Port security and information technology

Abstract

The terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 on New York and Washington DC shed light on the many security shortcomings that sea ports and the entire import and export process face. A primary source of these problems is the information sharing process which makes it hard to track the source of a problem in the import and export process due to lack of information and coordination. This thesis attempts to examine these data sharing problems by looking at what federal agencies, ports, and other private firms have been doing to solve the problems. The document exchange between various stakeholders and the process behind that was also examined to find potential problems. The reason behind doing this is because it is essential to understand the process and its problems before any meaningful results can be extracted from examining the efforts being done to solve the problems. The findings were similar for all cases showing that the primary reason preventing any of these problems to be solved is the unwillingness of commercial stakeholders to share information due to lack of incentives and privacy concerns.