WASHINGTON -- US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff heads to Europe this week to lobby for tighter transportation security controls to better combat terrorism.
"I look forward to my first trip overseas," Chertoff said Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, where he stressed the importance of the visit.
Countries worldwide must work closely together to share information on terror groups, creating "our own network to compete with that network and to combat that network," Chertoff said.
"We also have to look at what vulnerabilities networking has, and those vulnerabilities tend to be things like communication, transportation, movement of people, movement of cargo," he said.
"We need to have a world that is banded with security envelopes, meaning secure environments through which people and cargo can move rapidly, efficiently, and safely without sacrificing security," he added.
Chertoff, who is to stop in The Hague, Brussels and London, is scheduled notably to meet Monday with the Dutch ministers of justice and immigration, Piet Hien Donner and Rita Verdonk.
Meetings with his British counterpart Charles Clark are planned for Wednesday and Thursday, according to the US Homeland Security Department.
Chertoff, who assumed his post a few months ago, called for an improvement in security controls at borders through scanning passports for biometric data.
He said tighter security controls would not come at the expense of individual liberties or privacy.
"We win the war on terror by being able to conduct lives, encourage prosperity, protect liberty, preserve privacy while preventing terrorists from carrying out actions in this country," Chertoff said. "We don't want a fortress state, but we want to have a state that is open."
US border controls have been reinforced since the attacks of September 11, 2001, when terrorists hijacked US passenger planes and used them to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, killing close to 3,000 people.
Foreigners entering the United States are fingerprinted and photographed and must have a passport that can be optically scanned.
By the end of October the US government will require Europeans to have biometric passports with digital fingerprints and photographs in order to enter the United States without a visa.
A senior US official visiting Brussels said Thursday that the October deadline could be pushed back, at the request of the European Union officials.
Since October 2001 US officials have on several occasions rerouted interational flights destined for US cities due to the presence of passengers whose names were featured on a US list of people barred from flying into the United States.
An Air France flight and an Alitalia flight destined for Boston were recently rerouted to the northeastern city of Bangor, Maine.
The Air France rerouting turned out to be an error -- not the first time such errors, due to cases of mistaken identity, translation or spelling mistakes, have occured.
In September 2004, authorities rerouted a plane carrying British singer Cat Stevens, named Yusuf Islam since his conversion to Islam, saying he represented a risk to US national security.
