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Carefully - USA - Truckers, bus drivers on lookout for suspicious activity on roads
Chicago,IL,USA -The USA TODAY, by Judy Keen -30 Aug 2006: -- Truck driver Bill Adams scans the traffic on Harlem Avenue. "That Pepsi truck's no risk. Two empty flatbeds up there are no risk," he says. "Garbage truck is probably not a risk, but it might be if it were there at the wrong time — if it's 5 on a Sunday afternoon. You've got to think"... Adams, who drives for UPS Freight, isn't scouting Chicago's west side only for traffic hazards. He's on the lookout for terrorists... Adams is part of a rapidly growing army of truckers and bus drivers who have been trained by Highway Watch to spot suspicious activity on the highways. The program is run by the American Trucking Association with funds from the Department of Homeland Security. Drivers take a class or watch a one-hour DVD to qualify... Almost 400,000 people — mostly commercial truck drivers — have been trained since 2004. Membership is likely to top 1 million by March 2007. This summer, Georgia began requiring all 300,000 of its drivers with commercial licenses to be trained... Most truckers are eager to contribute to homeland security, he says. Their No. 1 question during training sessions: "Are they going to take us seriously?"... Very seriously, says Sutton, a former FBI agent who runs the program's analysis center. Using reports from drivers across the USA, Sutton says, analysts with intelligence and law-enforcement backgrounds track potential terrorist activity. For example, if several truckers report seeing someone photographing a bridge over a period of time, the analysts spot the pattern and alert law enforcement... As he maneuvers his truck along Chicago's Pulaski Road, which is teeming with people and cars, he points down a residential street. If a fuel tanker truck emerged from there, he says, he would "pick up the phone, because what in the world is a fuel tanker doing here?"...
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