About > History

The Northeast Operation Safe Commerce was the original and, until recently, only initiative successfully to study and monitor a working cargo container supply chain. This regional multi-agency working group had its genesis pre-9/11/01, but given the post-9/11 imperatives for the protection of that cargo delivery system, it rapidly marshaled a broad-based effort to examine a commercial container delivery operation running from Eastern Europe, through Canada, into the United States. Between February and July of 2002, the working group oversaw the study, testing and reporting of the Osram-Sylvania supply chain project.

Other Operation Safe Commerce projects have adopted their name from this original working group. These more recent efforts represent undertakings by the three major load centers in the United States (the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Seattle and Tacoma, and New York and New Jersey), supported by grant moneys under the jurisdiction of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), to study systems and technologies applicable to supply chains entering the United States through these ports. While grants have been approved during 2003 to enable these projects to go forward, it is unclear that any has been completed.

Representatives of the three major U.S. load centers and senior members from Washington, D.C., of the U.S. Department of Transportation, TSA, and the U.S. Customs Service attended an August 2002 meeting in Burlington, Vermont, hosted by the U.S. Northeast OSC Group. Important to the development of the current Canada-U. S. Northeast Cargo Security Project working group the August 2002 meeting also included a delegation of Canadian agencies interested in port and container security led by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and joined by Transport Canada, Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, representatives of the port communities of Montreal and Halifax, and by C.P. Ships, the shipping company that had transported the Osram-Sylvania project. This northeast North American cooperation was what has evolved into the current provincial and state supported Cargo Security Project.