[Senate Hearing 109-481]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 109-481
AFTER THE LONDON ATTACKS: WHAT LESSONS HAVE BEEN LEARNED TO SECURE U.S.
TRANSIT SYSTEMS?
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 21, 2005
__________
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman
TED STEVENS, Alaska JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut
GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio CARL LEVIN, Michigan
NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
TOM COBURN, Oklahoma THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
LINCOLN D. CHAFEE, Rhode Island MARK DAYTON, Minnesota
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico MARK PRYOR, Arkansas
JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia
Michael D. Bopp, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Kathleen L. Kraninger, Professional Staff Member
Joyce A. Rechtschaffen, Minority Staff Director and Counsel
Joshua A. Levy, Minority Counsel
Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Collins.............................................. 1
Senator Lieberman............................................ 2
Senator Carper............................................... 4
Senator Levin................................................ 6
Senator Lautenberg........................................... 14
WITNESSES
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Edmund S. Hawley, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security
Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Department of
Homeland Security.............................................. 7
Michael Brown, Chief Operating Officer, London Underground....... 18
Polly L. Hanson, Chief, Metro Transit Police Department.......... 22
Rafi Ron, President, New Age Security Solutions.................. 26
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Brown, Michael:
Testimony.................................................... 18
Prepared statement with an attachment........................ 58
Hanson, Chief Polly L.:
Testimony.................................................... 22
Prepared statement........................................... 66
Hawley, Edmund S.:
Testimony.................................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 37
Post-hearing questions and responses......................... 47
Ron, Rafi:
Testimony.................................................... 26
Prepared statement........................................... 76
AFTER THE LONDON ATTACKS:
WHAT LESSONS HAVE BEEN LEARNED
TO SECURE U.S. TRANSIT SYSTEMS?
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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2005
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:02 a.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Susan M.
Collins, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Collins, Lieberman, Levin, Carper, and
Lautenberg.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN COLLINS
Chairman Collins. The Committee will come to order. Today
this Committee will examine the security and preparedness of
mass transit systems in the United States. I particularly
appreciate the chief operating officer of the London
Underground traveling across the Atlantic to be with us this
morning. He will share the lessons learned from his experience
in leading his agency's response to the terrible attacks in
July in London.
I would like to thank our distinguished Ranking Member,
Senator Lieberman, for his initiative in recommending this
hearing and our other expert witnesses for their appearance
here today.
I would also note that the American Public Transportation
Association is hosting a meeting of security officials from a
number of foreign transit agencies in Washington, and many of
them have joined us at this hearing today. They represent a
number of foreign countries, and we welcome them and look
forward to hearing their views after the hearing.
On the morning of July 7, terrorists exploded three bombs
on underground trains in central London. A fourth bomb
destroyed a double-decker bus. Fifty-two innocent people were
murdered in those attacks. More than 700 were injured. Exactly
2 weeks later, on July 21, another attack was launched during
London's morning rush hour. Again, three trains and a bus were
the targets. Fortunately, however, those bombs failed to
detonate.
The attacks on London's mass transit have been described as
a wake-up call to those responsible for the safety and security
of our own mass transit systems, and they are not the first.
They echo the alarms set off by earlier attacks on mass transit
in Madrid, Moscow, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, and other cities around the
world. In fact, the National Counterterrorism Center database
reveals that in 2004, there were more than 150 deadly terrorist
attacks on mass transit worldwide.
Now that we have heard the alarm bells, it is time to act.
In the jargon of counterterrorism, we often speak of soft
targets. Soft targets are those locations and facilities that
attract large numbers of people and that, by their very nature,
must be open to easy public access, such as schools, shopping
malls, hotels, restaurants, and sports arenas. The American
mass transit system is among the softest of targets. Every
year, according to the American Public Transportation
Association, Americans take more than 9.6 billion trips on
public transportation. Every weekday, approximately 6,000
public transit systems carry more than 14 million passengers.
In less than a month's time, transit systems move more
passengers than U.S. airlines transport in a year. Implementing
security measures for these necessarily open systems is both a
challenge and a responsibility borne by Federal, State, and
local government officials, as well as private-sector owners
and operators. Meeting this challenge requires a strategic
vision and short- and long-term action plans developed among
these parties, and it requires leadership from the Federal
Government.
I look forward to hearing today from the Department of
Homeland Security regarding the Federal strategy for helping to
secure our Nation's mass transit systems. I am, however,
disappointed that that strategy was initially classified,
making access to it extremely difficult. In particular, I also
question whether the Department may be focused too narrowly on
aviation security at the expense of other modes of
transportation. While it is understandable that after the
September 11 attacks air security would command our immediate
focus, I believe that it is now time to reassess priorities and
evaluate our preparedness across all modes of public
transportation.
The answer, of course, is not merely to invest more in mass
transit security, but to invest it wisely, to adopt and expand
strategies and tools that have proven successful elsewhere.
From communications, surveillance equipment, sensors, and
access control systems to planning, training, additional
transit police, and increased public awareness, the techniques
by which mass transit security can be improved are known and in
use, as our witnesses will testify today. I welcome the
testimony. We will hear how these techniques can be employed to
harden a target that remains far too soft.
Senator Lieberman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LIEBERMAN
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Madam Chairman. Thanks for your
opening statement and thank you very much for convening this
hearing. This Committee has been quite engaged as the oversight
committee of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, tomorrow we are
holding a markup--I believe the first by a Senate Committee--to
bring out emergency response legislation; that is, legislation
that will assist the victims and their communities in their
response and recovery to Hurricane Katrina. So I appreciate
your decision to go ahead with this hearing as scheduled, and I
think it reflects our shared conclusion that our transit
systems remain vulnerable to terrorist attack and that the
terrorists who struck us on September 11 are not going to take
a holiday or a grace period because we have been hit by
Hurricane Katrina. They are out there, and we have to do
everything we can, urgently, to increase our defense, our
homeland defense of targets that are vulnerable and may be
therefore attractive to terrorists.
Many of us have been concerned, as your opening statement
suggests, Madam Chairman, since September 11 with the lack of
an adequate response to the defense of our mass transit
systems. As you said, it was understandable post-September 11
that we should focus first on aviation security, and quite
appropriately so. But September 11 was a tragic wake-up call
that should challenge us to better defend not just aviation,
but other transit systems and other vulnerable parts of our
society. The numbers here cry out, just as you said. The number
I have--more than 14 million Americans ride our mass transit
systems every day, as compared to 2 million people who fly on
airplanes. That does not mean we should not do everything we
can aggressively to protect the 2 million. It just means that
we better not forget the 14 million, and the response--perhaps
this is too simple, but it is one measure--is how much money we
have spent since September 11 on aviation security on the one
hand and mass transit security on the other. You will get some
debate about these numbers depending on how you calculate them,
but there seems to be agreement that we have spent at least $15
billion on aviation security since September 11 and that we
have spent only $300 million on mass transit security. That
cannot go on. We are inviting trouble if it does go on.
For about 3 years, some of us have been trying to get the
Administration to issue a National Transit Security Plan. Last
year, finally, in the intelligence reform legislation which
came out of this Committee and was adopted in December, there
was a legal requirement to do that. It was due on April 1. A
lot of months went by, but finally, after April 1, the plan was
issued. And, as Senator Collins has said, it was classified,
preventing many of the stakeholders in our mass transit system,
for whom the document was issued, from being able to use it. I
am pleased that the Department, hopefully--at least in part in
response to the request made by Senator Collins and me--has now
agreed to permit the stakeholders to view the strategy, but we
are still unable to discuss the content of the document here
today without restriction.
I do want to discuss--with Mr. Hawley, particularly--the
Federal Government's vision for transit security and
transportation security generally in a way that is constructive
and meaningful without compromising any of the restrictions
established by the Department. So I guess I would say right
here at the outset to you, Mr. Hawley, and as far as it relates
to any others, but it is really to you, that if at any point
during the hearing in response to a question I or any of the
rest of us ask, but I will say it about myself, you believe
that a full answer would require you to discuss information
that cannot be discussed publicly, then please indicate so and
limit your answers to that which you can discuss publicly. I
will say for my part I have reviewed the strategy, but I remain
concerned that within it there is not an adequate sense of
priorities. The vulnerabilities are listed in different areas
of mass transit--but there is not a sense that I got of
priorities about which of those vulnerabilities are most
significant and, therefore, which we should focus most
resources on most quickly.
Second, I share with you a general reaction, and want to
ask you about it, that the plan continues to reflect an
encouraging, proactive, aggressive, creative, comprehensive,
can-do, must-do attitude toward aviation security, but it does
not do the same with regard to mass transit. We understand, as
Senator Collins said, that a lot of forms of mass transit are
more open systems, harder to protect, but that is not a reason
not to do a lot of things that are not being done now to push,
if I can use an old metaphor, the security envelope here--it is
probably not the appropriate one--to make sure we are doing
everything we can, even allowing for the openness of the
systems.
In that sense, our witnesses today, I think, can be
extremely helpful, and I am very grateful that they are here.
Chief Brown, Mr. Brown, comes with the experience, not just of
the tragedy of the attacks in London in July, but of all that
the London system does to deter such attacks, well beyond what
is done in most of our transit systems today. Mr. Ron brings
considerable experience from Israel, unfortunately having lived
with the clear and constant danger of terrorist attack, in
other methods that can be used to deter those attacks in open
mass transit systems. I look forward to hearing from him. And
then Chief Hanson, from the Metro Police Department, is in some
sense the consumer and the front-line first preventer, not to
mention first responder, in mass transit security. I want to
ask her about how she thinks we in the Federal Government are
doing in helping her do her job. Bottom-line, I have, and I
know everybody on the Committee does, a real sense of urgency
about doing a lot better than we have done in protecting the
American people when they ride mass transit in this country,
and I am confident that from this hearing will come some good
ideas that we can use together to accomplish that very
important national security goal.
Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you, Senator.
I would now like to call upon a Committee member who takes
mass transit every day and thus has a special interest in this
topic and has had for some time.
Senator Carper.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Thanks, Madam Chair, and thanks very much
to you and Senator Lieberman for holding this hearing. This is
one that strikes close to home for all the members of the
Delaware congressional delegation, Senator Biden, Congressman
Castle, and myself, because we do commute on almost a daily
basis to Washington along with hundreds or thousands of people
who ride not just Amtrak, but the MARC systems, the SEPTA
systems, and others up and down the northeast corridor, so we
much appreciate your holding this hearing.
I flew down to Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday and was
reminded again as I stood in line to go through security at
Philadelphia International to take my shoes off and to go
through the process that we have all become familiar with in
the last couple of years, how much air travel has changed in
the last 4 years. Those of us who work the kind of jobs we do,
we do fly a whole lot. So we are especially mindful of that. I
am sure a lot of folks in the audience are mindful of that, as
well.
I think most of us agree that American air travelers are
traveling with greater security and that some of the
inconvenience we put up with is worth it. I feel safer. I hope
others feel safer, as well. I noted before--I think in this
Committee--that the bombings that we witnessed in the past year
or so in Madrid and in London should have in a lot of ways been
the same kind of wake-up call for us that September 11 has been
on the air side. We have taken some steps to secure rail and
transit systems since those two attacks, but I am telling you I
am still not convinced that we have done everything that we can
and should be doing to prevent a Madrid-style or a London-style
bombing from occurring here close to home on our own shores. I
am not suggesting that we take what we are doing at our
airports and set up similar security systems in trains or bus
stations. I am not interested in rushing into the Wilmington
train station, taking off my shoes, and standing in line to go
through screening devices any more than the other hundreds of
thousands of people who take transit every day, but I think
there are some things we can do, and hopefully as we come
through today's hearing we will identify some of them.
I am pleased that we have finally given the Department of
Homeland Security the money to distribute grants to rail and to
transit systems to help them pay for some of the cost of
additional security. It is my understanding that not very much
of that money has been spent, and I am not sure why that is the
case. We certainly hope to get some insights into that today.
Since Amtrak and most transit agencies barely have enough money
to operate from day to day, we probably ought to be putting up
the money, and I am just curious as to why the money that we
have appropriated has not gone out the door and actually been
put to work. I am also pleased, though, that the Department of
Homeland Security is spending money to train and deploy teams
of rail inspectors and canine bomb-sniffing units.
Whenever I talk to security folks within Amtrak, they
always say one of the best buys that we can get for our money
is dogs, just to have dogs that are trained with folks who know
how to handle them to check for bombs aboard trains. I think we
do need more information, however, about how these assets are
going to be deployed and how they fit into a strategy to harden
our defenses against an attack on our rail and our transit
systems quickly before another attack forces us to take
additional action.
In closing, Madam Chairman and colleagues, I will just say
that this is, I think, a very timely hearing and a topic that
is worthy of our attention and has been for some time. There
has been a lot of talk since the London bombings about whose
job it is to do the brunt of the work to protect our Nation's
rail and transit infrastructure--the operators in the private
sector, State and local level, or the Federal Government? I
agree with those who say that rail and transit security should
be a shared responsibility, but if, God forbid, there were an
attack on an American subway system like the one that occurred
in London, our constituents would demand that the Federal
Government act decisively, and I hope that this hearing helps
us flesh out at least a little bit more what the Federal role
in transit security and rail security should be and speeds up
our efforts to fulfill that role.
Thank you.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
Senator Levin, we welcome you, as well.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LEVIN
Senator Levin. Thank you, Madam Chairman, to you and
Senator Lieberman as always for taking a leadership role in a
very critical area. One of the issues that I am particularly
interested in in the area of transit security, but frankly all
security, is the development of technology that is capable of
detecting explosives at a distance. If we can develop that
technology so that we can identify explosives at a distance, we
are going to be able to dramatically enhance our security
everywhere. The technology does not yet exist, as far as I
know, and yet we have--as Senator Carper mentioned--dogs that
sniff explosive material. Explosive residues can be detected on
people and on clothing, and we should be able, if there are
enough resources invested, to develop a technology which can
spot explosive devices at some distance, and that would be a
huge breakthrough in the fight against terrorism. So I know
that the Department of Homeland Security is developing and
coordinating an effort to detect the presence of explosives at
a distance. I emphasize at a distance. We already can detect
them at a few inches or feet. We need to be able to detect them
at many yards away.
We could have protected ourselves and other countries could
have protected themselves against many of these explosions had
we had this capability. I believe we put some additional funds
in the budget this year to do that. I think we have gone from
$22 million to $136 million for the High Explosives
Countermeasures Office, but I would like to hear from Mr.
Hawley and also our other witnesses if they have information on
this subject as to what is the status of the efforts to
research and develop a detection capability for high explosives
at some distance.
I regret that I am going to have to leave, so I will not
hear their answers, but my staff will tell me whether or not
either or any of these witnesses have been able to shed some
light on this question as to where are the investments being
made; what is the time line; do we have any hoped-for
breakthroughs that are on the horizon? If so, with luck, can we
be deploying these kind of detection devices or a detection
device within a matter of a year or two, or is it longer range
than that? How many companies do we think and how many
institutions--academic institutions, commercial companies--are
involved? Is it a matter of a few or is it a matter of dozens
or is a matter of hundreds looking for this capability? And
from our witnesses from England, if they could also bring us up
to date as to what England is doing in this area, as well, it
would be helpful to me. Again, I only regret that I cannot stay
to hear the answers, but it is a very important question I hope
our witnesses might address.
Chairman Collins. Thank you, Senator.
I am pleased to welcome our first witness this morning,
Edmund Hawley, the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for
the Transportation Security Administration. This is the
position for which the Committee confirmed him this past July.
We are very pleased to welcome you back, and we look forward to
hearing your testimony. Please proceed.
TESTIMONY OF EDMUND S. HAWLEY,\1\ ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF
HOMELAND SECURITY, TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Mr. Hawley. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chairman,
Ranking Member Lieberman, and Members of the Committee. I
appreciate the opportunity on behalf of the Transportation
Security Administration (TSA) to discuss our efforts in
partnership with others in the Federal, State, and local
governments, as well as the private sector, to provide
essential security in public transportation. As has already
been noted, 2\1/2\ months ago, Londoners endured the ordeal of
four nearly simultaneous suicide bombing attacks in the
Underground system and a double-decker bus. Just 2 weeks later,
another four attacks in the Underground were attempted.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Hawley appears in the Appendix on
page 37.
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This has been an opportunity for us to assess and enhance
the level of security on our public transportation systems. Our
review of that effort has provided valuable information on our
security posture and insight into areas where improvements are
needed. These learnings from London and insights from Secretary
Chertoff's second-stage review form the basis of my testimony
today. Earlier this month, the Department delivered to Congress
the national strategy for transportation security that you have
mentioned. This was prepared in cooperation with the Department
of Transportation and outlines the Federal Government's
approach in partnership with State, local and tribal
governments and private industry to secure the U.S.
transportation system from terrorist attacks and also to
prepare the Nation by increasing our capacity to respond if an
attack occurs. It describes how the Federal Government will
manage transportation risks and discusses how the government
will organize its resources to secure the transportation
system.
To implement the strategy, it is clear that we must enhance
our coordination of security initiatives and our communication
among the Federal, State, and local governments and industry
stakeholders. Two significant developments in this area have
already occurred. On September 8, TSA, FTA, and DHS's Office of
State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness
(SLGCP) completed the public transportation annex to the
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between DHS and DOT. This
agreement defines the roles and responsibilities of the Federal
Government parties in public transportation security.
Additionally, earlier this month, as a direct result from our
learnings from London, TSA initiated a pilot program with
participants from DHS, DOT, and FTA to re-think the way in
which we communicate with stakeholders on passenger rail and
rail transit security issues. The objective of this program is
for the Federal partners in passenger rail and rail transit
security to coordinate ahead of time and speak with one voice
to our stakeholders. This program will bolster passenger rail
and rail transit security and provide the foundation for
similar initiatives in other transportation modes.
We are also bringing improvements to explosive detection
procedures. We are increasing our canine explosives detection
capability and have taken steps to expand the deployment of
teams to some of the largest mass transit systems. That effort
is now under way. TSA's surface transportation inspection force
is nearly fully fielded. Inspectors are already deployed and
working to develop close liaison with mass transit and
passenger rail operators. The inspectors provided timely
services in the aftermath of the attacks on London, deploying
to rail and mass transit operation centers throughout the
Nation. The lessons learned and relationships developed will
further enhance our security posture, as will the security
system evaluations in mass transit systems. These initiatives
are being integrated into the broader context of overall DHS
initiatives and Secretary Chertoff's strategy for the
Department. These include real stakeholder engagement,
networked information, development and leveraging of
technology, a risk-based approach to the deployment of Federal
resources, and the DHS program for grants to foster innovation
at the State and local level and in the private sector. We will
continuously strengthen our base of security programs in a
manner that ensures freedom of movement for people and
commerce.
A common theme in this discussion is our effectiveness and
security depends on the close working relationships among the
parties. I would like to publicly express my gratitude to
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta for his support of this
mission by letting us take a key member of his team, Deputy
Transit Administrator Robert Jamison, who will join us at TSA
as deputy administrator. He brings a wealth of experience in
the public transportation environment and is acting
administrator of the Federal Rail Administration.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear this morning. I
look forward to working with Congress on these topics and would
be happy to answer any questions.
Chairman Collins. Thank you for your statement. I want to
begin my questioning today by exploring an issue that Senator
Lieberman raised in his opening statement about the disparity
in funding for aviation security versus other modes of
transportation. My statistics are a little bit different from
those of Senator Lieberman, but the point is exactly the same.
Since September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security
has allocated over $18 billion in funding for aviation security
and only $250 million for transit security grants. Now, I
recognize that the funding for transit security grants does not
represent all spending that benefits transit security, but it
is the largest allocation of dedicated funding, and by any
measure there is a huge disparity. At this stage and in light
of the attacks on mass transit systems in other countries,
should we be reallocating resources to beef up other modes of
transportation?
Mr. Hawley. The risk-based approach looks at the total
transportation network, and clearly the Federal dollars that
are spent in the aviation sector are very much larger than
those spent in others. However, that does not reflect the
relative importance of either the modes or the security
available to them, and that it is a very high priority
certainly in the Department and TSA to be involved in transit
security. The numbers--there are a lot of different numbers,
but I think your point is valid, whatever the specific numbers.
But the way we look at the terrorist situation today is more on
a person-based as opposed to a thing-based, which is to say
that it is not, in our opinion, the right way to structure the
security regime to look at specific attack points and develop
solutions for every one of those individually, but rather to
look at the whole system and say it is the people who are
delivering these attacks, and things that we do in terms of
border security, connecting the dots, so to speak, between ICE
and Customs and border protection and TSA and FBI, and that the
focus of finding the terrorists themselves who may decide to do
a transit attack or an aviation attack or any of the other
modes, that the focus is to stop the terrorist attack wherever
it is, and certainly there are prudent things to do at the
point of attack across the board, but there is also the other
effort that does not lend itself to modal differentiation.
Chairman Collins. I think that is something that the
Department really needs to take a look at. The GAO has been
critical of the Department, as you know, for not concluding a
risk assessment of the Nation's passenger rail system. And,
there continues to be criticism of whether or not we are really
prepared in this area. I also think we can learn a lot from the
experience of other countries. In Michael Brown's testimony, he
notes the value of the closed-circuit television surveillance
units that are widely deployed throughout the London
Underground system, and it was those television images that
enabled a swift, successful law enforcement investigation
following the July attacks. What is the status in the United
States of efforts to install similar surveillance and
communication systems within our mass transit systems?
Mr. Hawley. The camera systems and the communication
systems are among the best security measures that the transit
systems can do, and, of course, each system has its own
particular characteristics and its own particular progress. The
point that I always come to on that is that the capital expense
of getting the camera installed is perhaps the easiest part,
and then comes the part of, OK, how are we actually going to
use them? Who is going to be watching the feeds? How are we
going to analyze them, and what do we do when we see something
that we are concerned about? From my point of view, as these
issues are resolved on the capital dollars to put in these very
excellent systems, that there needs to be a commensurate
activity that integrates those new systems into the real world
security process of an individual transit system or even
transit station. So it is something that we feel is very
important and a role that we can play that is helpful and
directly applicable to increased security, but does not have a
huge dollar cost associated with it. It is how to leverage
those capital investments to get the best operating security.
Chairman Collins. Are other countries ahead of us in this
regard? It certainly seems that way, just watching the images
on television versus our personal observations here in the
United States.
Mr. Hawley. Well, certainly the London Underground is among
the best, if not the best in the world, in terms of the
deployment of an integrated security system, and it is a
cautionary tale that even with that level, that these attacks
occurred, and also of concern is the fact that a short time
later essentially the same method was used by similar attack
methodology. So no system is invulnerable, no matter what the
investment is. You just cannot take risk away, but you can do
the prudent thing, and I think the systems that we have
deployed in the United States and the operating procedures that
go with them are as good as anywhere in the world, and I think
the proof point of that was on July 7, when all of the transit
systems in the United States came up on their own to a very
high, very effective level of security, and all that work of
preparation and vulnerability assessments and all of those
things that have been going on for 3 years came up in an
instant and was very effective. So I think the security for
transit systems in the United States is outstanding.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Thanks, Mr.
Hawley, for your testimony. Incidentally, Senator Collins
raised questions about the allocation of appropriations for
mass transit. In fact, in the initial budget proposal by the
Administration there actually was a cut from previous levels in
mass transit funding, and Senator Collins and I have asked our
colleagues on the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee
to at least appropriate for mass transit to the level of last
year. I hope that you will support us on that. I hope in some
sense that this hearing may encourage our colleagues to sustain
the current level of funding and hopefully to go higher.
I want to ask you a few questions about the national
strategy, and I want to do so mindful of what I said in my
opening remarks, that I expect that you will respect the
limitations or I will respect the limitations of what you can
say and cannot say publicly at this hearing. The strategy has
been in the works for a long time, long before you became the
Assistant Secretary for Transportation Security, and a lot has
happened since it began. There is always a lag time in these
kinds of things. I want to ask you this question, which is
whether you would say that the National Strategy for
Transportation Security, as it was released more than a week
ago, reflects the Administration's current thinking on
transportation security strategy?
Mr. Hawley. Yes, it does. It is a very good baseline on
which to build. As you get into it, there is tremendous depth
to the information that is there that lays out a very
comprehensive look at the total transportation system, and the
key point being that in the resource-constrained world, risk-
based priorities are the way to go, and that really is at the
heart of Secretary Chertoff's strategy for the Department and
certainly ours at TSA, and it lays out a lot of the current
processes that have been built up of solving the problem of how
do we have an effective level of security across systems that
operate geographically dispersed and are all interconnected?
How do we connect those with so many different players having
responsibility for different pieces?
Senator Lieberman. Let me ask you then to respond in
general terms, or however specific you think you can, to my
general reaction after having reviewed the strategy, which is
that within the itemization in different forms of
transportation, of vulnerabilities, there did not seem to be a
sense of priorities among those. That is the first one. The
second is my own feeling, somewhat explicit, maybe implicit,
that the approach to the non-aviation transportation sectors
remained much less aggressive, can-do, must-do, even if it is
hard, than the strategy for the aviation sector.
Mr. Hawley. I can tell you on the transit sector that the
first London bombings occurred on a Thursday, and Secretary
Chertoff had a number of us in on Saturday with, ``OK, what are
we doing right now to do what we can to have the level of
security effectively increased?''
Senator Lieberman. Long-term, not just----
Mr. Hawley. Long-term, I think the strategy gets--it goes
back to the point of looking for the terrorists before the
attack is launched, and if the predominance of our defenses are
only to protect the final end point of the attack, that is not
a very good system, and so it is the multiple layers that go to
stop an attack before the decision is made by the attackers as
to which mode.
Senator Lieberman. That is exactly the point I was trying
to make, which is--and I agree with this in part--that if
somebody is going to come at a transit system or any other
locale in our country, as unfortunately our friends from Great
Britain and Israel know, strapped with bombs around their
waist, once they get to that point it is hard to stop them, not
impossible, as we have seen, but hard. Obviously, the best
thing you can do is to have intelligence to stop them before
they strike, but I do not want us to allow that reality to be a
reason not to do everything we can to protect and defend the
final targets, as the British and the Israelis do more than we
do, I believe.
Mr. Hawley. Yes. I think that is an excellent point, and
the things that we can do long-term in terms of technology
development and things that tend to be capital costs are not
immediately available to us, but a lot of the things--the See
Something, Say Something campaign that enlists the public to be
alert, training of the employees of the transit operators,
behavioral observation techniques.
Senator Lieberman. That's exactly the kind of stuff I am
talking about. We are going to hear more about that on the
second panel. Can I ask you one final question? After the
threat level was raised to orange after the London attacks,
local transit systems around the country raised their defense
levels, and it put a lot of strain on them in terms of
finances. There's an article I have seen from the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution that reports that raising the threat level
to orange this summer cost the Atlanta transit system about
$10,000 a day beyond its regular operating budget, which
exhausted a quarter of its overtime budget within the first
month of the system's fiscal year and pushed the security
personnel to work 12-hour shifts even though they had the
assistance of local police.
In Connecticut, I can tell you that after the threat level
was lowered back to yellow, the Governor announced that State
Police officers and National Guard troops would no longer be
deployed on the Metro-North trains or at the State bus and
train stations. So in some sense the threat level was reduced,
as I understood the Secretary's decision, because local
protection had gone up, but when the threat level was reduced
nationally, the local protection left because of financial
reasons. So I wanted to ask you whether the financial strain
placed on transit systems by the lack of resources for transit
security in any way influenced the Department's decision to
lower the threat level for mass transit this past August?
Mr. Hawley. The funding source comes from the Urban Area
Security Initiative, which has, I think, since September 11,
$8.6 billion put into it, and from that pool local communities
are able to draw down sources--money from that, particularly to
offset overtime, etc.--and I think the issue on when it was
time to come down to yellow from orange was based in large part
on a sense that we could not keep a high level of alertness at
every player across the system indefinitely, and that by the
random application----
Senator Lieberman. Because of financial stress?
Mr. Hawley. Well, no, just the alert readiness. For
instance, it was in the summer, and I saw guys who were in
their Kevlar and their helmets, and the approach that seemed
persuasive to us is that the random application of parts of
orange that would not incur the cost of total orange
everywhere, but that random increased patrol here, random dog
team there, random different pieces that you did not have to
sustain across the entire activity would give a higher
delivered level of security than existed at yellow without
incurring the cost that you had to have at orange.
Senator Lieberman. I thank you. My time is up. Obviously, I
hope you will think about this irony when you lower the threat
level, then the locals got rid of the financial stress. I am
going to want to ask the Metro police chief, from her
perspective, about that whole experience. Thanks very much, Mr.
Hawley.
Mr. Hawley. Thank you.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. Thanks, Madam Chairman.
Again, Mr. Secretary, welcome. In the airline industry,
many technologies have been developed in the military and later
made commercially available. Rail and transit systems, however,
really do not have the same kind of research and development
pipeline to draw from, at least not to my knowledge. How is the
Transportation Security Administration working with other
agencies in this country or even outside this country to create
a similar pipeline for the detection of explosive,
radiological, chemical, biological devices that might be
deployed against our transit rail systems? How are you working
with industry to make such technologies commercially available?
Mr. Hawley. On the longer-term improvements in technology,
the science and technology group at DHS specifically looks into
the science piece to see promising areas. For instance, Senator
Levin was talking about standoff detection of suicide bombers.
What kind of science could apply to that mission? And so for
the longer-term, looking at different, newer technologies and
then turning those into products or providing seed money so
that people can create pilots is very much the job of S&T.
Within TSA, we have had a very effective explosives lab that is
based in Atlantic City, and they spend a lot of time trying to
figure out how a particular technology that works in one area
could be applied to finding explosives in another. So there is
a lot done there, a lot of connection with other parts of the
government in other countries. It tends to be a 2-year lag, my
guess, before we are going to see that effectively applied.
Senator Carper. All right. I understand from some
discussions we had with folks who run rail and transit
operations that they are approached--not besieged, but
approached--by vendors frequently who are selling technologies
that might help those rail and transit operators to better
secure their systems. It is oftentimes difficult for the rail
and transit operators to know a good investment from a bad one,
as I am sure you can understand. Let me just give you an
example: In the area of air quality, EPA has worked with
transit agencies and bus manufacturers to set a standard, for
example, for low-emission diesel engines that are commercially
available. I just wonder how is the Transportation Security
Administration doing this kind of thing with security
technology? How does TSA determine what technologies are most
effective, as well as how those products are most effectively
utilized, and how do you get that information to the transit
agencies to make sure that they know better how to spend their
limited security funds?
Mr. Hawley. Senator, I have heard the same comment from
lots of people in the transit industry, and the Department,
through the State and Local Government Office at the
Department--they are the funding source; they are the people
that provide the grants--have a kind of Consumer Reports type
function that they have where individual technologies are
tested and evaluated, and so it is trying to draw the line
between saying, ``Here is our cookbook, the vendors you should
be purchasing equipment from.'' We do not want to get into
making those choices, but we want to say, ``Here, these are the
technologies that are used in this way and they meet a common
standard across the board,'' so to give the individual transit
systems the ability to fine-tune, but also to take the cost of
evaluating all those vendors off their backs and let them focus
on their own operations.
Senator Carper. I think you discussed in your testimony the
importance of better utilizing canines to detect explosives. To
date, TSA has augmented local law-enforcement canine capacity
at events like the Democratic National Convention, Republican
National Convention, and so forth. Do you have any idea how
many canines TSA recommends that transit securities maintain?
Is there some rule of thumb that is used in helping them
determine that? Do you have any idea how many additional
canines are needed for higher-level threat areas and how they
have been deployed and prepositioned, and finally what is the
cost of providing this level of canine presence and who should
bear that cost?
Mr. Hawley. The canine opportunity, we have talked about
using technology that will join us in a couple of years, but
that is a tremendous resource and a very flexible resource, and
at TSA we have been on a pretty rapid incline where we expect
to finish the year at around 470 dog teams.
Senator Carper. Any idea what that number might have been a
couple years ago?
Mr. Hawley. I know last year it was in the 300s, and I
don't know really beyond that, but I do know that since the
July bombings, we have made 30 dog teams available to 10 large
cities, that they will have those dogs by the end of the year.
And now, as to the model of how the costs work with dogs, the
way TSA does it today is that we have them trained at Lackland
Air Force Base, a center of excellence for us for explosives
detection, and we pay the operating costs or we reimburse local
law enforcement who actually maintain the dog, and then a
certain percentage of recipient of that we allocate. For
instance, after July 7, we made available a certain number of
our airport dog teams for transit operations, and I would say,
going further, Senator, speaking specifically of Amtrak, that
it is something we are looking at as to how to use any dog team
that we have access to, on a random basis, apply it to, for
instance, Amtrak or transit systems as requested by them.
Senator Carper. One last one: You discussed, I think in
your testimony, the transit rail inspection pilot program that
tested the feasibility of screening passengers, screening their
luggage, screening cargo for explosives in transit and rail
systems. I think you said this sort of technology might be best
used when threats are made against a particular station or
site. My question is how will the personnel and technology be
deployed when such a threat is identified? Will it be available
in every transit system or are you going to have it
prepositioned throughout the country and redeployed when a
threat is identified, and how also would this be paid for?
Mr. Hawley. Yes, the technology works. It is large and
expensive and not terribly mobile. Dogs, on the other hand, are
available, are mobile, and can be very effectively applied. So
my solution is that we keep looking at the technology, keep
trying to get the costs down and the flexibility up, but that
we have tremendous resources in the canine arena that we are
using today and will continue to use as a very effective,
mobile, flexible, not terribly expensive force.
Senator Carper. Madam Chairman, rural southern Delaware has
a saying that maybe they have in rural northern Maine about
this dog won't hunt, but when it comes to effectively ferreting
out explosive threats and that sort of thing on trains and
transit, these dogs do hunt, and they do a real good job.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Lautenberg.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LAUTENBERG
Senator Lautenberg. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I am sorry
that I missed an opportunity to make an opening statement, but
I would ask that my full statement be included in the record.
Chairman Collins. Without objection.
[The prepared statement of Senator Lautenberg follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR LAUTENBERG
Mr. Chairman, the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina was
compounded by a disastrous response. There was plenty of warning that a
major hurricane could cause widespread flooding in New Orleans. And the
warnings came true.
We ignore warnings at our peril . . . but we continue to do so.
This month marks 4 years since September 11 . . . and 2 months since
the London subway attacks. We know that our transportation system is a
potential target of terrorists.
Public surface transportation carries 16 times more passengers than
airlines--but we focus almost all our security resources on aviation.
In 2002, the FBI warned that Al Qaeda may directly target U.S. trains,
rail bridges, and tracks. But despite the warnings, we still don't have
a plan to protect our nation's railways.
Since September 11, President Bush has not asked for one dime
specifically to secure our rail transit systems. Not one dime. Rather,
he asks for a broad Homeland Security fund for the Administration to
pick and choose which industries they want to secure and which ones are
left to fend for themselves. This is unacceptable. so each year
Congress has to designate specific funds for rail transit security
needs.
The 9/11 Commission reported in detail how unprepared we were at
that time for an attack on our transportation system. Unfortunately, we
are still not prepared.
I'm not suggesting airline-style baggage screening, but there are
things we can be doing to protect passengers and employees of transit
systems that won't inhibit travel. Just like we passed legislation in
the aviation sector, this Administration needs specific legislation on
rail transit security or it simply won't get the job done.
So while we hold this hearing to discuss ``Lessons from London,'' I
hope we understand that the warnings have been present long before July
2005.
Senator Lautenberg. As a prelude, very shortly, the natural
disaster of Katrina was compounded by subsequent disastrous
response, and there was plenty of warning that a major
hurricane would cause widespread devastation in New Orleans and
the surroundings, and the warnings came true, and we ignore
these warnings at our peril, but unfortunately we continue to
do so.
This month marks 4 years since September 11, 2 months since
the London subway attacks, and we know that our transportation
system is a potential target for terrorists. Public surface
transportation carries 16 times more passengers than airlines,
but we focus almost all of our security resources on aviation.
In 2002, the FBI warned that Al Qaeda may directly target U.S.
trains, rails, rail bridges, and tracks, and despite those
warnings we still do not have a satisfactory plan in place to
protect our Nation's railroads. The President, in his budget
requests, does not dedicate a particular portion of the funds
provided for transit security. Rather, our security is picked
out of a group--I say our transit security--out of a broad
homeland security fund for the Administration to pick and
choose which industries they want to secure and which ones are
left to fend for themselves, and I am hoping that this hearing,
Madam Chairman, is really timely and very important to bring
attention to this exposure that we have.
The funniest thing is when we look at potential attacks or
some major incident happening in the rail system, for years we
have looked at the transit agencies as having to deal with
their own crime on their systems. Terrorist attacks are
directed at our society as a whole and our American way of
life, and I can think of no greater responsibility for the
Federal Government than to protect us in this way. Instead, we
have been kind of left to deal with it as part of the total
security issue, and it is really not appropriate. I point out
that the per-passenger cost for security and aviation is $9.60
per person. The London Underground that we are going to hear
more about was over $2 dollars U.S. per passenger. U.S.
transit, where we carry 9 billion trips annually, less than a
penny per passenger, and it is really imbalanced, as everyone
knows, when we saw the terrible tragedy that hit London and
Japan in the transit systems, crippling the functioning of that
society substantially for a long time, creating terrible
problems. So, given your experience, Mr. Hawley, starting in
your position soon after the London bombings, have you seen any
sign that the Administration is going to request specific funds
in fiscal year 2007 for rail transit?
Mr. Hawley. On the issue of specific funds for transit, the
Administration believes--and I believe--that the nature of the
overlapping jurisdictions and operations in a region such as
the National Capital Region or many others, that with so many
players involved, that there needs to be some kind of an
overview for the area. What is our strategy that is appropriate
for this area? And that is why, on the targeted infrastructure
protection grants, the Administration proposal for 2006 was up
from $300 million to $600 million. So there is a significant
amount of money applied to this area, and I suspect that we may
disagree on whether it should be targeted directly to a
specific mode or made available for them to discuss and
distribute as they decide.
Senator Lautenberg. Well, a common theme in the development
of our intelligence system--the reform of our intelligence
system and with the Department of Homeland Security--was
focused on the debate as to whether or not the funds should be
applied on a risk-based formula. Well, how can we then, Mr.
Hawley, in fairness say, ``OK, Washington Metro, here is a
bunch of money. It is important. Divide it up in ways that you
think are most susceptible or most risky''? And to me that does
not answer the problem, very frankly, because I assure you
there are places in this city that get special funding even
though they are perhaps the best protected facilities that we
have in the country, but to ignore the damage--I mean, one need
only--unless you get a chance to come by helicopter from home--
if one gets in the car and drives across one of the bridges and
so forth, sees what kind of damage could result from an attack
on the Metro. I mean, this place would be in total chaos. So
how do we assure that the facility that carries most of the
people in the city and its environs is protected sufficiently?
Mr. Hawley. Well, clearly the priority for me and TSA and
DHS of protecting and being involved in excellent security in
the transit sector is very high on all of our radar screens,
and the issue of local decisionmaking--one of the 9/11
Commission report recommendations that we take very seriously
is the connect-the-dots, and trying to get intelligence from
the classified world directly to the operator in a way that
they can use it, either by lowering the classification or
finding a way to get it unclassified, is an operating way and
an imperative that I have of get whatever intelligence that we
have, whatever analysis, and network it widely within the
industry as best you can from a security point of view, but
always relating it to anything that would be tactically of
interest and supported completely.
Senator Lautenberg. Does the subject of Amtrak ever come
up, to your knowledge, under the rail security requirements? I
have not seen it mentioned at all in any of the papers that I
have seen. Is there anything there?
Mr. Hawley. Yes, sir, it is very much a part of it, and as
we look at the overall application of our resources and trying
to figure what can we use in a flexible way so that we do not
focus all our attention on one particular aspect or one
particular problem, we do want to have flexibility so we can
apply random appearances and random security for Amtrak,
transit, and all of our responsibilities. So I understand the
issue about the funding of aviation versus that of transit, but
I can assure you that at TSA and DHS the whole issue of transit
security is one that we take very seriously. I spend a great
deal of my personal time on it, and we were able to get the
deputy transit administrator to come in as deputy at TSA. So we
have a very high level, very deep operating experience at TSA,
and it is a priority.
Senator Lautenberg. I am sure you have seen or heard the
expression that came out of a major movie, and that was, ``Show
me the money,'' and if we do not see the money we do not know
how serious the thinking is.
Thanks very much for your testimony. Thank you, Madam
Chairman.
Chairman Collins. Thank you, Senator.
Mr. Hawley, before I let you go and we move on to the next
panel this morning, I have to tell you that I keep thinking
about your response to my last question. You said that, in your
judgment, the security of mass transit systems in the United
States is ``outstanding.'' I must say I don't know how you
could make that judgment when TSA has not finished risk
assessments of U.S. systems, and I will ask you to respond
either now or for the record.
Senator Lieberman. Madam Chairman, let me just say that I
totally agree with you, and everything we know continues to
worry me, that our mass transit systems are more vulnerable
than they should be today and that we have an urgent
responsibility through strategy and through adequate funding to
close those vulnerabilities to the best of our ability.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
Mr. Hawley. Sure. My basis for saying that was on July 7,
the work that had been done over the prior 3 years of actually
having written programs and very specific action plans for all
of the top transit systems--I saw the top 100--and it was
filled out with scorecards of how far they were on a whole
variety of individual metrics, and it frankly was a surprise to
me to see how ready the American transit system really is, and
I make this point not about funding or anything else, but just
to say that the work that has been done, consistently done over
a 3-year period, has led to a measurable result.
Chairman Collins. I think there is a lot of good work going
on at the local, State, regional, and Federal level, and by
private operators, but I think we have a long way to go, and I
will look forward to discussing this further with the next
panel. I think until TSA has completed its assessments, it
really does not have a complete picture of the state of
security for mass transit.
Thank you for your testimony.
Mr. Hawley. Thank you.
Chairman Collins. I would now like to call forward the
witnesses for our second panel. Our first witness, Michael
Brown, is the chief operating officer of the London
Underground. Mr. Brown has been with the London Underground for
16 years, serving in a variety of operations positions. In his
current position, Mr. Brown is responsible for managing the
Underground's operations and security, including emergency
planning and response, technology deployment, and personnel.
Our second witness, Polly Hanson, is the chief of the
Washington Metro Transit Police. Her experience in law
enforcement brings extensive knowledge to this Committee. In
the year 2002, after 21 years with the Transit Police, Ms.
Hanson was sworn in as the chief.
Our final witness, Rafi Ron, is the president of New Age
Technology Solutions, a transportation security consulting
firm. Mr. Ron was instrumental in developing and implementing
new security policies at Logan Airport. His prior experience
includes serving as the director of security at the Tel Aviv
Airport in Israel and 30 years in counterterrorism and
intelligence services of the Israeli government.
I feel very fortunate that we have such a prestigious
international panel giving us a variety of perspectives here
this morning. I thank you for being with us.
Mr. Brown, we will start with you.
TESTIMONY OF MICHAEL BROWN,\1\ CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, LONDON
UNDERGROUND
Mr. Brown. Madam Chairman, thank you for your words of
welcome, and thank you, Senator Lieberman, and other Members,
as well.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Brown with an attachment appears
in the Appendix on page 58.
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It is a great privilege to appear before you this morning.
The London Underground is the world's oldest underground
railway network. It first opened in 1863. There are 253 miles
of routes, 45 percent of the network is in a tunnel system.
There are 273 stations on the system served by underground
trains, and of these, 255 are operated by London Underground.
London Underground provides a public transport railway service
to London. It is part of Transport for London, which is a
public transport authority under the direct control of the
elected mayor of London.
Approximately 3 million passenger journeys are undertaken
each day on the Underground network, which is roughly the same
number as the whole of the rest of the rail network across the
United Kingdom. What I want to do briefly is talk about the
security situation before July 7 and then go on to say some of
the things that we have done since July 7. We have already
heard some commentary about the CCTV systems in the London
Underground. At present, the Underground has over 6,000 cameras
on nearly all stations and in some of our trains. Within 5
years, that number of cameras will double to 12,000. There are
five stations on the network which do not yet have CCTV
coverage, but they will have it by June of next year, and that
program has been brought forward since the events of July 7.
For all new CCTV systems, every camera will be recorded.
Work is also in place to monitor areas that are not effectively
monitored at the moment, such as ventilation shafts, more
monitoring of car parks and other potential entry points to the
network; 6.3 million pounds is being spent on such investment.
At present, policing of the Underground is carried out by
over 600 police officers. As of July 8, I ordered an additional
100 police officers, so there will be 750 police officers
specifically dedicated to policing the Underground system
within a year; 6,000 front-line station staff are deployed
across the Tube stations. These staff work either on platform,
ticket barriers in local station control rooms, or in control
across one or more stations.
All trains have a driver in their cab who is in contact by
radio with a line control center. There are seven such rooms
across the network. In terms of context, the majority of the
attacks before July 7 were carried out by Irish Republican
terrorists who had been involved in terrorism in all parts of
the U.K., not just in Northern Ireland. They usually, although
not always, gave a warning prior to their bombs exploding. So
clearly the bombings of July 7 were unprecedented in terms of
the type of incident with no warning and being a suicide
attack. The Underground is an environment where the millions of
people we convey each day have no full check on their identity.
No screening of their possessions take place, and there are
only ticket gates to control movements in and out of the
system.
The phenomenon of the suicide bomber means any traditional
measures of detection and interception are therefore likely to
be ineffective. Response to the incident is therefore key.
After the September 11 attacks in the United States of America,
London Underground played a full part in the resilience
planning process put in place by the U.K. Government and
supported by the Mayor of London. We have seconded a senior
manager to the London resilience team since it was established,
and this is to ensure that the operational realities of a mass
transport metro system can be properly considered in political
and investment decisions.
This team has led work in areas such as evacuation of parts
of London, chemical, biological and radiological attacks, and
most visibly has arranged tabletop and live emergency
exercises. The largest of these was a weekend exercise at Bank
London Underground Station which simulated a chemical attack at
one of the largest, most complex stations on the network. This
was a multi-agency exercise which was also attended by
political leaders. It is my view that the learning from all
exercises played a vital role for Underground senior managers
in revising training and in their own actions on July 7.
The resilience team also enabled the joint development of a
battery-powered track trolley designed to enable emergency
service personnel to travel down the tunnel to an incident
train while wearing heavy cumbersome protective suits. Although
the events of July did not require such protective suits to be
worn, these trolleys were deployed to help with casualty and
later with body recovery. Also, emergency personnel have been
trained to move trains in an emergency with instruction cards
being available for emergency personnel to enable this movement
of trains. As well as these larger-scale exercises, London
Underground arranges every year a smaller-scale live incident
gained with the full cooperation and involvement of police,
fire, and ambulance services. This usually involves closing
down a portion of the network during the weekend where the
emergency exercise takes place. While these exercises cannot
obviously involve all members of staff who might benefit from
such practical training, in my view they do present a very real
scenario for the senior and middle management team to
experience and to learn lessons from.
Let me go on to talk about the events of July 7. The three
explosions that happened on the Tube network happened almost
simultaneously at 08:49 and without warning across the
Underground network. Two of the explosions were on trains in
the Circle line, both of them in the second car, and one was on
the much deeper level Piccadilly line on a train which just
departed King's Cross, St. Pancras Station. The tight, deep-
level tunnel on the Piccadilly line led to a higher number of
deaths and serious injuries here than elsewhere. The fourth
explosion on the London bus, as you described, Madam Chairman,
took place some hour later and also involved a large number of
casualties. It was very close to the Piccadilly line train
incident.
In total, 38 people were murdered on the Underground and 52
people in total if you include the bus incident. For upwards of
half-an-hour after the incident, London Underground staff were
the first responders to the incident before the emergency
services arrived. Station staff, train drivers, cleaners, and a
large number of managers recovered the dead and the dying in
horrific circumstances at all sites. The drivers of all four
trains--two were involved at Edgware Road--were among the many
that performed with amazing courage, dedication, and compassion
for several hours.
As it became clear the scale and nature of the incidents,
the entire Underground network system was evacuated. At the
time of the explosion, just to put it in context, 500 trains
were in service, 2,500 staff were on duty, and the system was
evacuated of over 200,000 people in less than 1 hour after the
call was made to evacuate (apart from one train that was stuck
behind the incident train at Russell Square). This was
particularly remarkable as the capacity of the mobile--or as
you describe it, cell phone network--was unable to cope with
the volume of calls being made by members of the public. So the
communication systems in London were at breaking point.
Within 24 hours, 80 percent of the service of London
Underground was restored, and this was significant in that it
gave a real confidence boost to London and Londoners in the
resilience of their city. In accordance with our contingency
plan, we put in place a recovery team immediately afterwards,
and we restored all services within 4 weeks of the incident,
the last part of the network being the Piccadilly line. Five
cars remain under police control for forensic examination.
Immediately after July 7, all staff were put in high visibility
orange vests across the network, all managers with any
operational experience were deployed across the network and
also asked to wear orange vests. Police deployment was
unprecedented with major patrols at the main central London
stations, and over the next weeks there would be occasions when
every station on the tube network had at least two police
officers deployed throughout the operational day in addition to
regular station staff.
Enhanced staff briefings were instigated to ensure that
train drivers and station staff had rapid access to information
as it unfolded. This proved to be particularly important on
July 21 when the three bombs failed to detonate on the Tube,
but where the system was kept operational as we were able to
describe to staff what the security situation was in real time.
Some 17,000 CCTV tapes were removed by the police immediately
after the events of July 7, and it obviously was vital that
these tapes were replaced. This we did following our normal
protocol, but clearly the system was heavily stretched. As you
again said, Madam Chairman, the evidence was critical in
capturing aspects of the July 21 attempted attacks.
It is also important to note that since the July attacks
the criticality of the radio system, the train radio system,
has come into question, and what we have done is we have
increased the spending on our radio system and have ensured
that the delivery of a new system would be brought forward so
that all lines would have a new radio system by the end of
2006. In the meantime, we have adjusted operational procedures
to ensure that if a radio is inoperative, then we do not run
trains in passenger service.
I just want to talk briefly about investment, and I will be
talking in pounds, so I apologize for that. Overall investment
on the London Underground over the next 5 years will be 5.5
billion pounds. This reflects both London Underground directly
managed investment and capital works delivered under our
public-private partnership arrangements and public finance
initiative contractors. At least 70 million pounds of the
public-private partnership works will be spent on safety and
security-related improvements over the next 5 years. I have
already talked about the CCTV enhancement works and the 6.3
million pounds will be spent on this area. Also, London
Underground other works will include improved communication
systems by station and train radios and also allow emergency
services to use their radio systems underground. The day-to-day
operational spent for security and British Transport Police
operation has been enhanced following an increase of 100
additional police officers. The annual policing cost directly
funded by London Underground is 50 million pounds, and in
addition to this London Underground spends an additional 10
million pounds on other security and policing initiatives.
It is worth noting that the estimated revenue impact for
2005-2006 fiscal year of the attacks is of the order of 73
million pounds. As the network returned to normal, it is
obvious that there should be a full review of all lessons
learned from the event. Obviously, this is not yet in its final
draft, Madam Chairman, but what I would wish to share with you
is just a couple of things that we have already decided need to
be looked at. The first one is car design. There has certainly
been some feedback that the location and construct of the
internal design of cars may have caused difficulty for some of
the immediate rescue and recovery operation. Staff training is
undergoing a full structural review within London Underground,
and this review has now been extended to include a level of
practical rescue and recovery training given to existing
drivers and station staff. Already, all staff on the system
undergo 5 full days of refresher training every year. The
content and duration of this is being reviewed. It is also true
that we are reviewing our resource deployment in the event of
such incidents and all the issues around multi-site incident
management.
Thank you, Madam.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Chief Hanson.
TESTIMONY OF POLLY L. HANSON,\1\ CHIEF, METRO TRANSIT POLICE
DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON METROPOLITAN AREA TRANSIT AUTHORITY
Ms. Hanson. Good morning, Chairman Collins and Members of
the Committee, and thank you for asking me to testify on the
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or Metro,
security initiatives. For the record, I am Polly Hanson, the
chief of the Metro Transit Police. My written statement
provides general background information on Metro and the
Transit Police Department, so I will focus my remarks this
morning on our security-related activities.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Hanson appears in the Appendix on
page 66.
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As the largest transit provider for the National Capital
Region, Metro does take its responsibility in homeland security
with the seriousness it demands. WMATA's approach to transit
security involves a partnership between employees, customers,
the transit police, and other public safety departments in the
region, as well as the Federal Government. It is a strategic
approach that merges the application of technology with
enhanced operational awareness and puts an emphasis on
training, public outreach, and the use of security assessments
that take into consideration the unique features of transit and
utilizes many of the industry's best practices to implement
these strategies.
My written testimony provides a detailed summary of the
security actions taken by WMATA prior to and after the attacks
of September 11 in areas such as chemical and intrusion
detection, perimeter security, explosives detection, our two
federally sponsored security assessments, and other additional
target hardening and emergency preparedness measures, so I
would like to focus the majority of my statement on the more
recent actions Metro has taken in response to the terrorist
bombings that occurred in London and in Madrid last year. The
actions taken in response to these attacks are designed to
enhance both Metro's and the region's emergency preparedness
capabilities. Some of the actions taken are the purchase of
additional explosive ordnance detection equipment, increasing
the frequency of station patrols by transit police special
response teams--those are like SWAT teams--who patrol with
specially trained explosive-detection canines and semi-
automatic long guns. We have purchased additional radiological
pages for use on patrol. We have created a multi-jurisdictional
partnership with other law enforcement departments in the area
to assist with rail and bus sweeps. We have assigned a Metro
Transit Police captain to represent the whole transit industry
on the FBI's National Joint Terrorism Task Force, which adds to
the detective we have had assigned to the FBI Washington Field
Office, JTTF, since the late 1990s, and additional security
measures that are not visible and are designed that way.
Aside from the actions taken by our transit police, Metro
has constantly engaged our customers through a series of public
announcements, campaigns, stressing the need to be attentive to
their surroundings. During September, National Emergency
Preparedness Month, Metro has been sponsoring numerous outreach
events for our customers. We hosted an information booth and
conducted canine and emergency evacuation demonstrations at the
September 1, 2005, DHS kickoff at Union Station. Our safety
office has been offering emergency preparedness seminars at the
offices of large regional employers, as well as conducting open
houses at major rail stations on Tuesdays and Thursdays. During
these events, members from the Metro Transit Police, our safety
and communications departments, are on hand to answer questions
from customers and distribute emergency preparedness brochures
to explain emergency evacuation procedures and alternate route
planning information that can also be found on our web site,
MetroOpensDoors.com. We are also an active participant in the
NCR's just-launched emergency preparedness campaign, which has
this zip card that allows you to document everything you would
need to know in an emergency, and for the first time
transportation is a component because of Metro's request that
it be a focus because it is so important.
We also think that after Monday night's football game, we
might ask Joe Gibbs now to do a campaign because we think
people would be willing to listen to him. [Laughter.]
The recent events in London prompted a top-to-bottom
reemphasis on our entire workforce on counterterror and
emergency response training. Since 2003, Metro bus drivers,
train operators, and other operational employees have been
shown the National Transit Institute's Warning Signs video,
which covers systems security for transit employees, including
what to look for and what to do regarding suspicious activity,
packages, and substances. Warning Signs is also shown to all
non-operational personnel, and we are supplementing our
existing training for both operations and non-operations
personnel with NTI's terrorist activity recognition and
reaction training classes, which focus on suspicious activity
and behavior, which I think Mr. Ron will talk in great detail
about.
We continue to enhance and expand our training partnerships
with the region's first responders with Metro Transit Police-
sponsored initiatives such as managing Metro emergencies and
the Metro Citizens Corps, both one-of-a-kind programs, and also
advanced behavioral assessment training for our regional law-
enforcement partners. WMATA's emergency management teams train
an estimated 2,000 Federal, State, and local first responders a
year at our emergency response training facility. All of this
is covered in greater detail in my written testimony.
The Department of Homeland Security and Congress have yet
to make the protection of transit infrastructure a top homeland
security priority. Less than $250 million of grant funding over
3 years has been allocated nationwide to transit since the
creation of DHS in 2003. This amounts to an average of less
than 0.3 percent of DHS's annual budget of $30 billion, and
prospects are not looking better for the upcoming year.
The catastrophic consequences of Hurricane Katrina,
highlighted by the breaching of the levees in New Orleans,
serve as a stark reminder of the implications of neglecting to
take action to protect critical infrastructure. Given the
modest amount of Federal support for transit security to date,
DHS could simplify the grant application process in fiscal year
2006 to ensure that already identified needs based on both
external and internal security assessments are addressed in an
expedited manner.
Due to the amount of planning and the approval requirements
associated with the fiscal year 2005 transit grant program,
most of which replicates what transit systems are already
doing, we are now almost a year after the enactment of the
fiscal year 2005 DHS appropriations bill and 2 months after the
London bombings, and we still have not gotten the green light
from DHS to spend our fiscal year 2005 grant funds. At the very
least, for fiscal year 2006, DHS should be able to evaluate all
the risk assessment information submitted by transit agencies
in the past years and provide specific allocations to each
transit property based on risk rather than allocating funds on
a regional basis. As part of our Metro Matters capital
improvement campaign launched in the fall of 2003, WMATA
identified $150 million of high priority outstanding security
needs, yet WMATA has received only a total of $15 million in
DHS transit security grants over a 3-year period. WMATA has
allocated most of these funds toward beginning to address the
need for redundancy and enhanced reliability for key operations
control and communications functions, which was highlighted as
a top priority by both our DHS and FTA security assessments.
Other high priority security needs on the capital side
include enhancing WMD detection capabilities, expanding
intrusion detection and surveillance systems, enhancing
decontamination response and recovery capabilities, and
additional CCTV capability in rail stations and on buses.
Transit systems around the country work in partnership with
the American Public Transportation Association and have played
a leadership role in developing security-related best practices
in such areas as intelligence sharing, system safety and
security guidelines, employee training, emergency preparedness,
and the prioritization of transit research projects, but the
energy and ingenuity exhibited by the transit sector since the
tragedy of September 11 4 years ago must be matched by a
greater commitment of resources allocated on a risk basis and
practical planning requirements by DHS in order to enhance the
security of the more than 32 million customers who ride subways
and buses every day. DHS could also do a better job of
coordination and information sharing among internal agencies
within the Department, such as ODP, TSA, IAIP, and the Science
and Technology Directorate.
The transit community also needs DHS's help in the
development of standards for detection and surveillance
technologies and other security items applicable for target
hardening in a transit environment. Metro continues to serve as
a test bed for the Federal Government and a model for the
country on new security initiatives. Metro's chemical detection
system, commonly referred to as PROTECT, has become a model for
other transit agencies across the Nation and the world. Working
with our Federal partners at DHS and the Departments of
Transportation and Energy, WMATA continues to offer training
and technical assistance on the PROTECT system to anybody
interested in the transit industry. WMATA is actively engaging
the Department of Homeland Security in efforts to leverage the
advances obtained by the PROTECT program to other emerging
applications in chemical, biological, and explosive detection
areas.
In January of this year, the Metro Transit Police and the
Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security
Administration collaborated to enhance security at Metro
stations and on trains for the Presidential Inauguration. The
first-of-a-kind partnership with TSA included the use of
Federal screeners equipped with explosive trace detection gear
and canine teams supplementing Metro's teams of officers and
explosive detection canines. They performed without a hitch and
the ops plan developed can be applied to other special events
across the country. We were also working with DHS on expanding
the application and training of personnel in the area of
behavioral assessment screening of passengers in a transit
environment.
Early in 2004, WMATA was one of the first transit systems
to subject itself to a comprehensive security risk assessment
offered by the Office for Domestic Preparedness Technical
Assistance Program. It is a useful tool, quantitative and
scenario driven in nature and good for evaluating and ranking
gaps in our infrastructure protection and response
capabilities, and it represents the only example of a DHS
agency approaching us with well-thought-out, risk-based
process, which allows a property to assess outstanding security
needs. And while the assessment methodology needed some
tweaking, the ODP assessment team was receptive to our
suggestions for improving the process and we recommend that
other DHS agencies with responsibilities for accessing transit
security such as TSA and the Information Analysis and
Infrastructure Protection Directorate work with ODP to enhance
and expand the use of this risk assessment tool.
WMATA has a long-standing productive relationship with the
Federal Transit Administration on a wide range of emergency
preparedness initiatives linked to training and exercises that
are also summarized in my written testimony. As the recent
events in the Gulf Coast illustrate, considerable coordination
and planning among the region's State and local government
players, as well as the private sector, is necessary in order
to ensure that WMATA's own emergency preparations and security
upgrades will provide benefits to the National Capital Region
during an emergency.
Using the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments,
or COG, as its primary coordinating body, the region has made
progress with regional emergency response planning and
coordination. As the lead transit agency in the region, WMATA
continues to work with the rest of our partners in the
transportation and public safety community to refine the plans
in place. My written testimony summarizes other regional
emergency preparedness activities that WMATA participates in,
as well as our long-standing relationships with the region's
other law enforcement departments and emergency management
agencies.
We constantly reevaluate our top security needs based on
new threat information, updated external and internal security
assessments, and emerging technological innovations, and we are
going to continue to pursue partnerships with the Department of
Homeland Security and anybody else we can find to serve as a
test bed for new initiatives in the areas of biological and
chemical detection and enhanced security procedure for a
transit environment. The tragic events in the Gulf region
reinforce the importance of our need to work with all our
regional partners to further enhance emergency preparedness in
the National Capitol Region.
Thank you, Chairman Collins, and the rest of the Members of
the Committee for the opportunity to present these remarks and
for your support of Metro over the years. I am happy to answer
any questions you may have.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Mr. Ron.
TESTIMONY OF RAFI RON,\1\ PRESIDENT, NEW AGE SECURITY SOLUTIONS
Mr. Ron. As a private professional, I would like to
especially thank you for inviting me to testify before the
Committee.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Ron appears in the Appendix on
page 76.
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Over the past 50 years or so, it has become clear that
transportation is a high priority target for terrorists and
terrorist organizations. Since transportation systems
constitute a critical infrastructure without which our modern
industrial society cannot function, these systems are very
likely to remain at the high-risk end in the foreseeable
future. Key links in our transportation systems are vulnerable
to attack, and the potential damage may cause a large number of
casualties as well as long shutdowns which can lead to major
system collapse with multiple economic and political
repercussions.
No other system combines such a high level of vulnerability
with so many attractive goals for terrorists acting against the
United States. As a result of the September 11 attack, aviation
security has been given a great deal of attention, and the
achievements are impressive. In less than 4 years, the United
States of America has set itself as the global leader in
aviation security and has become the driving force in making
domestic and global aviation systems safer. Unquestionably,
American aviation has become a harder target for terrorists to
hit. For terrorists, this means that in order to ensure the
success of an attack on aviation, they would have to meet much
higher requirements than ever before in terms of effort and
sophistication. Concurrently, the disruption of global
terrorist organizational structure by the U.S. global war on
terror is resulting among other things in the shift of
responsibility for initiating and executing attacks to local
terrorist cells, as we have seen in the cases of Madrid and the
London attacks.
The resources needed to mount successful attacks on hard
targets are less readily available to terrorists operating on
the local level. The important lesson to be drawn from this
recent history of terrorist activity is that once high-priority
targets are made harder, terrorist efforts tend to be diverted
toward minor targets that are still perceived as being soft.
Mass transit remains a vulnerable target, more difficult to
protect because of its vast extension and accessible nature,
because attacking it does not require extraordinary resources,
and because technological solutions have only limited relevance
to its protection.
The turning of terrorist attention to urban mass transit
systems is thus an expected consequence of our success in other
domains. Implementing the aviation security model in the mass
transit environment is not an option; 100-percent screening
cannot be performed with the technology available today without
creating a bottleneck at checkpoints. However, bottleneck
checkpoints are not a proper solution because we need to allow
high throughput without which mass transit cannot fulfill its
role.
The challenge facing us is to develop a system approach
solution that combines technology, human resources, and
procedures. This system approach solution must be designed to
address the three stages of the security process: preparedness
and routine management, incident management and first
responding, and recovery. The system must have a so-called open
architecture that will allow the shift of weight from one
element to the other as more advanced and relevant technology
becomes available and operational. At present, the most
relevant available technology is in the video field.
Traditionally, video systems are installed in the location of
the expected crime scene. While this is an effective way to
identify criminals and secure the necessary evidence to convict
them in court, it is totally inadequate to deal with a
terrorist attack because in the latter case, as soon as the
attack takes place, terrorist success has been achieved and the
damage has been done.
What we need is a new approach to video application, as
well as to the overall security planning. Prevention and
deterrence must be the goal, rather than detention and
conviction. This distinct goal dictates pushing the security
measures to the perimeter of the mass transit system. Our focus
must be on detection and response before the terrorist gains
access to the target. In other words, we need to shift our
efforts from the train and the ramp to the station entrances.
While video technology is undoubtedly important, it does
not provide us with the most critical information we need,
explosive detection. At present, explosive detection systems
are designed to meet the requirements of the aviation industry
and are not applicable in the mass transit environment. With
research and development that will recognize this need and is
focused on operational application, such explosive detection
systems solutions can be available in the next few years.
Current ideas are in the area of air sampling techniques, as
well as trace detection on tickets and body parts that come in
contact with the system in the entry process.
Appropriate technology is a critical factor for the
protection of mass transit systems, but no technology can
provide a solution without human individuals who can not only
operate it effectively, but also provide appropriate immediate
response. It is useless to detect an explosive device if you
cannot act to stop the person who carries it from entering the
system. Human resources would thus remain a critical element
even when we have those future technologies at hand. At the
present time, while these technologies are still in the works,
the importance of the human factor is even more critical.
In Israel, as well as in other parts of the world, the
presence of trained security personnel at entrances to public
facilities has proven to be a very effective preventive measure
against terrorist attacks, including suicide attacks. Despite
numerous attempts by suicide bombers to enter shopping malls in
Israel, none has been successful. The terrorists were forced to
carry out their attack outside the mall. The targets affected
have been relatively minor, and the damage sustained was
smaller in terms of human life, as well as property.
In reference to the human factor, I would like to point out
that the Achilles heel of the suicide terrorist is his
behavior. A person intending to commit an extreme act of
violence, in most cases for the first time in his or her life,
as well as to terminate his own life, is most likely not to
behave like the ordinary people around him going about their
daily routine. An example is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, who
was clearly detected by both security and non-security
personnel as a very suspicious person before and during the
boarding process to an American Airlines flight in Paris in
December 2001.
Behavior pattern recognition techniques implemented by
trained security and non-security personnel have proven to be a
valuable measure in the detection and prevention of terrorist
attacks in public facilities. The training provides the skills
and the confidence not only to law enforcement officers
positioned at entry points, but also to employees who are
present at every point and corner of the system. No one is in a
better position to recognize irregularities on the ground than
the people who regularly work there.
Let me sum up by reiterating three major points: One,
legacy security programs in mass transit systems must be
reassessed in the light of the shift from the threat of
conventional crime to the threat of terrorism, including
suicidal terrorism. This means putting a higher focus on early
detection and prevention. Two, there is a pressing need to
invest in technological R&D that will result in effective early
detection of explosives and chem/bio material without
disruption of throughput. Three, security and non-security
personnel in mass transit should undergo counterterrorist
training that includes suspicious behavior recognition
techniques.
I thank you very much for your attention, and I will be
happy to answer any questions.
Chairman Collins. Thank you very much. I want to thank all
three of you for excellent and very helpful testimony from a
real variety of perspectives.
Chief Hanson, I want to begin my questioning with you. You
did an excellent job of describing the funding inadequacy, as
well as your frustration in the delays in the release of
funding, something that Senator Lieberman and I will follow up
with DHS on. I want to ask you, given your unusual position of
running the Metro for the capital city for a major region with
different jurisdictions and handling millions of tourists each
year, whether you had any input into the national strategy for
transportation security that the Department has recently put
together?
Ms. Hanson. WMATA reviewed the document in February and
provided comments. I understand the final document is very
different and we have not seen it.
Chairman Collins. Do you think that you need to have access
to this document in order to better understand the roles that
different jurisdictions will be playing?
Ms. Hanson. Well, if the document is not shared with the
stakeholders, I am not sure I understand what the value is
then.
Chairman Collins. That is what troubled me as well. The
fact that the strategy was initially--until we intervened--
issued in a classified form defeats the whole purpose of coming
up with a strategy that is supposed to be shared with all the
stakeholders so that people understand what their roles and
responsibilities are.
Ms. Hanson. I also wanted to say I think right now, for the
fiscal year 2005 grant process, there are regional transit
strategies. So I am not sure what the relationship is between
the national and the regional strategies, and if there is not
one, then I do not understand that, either, because it would
seem to me that there needs to be a relationship or a
connection between those two strategies, otherwise I am not
sure why we went through a huge exercise this last grant
process in developing a regional strategy.
Chairman Collins. I think that is an excellent point, as
well, but it troubles me that if the national strategy has not
been shared with you, as the person responsible for the
security of the subway system in our Nation's capital, then I
don't understand who it would be shared with. That strikes me
as a real gap or lapse.
Ms. Hanson. And I think most of my colleagues would suggest
that we have clearances, so that would not have been an
impediment. You did make reference to the fact that it was
classified, but at this point most transit properties that have
dedicated law enforcement personnel have folks in the agency
that have top-secret.
Chairman Collins. Mr. Brown, I was very interested in
hearing you describe in more detail what appeared to have been
a first-rate response to the bombings in London. You have done
the training. You had the surveillance cameras. Your response
was swift, effective, and undoubtedly saved lives. What is your
reaction to Mr. Ron's suggestion that we need to put more
resources in at the front end to try to detect and deter
someone who is committed to suicide bombing?
Mr. Brown. Well, I would certainly accept that. I think it
is a very valid point. I think part of our approach in terms of
the major investment in even more closed-circuit television
coverage across the network, as I said, doubling the number of
cameras, is just designed to do that. Also, I think there is a
need to ensure that all staff--we are compared to many other
metro systems--we have a huge number of front-line operational
staff visible on our stations. Every one of our stations has
staff deployed on them every time that station is open
operationally. None of our stations open with no staff on them,
and I think we have a responsibility to review how we train
those staff to be alert to strange behavior, to people doing
different things.
Our staff are pretty sharp. If they work in a station all
the time, they know the difference between a lost tourist
behaving in a bit of a strange way, looking where to get to
Buckingham Palace or something, as opposed to someone who is
behaving in a different type of suspicious way, maybe about to
perpetrate a terrorist act. So I think absolutely we need to
ensure that we do not just rely on police activity or
technology, but we also rely on the human factor in terms of
our detection capability.
Chairman Collins. I think that is an excellent point, as
well.
Mr. Ron, what has been the reaction of the public transit
agencies that you have approached with your ideas for improving
security at the front end, aiming at prevention, detection, and
deterrence?
Mr. Ron. As Chief Hanson mentioned earlier, the Metro
system here in Washington, DC, has adopted this approach and is
conducting training programs along the lines that we laid down
in Boston earlier for the airport environment, and I should
compliment the chief for that. We have not seen a lot of that
happening in other parts of the country yet, but we do hear
about other metro systems around the country that are showing
interest in this approach and are looking at the programs to be
implemented.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Lieberman.
Senator Lieberman. Thanks again, Madam Chairman.
You have been an excellent panel, very helpful. Thank you.
Chief Hanson, I was really troubled to hear your testimony
that you have not gotten the green light to spend the transit
money that you did get from the Federal Government for fiscal
year 2005. I don't know--Mr. Hawley, you were good enough to
stay in the room--do you have a response to that? Just come up
to the mike. Do you know what is going on? Is that a typical
situation?
Mr. Hawley. I do, and I would like to talk to the chief
privately about that.
Senator Lieberman. OK. I hope the green light can go on
soon because obviously you have significant needs.
I wanted to ask you first a question that, in some sense,
the testimony each of you have given has answered, but I want
to ask it anyway because I have continued to worry, as we have
heard testimony from our own DHS leaders on this, to some
extent from Mr. Hawley today, although I think he was more
reassuring, that there is a concern that because mass transit
systems are more open than aviation, that it is very hard to
defend them, so let's not raise expectations too high, because
I think that ends up creating a pessimism that also encourages
less defense than we should have. And I understand the
difference, obviously, between getting on a metro and a train,
and getting on a plane, but I presume you agree that there are
a lot of things nonetheless that we can do. I mean, it is great
to say that better intelligence will stop a suicide bomber
before he or she gets to the Metro or the Underground or the
bus station, but some of them are going to get through and then
we have to figure out how to stop them as they get closer. So
am I correct in what I have heard? Do you agree that we have to
approach this with a can-do, must-do attitude about mass
transit security?
Mr. Brown. Absolutely, Senator. My view is--and I just go
back to the comment I made--that if you think about the lost
revenue that we have had as a network of 73 million pounds for
this fiscal year--that in itself actually should be part of the
investment decisionmaking process. This makes commercial sense,
never mind all the human factor sense that it makes. I think
things like the portable detection device, limited use of some
screening of people coming into stations, is certainly
something we are exploring on a targeted basis.
Senator Lieberman. There would be a random screening or a
screening after some kind of behavioral identification?
Mr. Brown. Well, it could be either, and also it could be
based on specific intelligence, because there's no doubt there
is intelligence in the background in all of this, and therefore
it is minimizing your risk on these things. I think also, to
the point that was made earlier on in terms of the amount of
approaches that you get from all sorts of people who are
selling you bits of kit that are going to solve all your
problems, I have to say I think 99 percent of those that I get
go straight in the trash can because really most of them are
not worth the paper they are written on. So I think we have to,
as an industry, work very hard to ensure that we have
confidence, globally have confidence, to ensure that we are
deploying the right technology, that we are using the right
expertise, to ensure that we do target our resources
effectively, but certainly not targeting any resources cannot
be the right answer.
Senator Lieberman. Right. Chief Hanson, I was impressed by
your description of some of the things the Metro system here is
doing, and obviously--are you working at all with random
searches? I know in Connecticut on the trains, when the orange
alert went in after the London bombing, that there was some
random searching of people done. Have you experimented with
that?
Ms. Hanson. We are analyzing that. We are putting together
a package that I am actually going to present to both the CEO
and the Board of Directors for Metro to discuss ideas that we
have. I support Mr. Ron's ideas--and WMATA has taken advantage
of the training that is based on his philosophy and teachings.
I have been very fortunate in this region to be able to access
Urban Area Security Initiative money. I am the exception, not
the rule. Many of my counterparts in the country do not have as
much success accessing the regional money as I have. We have
paid for some of that training with that money, and I have
received money for the orange alert overtime. But as Mr. Brown
mentioned, he has 8,000 operational employees. We have the
same. It is very expensive to train operational employees, and
I am not talking about the cops. There is reimbursement money
for them. With your operational employees, you cannot take a
bus driver off the bus and not replace him or her. If some of
the training that is available through use of Urban Area
Security Initiative money was there to support the training of
operational employees, then that would be a more effective way
of promoting prevention activities because then you are
drilling down and using all your employees to be effective in
the prevention or identification of suspicious activity.
Senator Lieberman. Well said.
Mr. Ron, am I right that--I believe you talked about this,
or at least in your written testimony--that in Israel the
operational personnel, bus drivers, for instance, are trained
in some of these detection techniques?
Mr. Ron. Yes, they are, and that actually comes into effect
by more than one--the suicidal attack that was completely and
successfully prevented on the field by bus drivers that
identified the terrorist as he was boarding the bus----
Senator Lieberman. Right.
Mr. Ron [continuing]. And responded immediately and
correctly by either closing the door on the terrorist and not
allowing him to board the bus or by even pushing him out of the
bus if he was already on the bus, and we have more than a few
cases where these tend to save a lot of lives and was very
successful.
Senator Lieberman. I was struck by one thing you said, very
sensible, it seems to me, that it's a different way to go at
the disproportionate allocation of funding to aviation security
here, which we all support, but one of the effects of that is
that it makes mass transit more of a target because it is
softer, it is more vulnerable. On my time, which is running
out, I want to ask you just to talk a little bit more about--
you mentioned how security personnel are stationed now at the
entrance points to major bus stations to deter terrorists from
coming there so if they're going to strike they will go to a
bus stop where there are fewer people, same with the malls. I
was fascinated by that. I assume you mean that they are trained
in this behavioral pattern recognition that you have talked
about. Just take a moment to tell us what does that involve
and, in a very American context where there is always a debate
about profiling, does it include profiling as part of that?
Mr. Ron. Well, I will start from the last point since I
recognize the sensitivity of the issue of profiling, and I
would like to emphasize that the program that we are advocating
is not a racial profiling program, and I would like to make
that very clear. This is behavioral conduct that has nothing to
do with any racial or ethnic aspects, and I would even like to
emphasize the point that our experience in Israel has taught
us, especially at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, that
terrorists do not come in the shape and color that everybody
expects them to be. The two worst attacks on Tel Aviv Ben
Gurion Airport, one was carried out by a group of Japanese
terrorists and the other one was carried out by a German
terrorist. Another attempt to take a bomb to an El-Al flight
from London was carried out unknowingly by an Irish young
pregnant girl. So this is very much as far as one can get from
the racial profile of what we all expect to be a terrorist, and
I strongly suggest to avoid racial profiling, also on
professional background, not only on moral and legal
background.
Now, as far as the training that takes place in Israel to
employees and the issue of positioning them at entrances to
public facilities, training defers from one agency or one
entity that carries out the security work to another, but the
common denominator is the idea to detect a potential terrorist
or to detect suspicious individuals before they manage to enter
the premises or the facility that is being protected. In
Israel, by law, every public facility, including coffee shops
and restaurants, must have a guard at the door, not to mention
the major bus stations and train stations, and this is carried
out by the facilities. It is paid by the businesses. They
protect themselves, and they are using private security
companies. The level of training of the private security
companies is not regulated in Israel, but there is common
knowledge that is shared among the people in the industry, and
this has proven to be very useful.
As far as the government agencies that are in charge of
protecting public facilities, including the railway system or
the railway main terminals, the airport main terminals and
etc., these are being trained in the same philosophy that I
mentioned earlier, and this has proven to be very successful.
Senator Lieberman. Well, thank all of you, the three of
you, for what you are doing and for what you have helped to
teach us about what more we can do here in the United States to
protect riders on mass transit.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. Senator Lautenberg.
Senator Lautenberg. Thank you again, Madam Chairman, for
conducting this hearing and for being able to identify the
excellent witnesses that we have had here today, different
perspectives, but all focused on the same problem. I would have
to say that the traditional perspective that the police chief
is this tough, burly guy who has large muscles certainly does
not seem to apply, and I feel very comfortable, however, and
very safe with this very excellent presentation by this
relatively, almost--I will not say harmless looking--but not
menacing at all, and it is nice to see that.
Ms. Hanson. You are too kind.
Senator Lautenberg. It is nice to see you and to hear what
you have to say about the system, and you raise some very
serious questions for me. And you say, at least in your
testimony, for fiscal year 2006, DHS should be able to evaluate
all the risk assessment information submitted by transit
agencies in the past year and provide specific allocation to
each transit system based primarily on risk rather than
allocating funds on a regional basis. And Senator Lieberman
took the liberty of referring a question to Mr. Hawley, because
as I heard your remarks, Mr. Hawley, I thought that you were
kind of accepting the fact that these funds have to be given
out regionally and it is left to others to decide precisely how
the distribution is going to be made.
Now, in each case here, you have a different perspective on
the transit systems. Israel, for instance, does not have, or
maybe they have had and you never know quite what is on the
agenda in Israel at any given time, but very little rail system
use for commutation. I think that helps, doesn't it, have a
better control factor about who is coming and who is going? We
have heard a lot about the heroic actions by bus drivers, by
people who traditionally have a very limited responsibility,
but reacting to danger and the reaction saving lots of lives
and encouraging people that they can still use the system and
believe that they are being protected. We had a woman from New
Jersey killed some years ago on a bus, and I happened to have
been traveling in Israel at the same time, and it was amazing--
and I will venture to a side perspective. I was sitting, with
several Senators, with Prime Minister Sharon, and all of a
sudden, in the middle of the meeting--Senator Rockefeller was
there, Senator Levin, Senator Reid--we were on our way to Iraq
and notes were being passed to the Prime Minister, and he
looked crestfallen all of a sudden. And he said, ``We have just
learned that there was an attack at Ashdod by a couple of
suicide bombers, and they took a number of lives.'' And I
volunteered, and I said, ``Mr. Prime Minister, you don't have
to continue this meeting. This is not urgent. This is
informational, and we understand you have got other things to
take care of.'' And he said to me, ``Senator, a Prime Minister
in Israel knows only one thing, that whatever happens, he must
carry on, and we are going to carry on this meeting.'' I was
struck by that, by that commitment. We all have the same
commitment, expressed differently.
Mr. Brown, the reaction of your people in London--I do not
know whether you had seen the film--it was called ``A Dirty
Bomb''--that was run some weeks before that, using London as an
example, and I do not know whether that induced that violent
behavior or what, but your performance was far better than that
movie indicated. So I did not mean to use my time making a
speech, but I wanted to ask how much help, for instance, does
WMATA get from city police, from Capitol Police, in terms of
your security?
Mr. Brown, how much help do you get from London City Police
or national police? Is that a significant part of your security
network?
Mr. Brown. If Chief Hanson allows me to go first, yes,
certainly in London the British Transport Police is responsible
for policing the public transport network, but in times like
July 7, the boundaries kind of disappear. So the Metropolitan
Police actually were the ones that led the investigation. The
Metropolitan Police across the whole of the United Kingdom has
a particular role in antiterrorist activity and terrorism
investigation, and therefore they took----
Senator Lautenberg. That was after--and I think, Mr. Ron,
you made a point about having the intelligence.
Mr. Ron. Yes.
Senator Lautenberg. The capacity to interrupt was something
else.
Mr. Ron. Yes, absolutely. So there was a huge engagement of
lots of policing, and, in fact, we had police officers down
from Scotland and from all parts of the U.K. in London
immediately after the events. So it was a national response to
an attack on our nation's capital.
Ms. Hanson. Sir, we have also regional partners, and I
would have to say you mentioned your own Chief Gainer, as well
as Chief Ramsey, and part of the partnership initiative I
discussed is something that we created right after the London
bombings that we are sustaining--and it is police officers from
jurisdictions throughout this area--Fairfax County's
helicopter, as well as bicycle cops from Montgomery County, or
transit cops with Capitol Police officers, as well as MPD, do
sweeps together of stations and buses. In fact, we also brought
in commanders from the regional police departments to this
initiative, and brought in our regional partners from VRE,
MARC, and Amtrak to explain where our vulnerabilities and risks
were so that folks in the region knew and created a document
for regular police officers so they would be attentive to our
critical infrastructure. And Mr. Ron's training that he
created, we actually shared with our regional partners that are
a part of this sweep team, because we do want to share with
anybody we can the vulnerabilities, the special features of
transit, and the things that, if you are not a transit cop or a
transit employee, you might not be attentive to.
Our Managing Metro Emergencies was created to bring our
regional law enforcement partners, fire department first
responders, as well as other emergency managers together in a
classroom setting to go over transit-specific incidents so that
it would allow first responders who have to come to an incident
to be well-versed and trained in the intricacies of transit so
that we have a better, stronger first response in this region.
So partnerships are not a problem for us, sir.
Senator Lautenberg. I will conclude with--because I am
frankly stuck on the fact that we all talk about how dangerous,
how devastating an attack on a transit system could be, and we
should be working so hard to prevent it. Again, I think, well,
London, Madrid, Japan--I mean, we have seen it in all those
places--creates--as you said, Mr. Brown, it is the economic
consequences, though it is secondary to the human consequence--
the fact of the matter is that it affects people's lives in
adverse ways all over the area or the country. So when I look
at Chief Hanson and your commentary, you say WMATA identified--
as part of the Metro Matters capital improvement campaign
launched in the fall of 2003, WMATA identified $150 million of
high priority outstanding security needs, yet WMATA received
only a total of $15 million in DHS grants and securities. Now,
are you still lacking the kind of support that you think ought
to be coming? And we recognize there is all kinds of
competition, but what do you have to have to protect the people
that use your system? It is a very efficient system. It is a
very pleasant system to ride, and it has attracted a huge
ridership as a consequence of that, and security seems to be a
given there.
Ms. Hanson. On the issue of the people we are
transporting--it's worth noting that Metro was essentially
created to support the Federal Government, and almost 50
percent of our riders come here to the core of the city and are
Federal Government employees. We only have to look at the
example of Hurricane Isabel. Metro, because of information we
received, chose to shut down because we thought the winds
sustained would be too much to run the rail and bus system
safely. And when we shut down, this region shut down because
folks had no other way to get to work. The effect on the
economy and commerce in this region would be tremendous if
Metro could not run.
There is some operational flexibility that the London
Underground has, as well as New York, because they are older
systems, that WMATA does not have. We have a two-lane highway,
one going one way, one going the other. We do not have another
lane, and you know what happens on I-95 or even out here on
Independence Avenue if you have something stuck in the roadway.
So we are very vulnerable if we had something happen to our
system. While we would run to the extent that we could, our
ability would be really limited, and many of the things that
are in our improvement plan, Metro Matters, have to do with
capacity, have to do with our need to be able to carry not just
the passengers we are challenged to carry now, but additional
folks we might have to evacuate, and to improve our
communication train control systems, which I think you had Mr.
Brown saying were very important. So it is very important. We
do need the support. We continue to use the funds that we get
to go down the list of priorities as established by our risk
assessment done by ODP, which is part of DHS.
Senator Lautenberg. Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman,
we have had lots of discussions around these areas of how
grants should be made, and when we hear it from such an
authoritative, experienced voice and we see the result of a
good performance--and we admire what you have done, Mr. Brown,
and you, Mr. Ron, and I am glad that Mr. Hawley was locked into
his chair and could not leave the room--is Mr. Hawley here--
because we are going to be back again and again and again.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Collins. Thank you.
Mr. Hawley, I do want to commend you for staying to listen
to this panel. I know that you, as well as the Members of this
Committee, have learned a great deal from their testimony, and
we will look forward to having additional conversations with
you.
I very much appreciate the participation of all of our
witnesses today. This is an extraordinarily important issue,
and it should not take yet another attack on a mass transit
system, whether here in the United States or somewhere else in
the world, for us to focus on improving mass transit security.
My hope is that this hearing, which was recommended by Senator
Lieberman, will help to focus the attention of policy makers
and make this a priority, as all of you have urged.
I want to yield to Senator Lieberman for any closing
remarks, but I very much appreciate your testimony.
Senator Lieberman. Thanks, Madam Chairman, a personal thank
you for your focus on this problem. Even in the midst of all
our work in responding to Hurricane Katrina, we cannot take our
eye off of this because the terrorists are not--and I think
this has been a very constructive hearing.
Just to pick up from what you said a moment ago, there is
always a danger--and I know when you are in an open society, as
we are, and the two other countries represented here are, there
are a lot of soft targets. You cannot protect everything, but
there is a way in which we have got to, as I think we are all
trying to do, get ahead of the terrorists. In other words, we
cannot be always responding to the last attack and fortifying
that previous target. We have to get on thinking--the 9/11
Commission, in its extraordinarily impressive report, said
that, memorably, one of the great deficiencies here in the
United States in terms of preventing such an attack was a
failure of imagination, and what did they mean? They meant our
inability to imagine that people would actually do what was
done to us on September 11, and now, shame on us if we are not
actively trying to put ourselves into the brains of these evil
forces that hate us, to think what is next so that we can get
ahead of them to stop it.
I think the three of you have contributed both to the
defense of the people you have the responsibility to protect,
but have also helped us greatly. And I also thank Mr. Hawley
for staying here, and I hope that it has been as valuable for
him to hear your testimony as it has been for our Committee.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Collins. Thank you. The hearing record will remain
open for 15 days for the submission of additional materials. I
want to thank our staff for their hard work, as well, and this
hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12.15 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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