As most of us love the warmer weather and blooming flowers during the spring season, TSA’s growing efforts to protect the nation’s surface transportation systems are producing tremendous fruit.
“We work directly with our surface transportation partners with the goal to increase their security baseline and to inform them about current and evolving threats,” said TSA Surface Operations Assistant Administrator Sonya Proctor. “The first key is to help operators identify mitigating measures to prevent a successful physical attack, then encourage them to train and exercise their incident response plans to allow them to be resilient in the event they are the target of a cyberattack.”
However, Proctor noted no one can guarantee our passenger and freight rail systems, highway and motor carriers, pipelines and water vessels won’t be successful targets for persistent, capable, nation state adversaries.
“The way we view it is if you are a target, we want you to have practiced and implemented measures of resilience to protect your operations,” Proctor emphasized. “It is critical they are able to resume operations in support of national security and the nation’s economy.”
Training exercises at no cost
Many of the nation’s surface transportation operators don’t have the resources, including personnel and funding, to mitigate threats, and that’s why TSA steps in to take training exercises to them.
“Exercises are critical,” declared Proctor. “In exercises, you get to play out threat scenarios, and there is never a cost. There’s never any cost with anything we do. Smaller companies don’t have the resources, so we become their resource to provide their training and exercises.”
TSA Surface Operations has a cooperative relationship with the agency’s Intermodal Security Training and Exercise Program, also known as I-STEP, which provides exercise, training and security planning tools and services to the nation’s transportation operators and offers everything from tabletop scenarios to full-scale exercises.
“For companies that have never done an exercise, a tabletop is a great way to start,” Proctor said. “As they grow with the exercise program, they may graduate to a full-scale exercise in the field and bring in more of their partners.”
The exercises are tailored to operators’ needs and focus on anything from operational security vulnerabilities to school bus safety to active shooter drills.
TSA also offers the First Observer Plus™ program, which provides transportation professionals with the knowledge they need to recognize suspicious activities possibly related to terrorism, guidance in assessing what they see, and a method to report their observations.
“Exercises make people think through a scenario,” said Proctor. “In mass transit locations, for example, bags get left behind all the time. You get calls a lot quicker after having that training, which helps people assess the situation.”
Technology, surface screening
When you hear about TSA and technology, the focus is typically on passenger screening at the nation’s airports. However, Proctor said some surface operators are leveraging technology to help keep their travelers safe.
“Usually, it’s package screening, kind of a tabletop device,” she explained. “TSA’s Requirements and Capabilities Analysis (RCA) has some tabletop devices that allow small baggage screening.”
Proctor said surface operators tend to use the screening devices randomly, particularly at special, high-volume public events. Unlike the airport environment where TSA screens more than 3 million passengers on the agency’s busiest days, she believes full-fledged passenger screening “isn’t really practical” for mass transit.
In 2023, an average of 34 million passengers traveled by mass transit each weekday.
“There’s a very different expectation in mass transit. People come to mass transit, they have their pass card and their fare. They want to get on the train and get to where they’re going. Trying to create an atmosphere where people are individually screened would be a significant challenge.”
Systems are in place at select locations to test or randomly use technology to screen unobtrusively.
“They can screen people from a distance and look for what might appear to be anomalies,” described Proctor. “We work with RCA on identifying the kinds of technology that might be good for high-volume transit stations, but people going to work every day are not likely to appreciate waiting to be screened to get on a train.”
Love, surface style
Proctor expressed a deep admiration of surface and TSA’s surface transportation partners.
“I love what we do. I love the people we work with in the field and love dealing with our industry partners,” proclaimed Proctor. “TSA has a lot of contact with people in the checkpoints at airports, but I think the relationships we have with our industry partners are like no other – with a shared concern about security in the surface environment, which is built on trust.”
She said the partnerships and close relationships give her and the TSA Surface Operations team the ability to do the work they do to accomplish TSA’s mission, especially when it comes to conducting security assessments to mitigate possible threats.
“They could say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ but instead, they open their doors to let us come in and assess their security. It doesn’t pay for them to have bad security; it doesn’t pay for them to have high risks in their environment. They don’t have to do it, but we’ve developed this trusting relationship over time. We come in with one purpose, and that’s to provide them help in identifying places where they might be more vulnerable, to help them understand current threats.”
Proctor said her team has conducted more classified briefings for surface operators in the last five years than in any period in TSA history.
“They want that. After a threat briefing, an exercise or training, they understand so much more. They come away with a different understanding, sometimes a very sobering understanding of the current environment.”
It’s the training, the exercises, the technology, the partnerships, but most of all the love between TSA and the agency’s surface stakeholders working together to successfully take the nation’s surface transportation security to the next level.
You can call it “Love, surface style!”
By Don Wagner, TSA Strategic Communications & Public Affairs
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