Security headaches grow

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.bangkokpost.net/today/131100_Business12.html

IMTIAZ MUQBIL
November 13, 2000

The brave new world of globalisation is raising a new set of safety
and security concerns, many of which significantly affect the travel
and tourism industry, according to experts at a global security
congress held in Bangkok last week.

Speakers at the World Security Congress 2000 said terrorism had become
just one element among security challenges that now included increased
use of fraudulent documentation, Internet virus and hacker attacks,
money laundering, industrial espionage, anti-globalisation protests
and even whistle-blowing by disgruntled employees.

No matter how good the defence mechanisms, they said, preventing crime
and terrorism risked remaining one step behind because of the sheer
magnitude of the problem, involving as it does high equipment costs,
legal issues and training across borders, all made worse by
corruption.

The stakes are rising in an era when companies walk a very thin
between profit and loss. Protection of information is becoming equally
and perhaps more important than protection of physical assets and
manpower.

Tour companies, airlines and hotel chains are all susceptible to these
security threats because of their increasingly global reach and fight
for market share, which often drives them to bend if not necessarily
break laws in countries in which they operate.

According to security experts, many of these companies are dominant
brands and very prominent parts of what is being described as a
wholesale export of western culture and influence over markets,
standards and education.

UK security consultant Stewart Kidd cited this example which he said
was "not exaggerated but slightly dramatised": An Internet-based
company located in Stockholm employs US and Canadian college students
to sell phoney investment bonds to Germans via a web site located on a
Belgian server and owned by a French telecommunications company.

The company is registered in Liechtenstein under Luxembourg law and is
partly owed by an Indian with dual UK nationality who lives on a
Panamanian-registered yacht in the Antilles and banks his cash in the
Cayman islands.

Questions: Where has the crime been committed? Who will investigate?
Who will prosecute? What are the chances of the owner going to jail?
Finally, apart from those who lose money, does anyone care? No
governments do, he said. "It's not their problem."

Mr Kidd said that while mergers and takeovers-which are rife in the
travel and tourism industry-required a totally transparent process of
due diligence, some companies ignored warnings to run personal checks
on management executives of the company being bought. One of his
clients ignored advice to do so and found an accounting system full of
holes.

Another speaker, David Judge, sales and marketing director of 3M,
which manufactures secure cards and equipment to detect fraudulent
travel documents, said: "With 283 countries now issuing passports and
with approximately six legal variations of each passport, plus a
10-year [validity] period, the ability of border control staff to be
able to administer effective security evaluation over the whole range
of possibilities is now impossible."

He said airlines were paying billions of dollars a year in fines for
carrying illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, who were finding
increasingly ingenious ways to get into countries. The UK alone dealt
with 99,000 claims for political asylum in 1999, of which 46,000 were
still outstanding at year-end.

With airports getting bigger and busier, Mr Judge said, "it is
possible to live in one for several days without having to disclose
one's presence, by which time all trails have gone cold".

He said technology was being developed to detect fraudulent documents
to ensure that such people either never get on aircraft in the first
place, or are nabbed at transit points (in case they swap documents
with others en route).

Because airlines must pay to repatriate such "travellers", they are
being approached to start including digitised pictures along with the
Passenger Name Record (PNR) created by the reservations computer,
which now tracks only the usage of the ticket. Inserting a picture
will effectively convert the booking into an ID check.

Some of the new technology can include templates of all the hundreds
of different passport types. Mr Judge said an electronic manifest can
be created as passengers board a flight, allowing all passport
information to be shown, along with facial images, at each point of
the itinerary.

He said the increasing capacity and speed of electronic systems also
allowed security devices to be loaded with files of wanted faces, a
list that could be updated in real time so that every device anywhere
in the world could contain the most up-to-date list.

Australian security consultant Dominic Boyle said multinational
companies-now called "corporate states" because they are becoming
bigger than most countries-would increasingly have to start creating
their own security and intelligence apparatus because they could no
longer count on governments to protect them.

"To this end, the corporate state has developed security capabilities
including corporate security policing, investigations and
counter-intelligence and perhaps the most controversial, private
military companies such as Sandline and DSL."

He was referring to mercenaries.

The exhibition that accompanied the security congress included a range
of products, many of them designed for sale to the travel and tourism
industry, such as airport X-ray machines that can detect everything
from explosives to precious metals and organic foodstuffs.

Mr Kidd said one big issue corporations face is that of loyalty. If
the security director of major corporation, a local citizen hired by a
global corporation, discovers that the company is doing something that
is against the interests of his country, where will his loyalties lie?
He asked the question without venturing an answer.


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