Aus Customs

[Worrals in the wilds]

Westausatc, I agree with you on the “nothing to hide” argument. That is why the phrase does not appear in any known Australian Act, and why only the Fire Brigade (as far as I am aware) can enter a private premises without warrant. On your other point though, why shouldn’t Customs investigate the offence, rather than the Police? They have their own Investigations Unit who are quite capable of mounting an investigation. If there was evidence of a wider group of offenders it would have been passed to the AFP for further investigation.

As for being dragged away in the Customs hall, unless the officers were hugely unprofessional (it’s been known to happen) he would have been quietly taken to a private interview room under caution as soon as the evidence was found. He would have been read his Crimes Act rights and afforded every chance to explain himself before being charged. Surely there is no evidence that he was dragged away screaming with officers yelling “kiddy er” at him.

Anyway, the only people I’ve seen be noticed by other pax in the Customs hall were usually behaving like dicks. Pax are too tired and nervous about their own excess duty free stash to notice anything much, including exit doors, queues and signs saying “produce passport here”.

Spanner 90, Customs officers are cleared under the civilian classification system to Protected or Highly Protected depending on rank. More relevantly, the Customs Administration Act (s16) prohibits any officer from disclosing any protected information. The maximum penalty is two years imprisonment. Any information viewed or stored while performing duties is covered under the definition.

You may recall the Wheeler Report that was produced for the Government after a leak from a Sydney based Customs officer. Despite political platitudes from the Attorney General and Customs Minister about how it was great that all those bad things came to light, the Customs officer accused of leaking the report (Allan Kessing) was relentlessly hunted down by the Customs Internal Affairs Unit and convicted under the CAA. At the time, it was widely muttered within Customs that if the amount of resources used to pursue him had been used to fight crime at Sydney Airport, there would have been no need to leak the info in the first place.
Are you routinely carrying security classified material? If so I assume you are a government operative of some sort and are familiar with the requirements set out in the Defence Signals Directorate’s Technology Security Manual. http://www.dsd.gov.au/_lib/pdf_doc/acsi33/acsi33_u.pdf

OAN, a few people here seem to have the mistaken opinion that these search powers are a new, post 9/11 thing. They are not. Fundamentally, since the middle ages (in the UK, obviously) Customs Officers have had the power to search any imported or exported stuff. The basic power to search has been formally in place since the seventeenth century and informally since the time of the Magna Carta.
An illustrative quote from the internet: “ Following the conclusions of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Goschen, in his report of 1891, rummage was considered to be the first line of defence of Customs Revenue and called for experienced, well supervised, Waterguard Officers to undertake the work." ( hm-waterguard.org.uk)
The name Customs comes from the twelfth century and is derived from “Customary” payments to the king, i.e. the government shake-down.


While this post has gotten a bit rambly (deploying the drift anchor, Cap’n) I wanted to make two points...
1. Customs can and will search your stuff if they want to, and they’ve been doing so since the Middle Ages. This will not be rescinded any time soon.
2. If you don’t want them to read stuff on your computer, don’t store the stuff on it in the first place, or leave it at home. It's cheaper than Hasslehof's suggestions.

And for those of you feeling relentlessly pursued by Big Brother, the following interview is a reminder that Big Brother is sometimes just as ruthless (if not more so) to his own. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2007/1934856.htm
Exactly how many pilots have had their laptops searched recently? Has there been an epidemic of it?
Worrals