People in the Know

One of the great things about blogs is how they bring expertise in all sorts of fields straight to you at home or in your office. Often some of the best analysis in politics and sports and other important areas of life are occurring here in the blogosphere and not in your local newspaper or weekly magazines.

In such situations, knowledge and immediacy are combined in a way that gives the blogs impact. To wit, I give you Stephen Spruiell at NRO and this post on the DWP port deal:

Alistair McNab, president of the Greater Houston Port Bureau, said, "The total lack of understanding displayed has been unconscionable."

"They're going to be operating a terminal as a tenant," McNab said. "The Port Authorities are still in charge. I've seen these statements that Dubai Ports World is 'taking over' these ports. The statements in my view are designed to inflame passions rather than to give the truth. There are so many misstatements it's breathtaking."

Through the GHPB, McNab has worked with other maritime associations to internationalize maritime security regulations. He said that critics of the plan don't seem to get it. "The U.S. Coast Guard has taken the lead on port security not just in the United States but around the world since the Homeland Security Act in 2002. It hasn't just been U.S. legislation, but International Maritime Organization (IMO) legislation which paralleled the new U.S. security paradigm. The world standards through the IMO were driven by the U.S. Coast Guard. We got just about everything we wanted regarding port cargo and personnel security. It's not just the U.S. --the whole world is on the same page. It doesn't matter if it's a port in New York or Dubai or Sydney-- we all comply with the same regulations. There is worldwide enforcement. We feel quite pleased that the U.S. took a leadership position in enacting the kind of international security regime we envisaged. All that was done through the Department of Homeland Security but particularly through the U.S. Coast Guard."

The USCG takes a lead role not just in setting security standards, but enforcing them. It collects a mind-boggling amount of data on all vessels, cargo and crew entering the United States, which is then subjected to a deep analysis. If anything seems out of line, the USCG boards the vessel before it gets anywhere near a port. In his article, Sanger includes the oft-cited statistic that "Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers [entering the U.S.] are inspected." But that statistic only applies to the containers that are randomly inspected by Customs above and beyond any containers triaged out of the supply chain because their documentation has raised a red flag or they come from someplace like Gaza and deserve extra scrutiny. And to randomly inspect a much larger percentage would incur economic losses in excess of the potential benefits of checking out every container of tube socks bound for Wal Mart.

We can all agree that profiling makes sense, right? And we get angry when we see little girls getting hassled at airports, don't we? So why are we suddenly attacking a port-security regime that applies a more rigorous set of rules to any cargo coming from suspicious destinations and refuses to overdo random inspections?

Food for thought. While we chew on that, consider how bloggers can find these people while Big Media cannot.