TWIC inches forward, but legislators criticize missed deadlines

The Transportation Workers Identification Credential (TWIC) give new meaning to the term “long-awaited,” but still, progress is being made. The first step was the enrollment a couple of weeks ago of 5,000 workers at the Wilmington, Delaware port, and eleven more ports will start enrolling their employees this month. ID cards, though, are not of much use without card readers, so DHS told Congress Tuesday that the department will test card readers at five other ports. As Washington Technology’s Alice Lipowicz correctly notes, quoting Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi), these forward steps notwithstanding, TWIC is still failing on several fronts, including underestimating how many workers need the ID cards and dragging its feet on deploying readers for the cards. “The Department began rolling out the TWIC program, which was mandated five years ago, just two weeks ago,” Thompson said in a statement at a House Homeland Security Committee hearings on Tuesday. “Already there are glaring problems.” At the port of Houston, the department estimated 30,000 workers would need the cards, while actually it is close to 350,000, he said. “TWIC readers are years away from installation,” Thompson added. “Without the readers, a TWIC is merely a flash pass that can be fraudulently duplicated and misused.”

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) released its final rule for implementing TWIC on 1 January, in accordance with the Security and Accountability For Every Port Act of 2006, but the agency did not meet a 1 July deadline for enrolling ten priority ports in the program and did not meet an 13 April deadline for beginning testing of readers at five ports.

Secure identification credentials are a major business opportunity for government contractors in the post-9/11 heightened-security climate. DHS awarded a $70 million contract to Lockheed Martin in January to deploy the identification credential for 750,000 transportation workers. With as many as ten million scheduled to be eventually enrolled, contractors are watching closely for similar additional opportunities. TWIC has modified its technology to account for recommendations from maritime and industry partners, and has adapted its contracting approach for TWIC to the fact that the program uses evolving information technology standards. To protect privacy, no paper records will be created at the enrollment stations and all electronic records at the enrollment stations will be deleted after transmission to the TSA. The TSA will maintain all the enrollment records, fingerprints, and personal information in a database which is protected against unauthorized use by encryption. TSA also will limit access to authorized users and establish segmentation, an approach by which databases are divided into compartments so that if one portion is compromised others are still protected.