DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has announced that it is no longer necessary to do a 100% screening of cargo that enters the United States.

Asked about a 2007 US Congress requirement that all containers entering the US should be scanned by their ports of exit by 2012, Napolitano said: “We at this point are not going to insist on that.”

Although the 2012 deadline was set by Congress, it did give her department the opportunity to extend it if 100 percent scanning wasn’t feasible.

Napolitano has previously expressed doubt about whether the mandate for all containers to be scanned by 2012 would be met.

It appears that the United States wants other countries to do all the scanning of cargo for them. The other countries said no or no it’s not feasible. They only scan something that is suspicious or dangerous. Congress gave the DHS and “out” so that they could extend the deadline.

Napolitano said the Department of Homeland Security preferred a more “layered approach” including better co-operation between countries, better intelligence sharing and analysis, as well as some container scanning to prevent attacks on the United States.

“I think what we have learnt over time is that there are many different ways to achieve a security objective. You have to have multiple layers that operate effectively,” she said.

The Container Security Initiative (CSI) is run in fifty ports around the world and is designed to scan for high risk containers before they leave their port of origin. If this is true, then what is the need to scan all containers before they reach the US? Ports already scan items them think are risky. A one hundred percent scan is far too time consuming, particularly at one of the busiest ports in the world in Rotterdam.