Why the T in TSA doesn’t stand for trucking

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Updated Mar 21, 2015
Ex-CIA agent Goss said after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., the agency worried terrorists would try to hijack trucks with tanker loads and use them in a terrorist attack.Ex-CIA agent Goss said after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., the agency worried terrorists would try to hijack trucks with tanker loads and use them in a terrorist attack.

Innovation leads to regulation.

Nowhere is that more true than trucking.

Seemingly every good idea to make trucking a more efficient business is met with a higher regulatory standard that makes the work seem hardly worth the effort.

But being in front of Washington’s whims is a good thing, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.

When two airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center in 2001, air travel in U.S. changed forever. Maybe the regulatory change was for the good; maybe it wasn’t. The fact is it changed, and Washington managed the process.

Porter Goss is a former director of the CIA. He spoke at the Truck Renting and Leasing Association’s annual meeting Tuesday.Porter Goss is a former director of the CIA. He spoke at the Truck Renting and Leasing Association’s annual meeting Tuesday.

Nearly eight years earlier, on February 26, 1993, a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center – a mostly failed terrorist act that killed six people.

Two years later, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people.

Two rental trucks were used in two of the largest domestic terrorist attacks of their times, and only two years apart.

Porter Goss, who served as the 19th director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and was the first director of the CIA under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, says Washington was looking at the truck renting and leasing industry as a whole as a result of the bombings.

What kept the trucking industry from sweeping reform and governmental oversight, in part, was its willingness to triage its own problem.

Goss, who spoke at the Truck Renting and Leasing Association’s (TRALA) annual meeting in Amelia Island, Fla., on Tuesday, says his job required him to wake up every morning, sift through hundreds of global events that happened overnight and ask himself, “what’s the worst that could happen?”

For years, much of his worst case scenario revolved around trucking, because he says terrorists historically have shown a preference for deploying the things we see and use everyday – specifically trucks and airplanes – against us.

The scenario he most feared was a would-be terrorist hijacking a tanker truck (or a network of terrorists taking over a tanker fleet), dumping the fuel into the sewer system and incinerating the infrastructure of a major city, simultaneously grinding the economy to a halt and instilling fear into other major cities across the U.S. Those fears are part of what drove serious reform and regulation at ports nationwide.

As lawmakers further trained their focus on combating domestic terrorism, Goss says trucking was one of the only industries to approach Washington with solutions, which included more rigorous vetting of potential drivers.

Saying that step helped avoid further regulation would be a serious misstatement.

Goss couldn’t say just how close trucking got to having its own TSA, but did say the intelligence the CIA had on hand at the time did not suggest a rogue trucker posed a significant threat, and that more rigorous screening of drivers at the fleet level was more appropriate than governmental action that played gatekeeper between fleets and drivers.

“The government is not the solution to every problem,” he says.

The best first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one. That trucking was able to quickly do that on its own meant it avoided more government mandated problems.

Jason Cannon has written about trucking and transportation for more than a decade and serves as Chief Editor of Commercial Carrier Journal. A Class A CDL holder, Jason is a graduate of the Porsche Sport Driving School, an honorary Duckmaster at The Peabody in Memphis, Tennessee, and a purple belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. Reach him at [email protected].Â