engineering: a spear phishing attack through emails that tricked employees into installing malware.

The container companies discovered the initial breach and installed a firewall installed to prevent further attacks. But police say the suspects managed to get onto the physical premises to install key-logging devices directly onto the keyboards of computers, allowing them to gain wireless access to keystrokes typed by staff as well as screen grabs from their monitors.

The gangs also reportedly built their own hardware, concealing small homemade devices inside normal hard drive cases and power strips. These allowed them to access and remotely control data on the shipping companies’ computers, and to gain security codes so drivers could pick up particular containers.

There were reports that Police inspecting shipping containers have found cocaine stolen away inside frozen sharks.

Shipping containers are thought to be integral to large drug smuggling operations. The iconic intermodal freight container was introduced in the 1950s as a way of standardizing the way goods are moved around the world. Rising in parallel with computers, containerization is how ninety percent of our stuff moves around the world everyday. But that scale—some 450 million containers are shipped annually—means that customs officials tend to inspect only around two percent of those shipments per year.

Estimates about the use of containers by smugglers are rough.

But a report in 2012 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the ships unwittingly involved in the trafficking of drugs, guns and other substances, like those used in building WMD, are primarily commercial lines based in Germany, Greece and the US.

“Containerization provides trafficking and proliferation networks with the same cost- and time-saving transport mechanisms that have allowed the world’s multinational companies to deliver their products quickly and cheaply, penetrate new markets and expand their global customer base,” the SIPRI report concluded.

In one demonstration, a group of researchers using cheap radio equipment showed they could hijack a system used to track shipping vessels worldwide, causing fake vessels to appear, real ones to disappear, and to issue false emergency alerts. In another, GPS researchers proved they could hijack a ship’s navigation system and actually steer it—a technique they’ve also used on drones.

Simpler computer exploits of shipping systems have also been discovered. An investigation by Australian authorities in 2012 revealed that drug gangs were able to use public databases to track which shipping containers in port were under inspection by police, allowing them to abandon those shipments.

And the technique used in Belgium isnt’t completely new either: in season two of The Wire, a drug gang in Baltimore hires dockworkers to alter the computer records of containers with drugs that have been planted inside.

A requirement to weigh containers may therefore be a convenient way of identifying shipments that might contain illicit drugs.

A containerload of hollowed-out boards stashed with cocaine might not weigh much less or much more than a normal load of the same boards.

Some shippers have also caution that the weighing requirement would impose added costs on some carriers, without doing much to improve security.

It is estimated that there is probably a minimum cost of $100,000 to purchase a portable scale for port. The cost to install a more sophisticated scale would be much greater.

Every additional requirement a port lay down does put extra cost onto the terminal handling operation, and may even slow down the operation, as some operators pointed out.

Hence, no matter what permissists claim on containers weighing, it may actually help to tackle smuggling globally.

Can you think of other types of smuggling that Customs globally will find container weighing invaluable in deterring smuggling?