Personally, this all sounds like a little bit of BS to me.
I was asking myself where's the hard data and evidence to support claims by authorities that ' criminals are slipping under the radar because airlines do not conduct compulsory identification checks.'
So out of interest, I started digging around to see what I could find on the topic and exactly what was presented to the committee, rather than one members view.
For those who don't want to read all of this to get the picture of it - In summary, both the comments by the Senator and the conclusions drawn by the reporter simply blow the issue out of proportion.
This is highlighted by the fact that in the 2010 data discussed in the committee presentation, there were 7.11 Million domestic pax boardings in PER, and only 22 incidences of false identity. 22 out of 7.11 million is such a small number, and utilisation of the existing PACE system for domestic travel to track travel by persons with illegal intent would be far better than having to go all USA on the ID checking.
In short, the reporter, and quite frankly the committee chair are smoking something.
And Sen. Hutchins seems to do quite well for himself when flying QF. Was digging in his most recent submission for the Register of Members Interests, and he scored two upgrades from J to F in July and August of 2009, one for LHR-SYD, and the other BKK-SYD. There was nothing on file with the electoral commission to give an idea of who his donors, if any are, thus no insight into who might be lobbying him for anything which was rather odd.
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Now for those who like to read and see how I came to this conclusion, then enjoy the following.
The subject in question is within the purvew of the
Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement, which is currently conducting an enquiry into
Adequacy of aviation and maritime security measures to combat serious and organised crime under its legislative purvew as defined by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement Act 2010.
The committee
met four times during 2010, one of which was to discuss the annual report of the Australian Crime Commission, and the other three related to the topic at hand. The
last of these three meetings, held in Fremantle in November of that year seems to be the most relevant to the reported remarks.
The information which Sen. Hutchins uses to support his claims is based on a presentation at this meeting by members of the Western Australian Police Service (referred to herein as WAPOL). Namely, presenting were Det. Supt Carver of the Serious and Organised Crime Branch, Mr Padget - Leading Intelligence Analyst for the State Intelligence Division WAPOL, and Ms Plumb - who while an employee of WAPOL was appearing before the committee in a private capacity (read the transcript to understand this one, Sen Steve Fielding asked some questions to clear up why this was).
Ms Plumb lead the deputation, presenting for ~90min on the topic of
Domestic airline passengers flying in false names: disorganising organised crime. The data presented was based entirely on data from WAPOL, and its findings, conclusion and summary was not representative of any juristiction outside of Western Australia. The impetus for Ms Plumb's research first came about in 2001 as a result of a request for submission to the Wheeler Enquiry.
Background done - here's the crux of the presentation. From the Full Year 2006 data collection and analysis, only 13 individual cases of this occuring could be found. So, not much of a compelling argument in terms of numbers to suggest that identity verification for domestic travel is a pressing issue.
Examination of the 2010 data doesn't give much more of an argument for this either, with only 19 of the 22 persons detected having used false names had known, provable links to organised crime. These 19 weren't exactly angles, with Ms Plumb noting;
They were importing and exporting commercial quantities of controlled drugs and using false names, documents and credit cards. So we are talking about really big operations now. The range of charges across these cases included conspiring to traffic commercial quantities of controlled drugs, in excess of 500 fraud charges, possession and production of false travel documents, importing commercial quantities of border controlled drugs, possession of stolen property, dealing in the proceeds of crime and possession of counterfeit money.
On page ACC8 of the transcript, Det. Supt Carver comments that the PACE alerting system used by law enforcment for tracking and alerting to travel of suspect persons is not currently extended to domestic travel, it only applies for international travel. Carver comments:
We do not have a domestic PACE alert, so in a serious and organised crime investigation it is very difficult for us and the states and territories to get in front of the play. Firstly, if they are using false identification, they could still use false identification even under a new regime, but the thing is that, if we have PACE alerts and we know they are using those false names and we have access to those manifests, it makes it very much easier to get in front of the play as far as investigations are concerned.
The rest of the comments on the transcript were quite boring, but I did discover this little nugget on the self-checking of bags on page ACC17 where the committee and deputation discussed the scenairo at some length.
Based on the scenairos presented, I doubt very much these would work - as it seems those members and deputation present haven't really seen or expeirenced how the technology works, and how unlikely and improbible the scenairo is of someone printing more tags then one needs and leaving a spare lying around for nefarious use.
If you remember from my
blog and video review of QF's NGCI system, the kiosk specifically asks you how many bags are you checking in. The design of the screen by virtue of the spacing between buttons makes it near on impossible to accidently hit the wrong number, and if one did the back key can be easily pressed to make a correction.
On the issue of the Australia card, or some form of national identity system - this is simply not needed. If AvSec needed to check identities, existing state or federally issued ID should be sufficient for this purpose - we don't need more bureaucacy and wasteful in my opinion just for the purpose of identifying citizens. Reference was made to the UK system of biometric identification being introduced there, but the committee and deputation didn't say much more than that.
