Dutch Customs, an interesting environment.

This morning I read a small article (accompanied with a video) about animal smuggling. The Dutch government has agreed together with 180 other countries to (try and) put a stop on animal smuggling. You can see it on This little video.

The smuggling of protected animals is a big problem and personally I think as long as there are stupid people with a lot of money to pay for this stuff there is going to be a market.

Years ago I have work at the Dutch national airport Schiphol. I was hired by the Dutch customs for some IT related things. I have done several projects and have seen a lot of 'behind the scenes' stuff. Really interesting.

For instance they had a application to scan airplanes even when they still where in the air. They received all the information about a plane and the origin where it came from. On the screen they could see all the goods that were on board of the plane and perform a risk analysis. When they thought it was possible that there could be illegal stuff on board they marked the luggage and the pilot got a signal that he had to stop the plane at customs so the could scan the content. Customs had one hour to check the content, it did go with military precision. Often those plates (the lugage is stored on plates in the plane) were brought to the x-ray scan.

While in the X-ray scanner custom employees can watch a monitor to see whether they see suspicious goods.
I remember a print of a Bugatti (car) on the wall of the custom office, it is just like a technical drawing, you can see really everything on it. One of the custom eployees told me that once the Formula 1 circus was traveling through Amsterdam to Sydney one of the teams didn't want their containers to be scanned because they were affraid of business espionage of other teams. Even Bernie Ecklestone interferred because it was escalating pretty quick....

When I was doing an other project I was in the hall where the intercontinental flights arrived. At that time there was a 100% check which means that every passenger was checked before they could enter Holland. At that time there were a lot of drug related problems with smugglers. One 'tool' the custom officers used was a passive dog. I thought this was really awesome to see. This was a dog, a german shepperd, which was trained to search for drugs.

He was called 'passive' because when he found drugs or the smell of drugs he just sits at that person or suitcase. Not making any noise or barking. When I was there he 'catched' on person. It turned out the guy had heroine hidden in the arm of his suitcase. The dog smelled it and sat down next to the suitcase. The guy wanted to take the suitcase and take of, but the dog followed him calm and sat down again once the guy stopped walking... It was so awesome to see...

The also have active dogs. These dog's are unleashed in the plane or in hangars of luggage. When they find something the start to bark loud so the custom employee knows where to look....

While I was at the aiport I took advantage of being there at the Customs. One of the guys was so kind to show me around around the luggage system. It is huge and almost fully automated. It has the size of 6 soccerfields and there is this huge assembly line on which all luggage is automaticly transported to the right plane of luggage drop off... If you see the ammount of luggage they are handling you will be surprised about the amount that goes wrong, it is below 1 percent... pretty cool isn't it...

It was a great time at Schiphol, especially because I got to see things you won't see normally when you areat the airport. It's a complete world on it's own....

Have a great day

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