Have you ever wondered whether your identity is being
tracked when you go through Customs at an airport? There is no doubt that your personal
information from your passport is recorded.
Even your ‘biometric identifiers’, like fingerprints, are collected. But how much do you know about how your
personal details are stored and shared by Customs beyond your control?
Data sharing for national security purposes
The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service
(‘Customs’) collaborates with governmental agencies, both nationally and
internationally, by
sharing the information it collects to “detect and deter unlawful movement of
goods and people across the border.”
At the national level, such cross-agency data sharing
unifies resources and centralises national security efforts, which enables greater accuracy in identifying potential
security threats. Analysis of
information from multiple sources, including Customs, allows analysts to track
peoples’ behavioural patterns and communications, as well as facilitating the
identification of non-intuitive relationships between groups and
individuals. Identification of such
trends aids in anticipating potential attacks, foreign interference and
organised crime.
National agencies currently participating in information
sharing agreements with Customs include the Australian Federal Police,
Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Department of Defence,
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Australian Security Intelligence
Service, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.
Cooperative data agreements
Australian Customs
has data sharing partnership with the AFP, the New South Wales, Victorian and
Tasmanian police, Australian Transaction and Reports and Analysis Centre
(AUSTRAC) and the Australian Crime Commission, with a focus on
preventing drug importation. Customs
often works particularly closely with the AFP and has developed a Joint
Organised Crime Group (JOCG). ‘Operation
Inca’ is a specific example of such a partnership in 2007. This operation
targeted importations of the drug MDMA and led to the dismantling of a
purported international drug ring, with 30 charges laid in Australia alone. The partnership between Customs and law
enforcement agencies at the state, national and international level enabled the
sharing of information about the smuggling of cocaine in shipping containers,
which had been gathered from surveillance data in ten different countries. This led to the identification and arrest of
the criminal ‘masterminds’ of the drug ring, as well as the smaller
players.
Customs also has a
role in maritime security, protecting sovereign territories and preventing
illegal activities in the Southern Ocean.
A current operation is the targeting of ‘illegal,
unregulated and unreported fishing’, which widely affects ‘domestic, regional
and international stakeholders’.
Illegal fishing is disrupted using measures such as the RP0A-IUU
network, by which fishing vessels engaging in illegal activity are barred from
accessing regional ports. This network
involves sharing of information with partner agencies, including the Department
of Defence, law enforcement agencies and the Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade who work closely on collaborative initiatives combating border threats
and illegal maritime activities.
Biometrical and
biographical data, immigration status and travel history will soon be shared
and stored in the chips in e-passports in Australia. At international airports and seaports,
Australian Customs is
already able to collect passengers’ biometric information. This data may include fingerprints, facial
recognition imaging or iris scans, and is stored in the Automated Biometric
Identification System database.
Prospective laws foreshadowed in the ‘Foreign Fighters’ bill indicate
that Customs would not only be able to store such information for its own
purposes, but also share
it with an international database of biometric information for unspecified
national security purposes. The
biometric data collected at borders will be passed to the AFP and national
security agencies to pre-emptively assess passengers’ risk status prior to
their arrival in Australia, by matching
passengers’ data to international databases.
Funding is currently being directed to developing secure international
databases with partner countries to target identity fraud.
International
examples of large scale data exchange illustrate the potential for future
expansion of Australian Customs’ data sharing capabilities, such as through
direct connections with integrated global databases. In the United States, biometrics databases
hold millions of entries as part of the US-VISIT program and store the
information of every international traveller within the US and those seeking to
work, study or live in the country. Such
biometric
databases are shared with over 77 foreign governments, including Australia,
through collaborative data agreements.
The US also collects biometric data with private bodies, such as
Facebook, for national security purposes.
Facebook’s data is mined for its vast collection of uploaded photographs
and the site’s facial recognition software, which identifies individuals by
matching faces to ‘tagged’ photographs.
This data enables significant accuracy in identification of individuals,
as accounts are frequently linked to users’ real names. The US further demonstrates the capacity for
efficient data sharing between state and federal government bodies. In response to the terrorist attacks in 2001,
the federal US government reformed its predominantly siloed storage structure
of biometric data to facilitate
sharing between agencies through interoperable databases.
Further issues regarding information sharing
The collection and
sharing of information by agencies such as Customs poses many further issues
for potential investigation. It is
useful to situate Customs’ data sharing activity within the broader context of
resource and statutory limitations, which reduce efficiency and raise privacy
concerns. Lack of adequate funding and
training can pose processing difficulties to individual agencies, which may lack the capacity to manage the
sheer size and variety of information collected. Further, when data is stored in multiple
different ‘siloed’ systems, efficient data sharing is impeded by lack of
interoperability and consistency between agencies. Inadequate legislative privacy protections in
Australia should also be flagged as an area of concern regarding the greater
capacity of Customs and other agencies to share individuals’ private
information. Already, the
small protections that do exist controlling information collection, such as
the bar on the federal government from
matching data in their possession to peoples’ tax file numbers, is being
circumvented, as much of the information obtained by Australian
governmental bodies is purchased from private organisations.
Such issues leave extensive scope for further investigation into the area
of data sharing.
