You’re coming back to Australia from a flight overseas. Inside your carry on luggage is a hard drive filled your personal data and amongst other things, pornography.

Customs decide to do a random check of your hard drive and upon discovering some dubiously named pornography files, decide to confiscate the entire drive.

The name of the dubious file in question?

‘brother rapes sister’.

Normal human reaction at this point would be to die of embarrassment and contacting customs quietly about having your hard drive returned to you.

Well, that is unless you’re Ross Mansfield.

Ross Mansfield was coming back from the Philippines and upon having his external hard drive confiscated after ‘brother rapes sister’ was found. After his hard drive was confiscated Mansfield went to the media with his story and has threatened to sue customs if anything is deleted.

Mansfield’s defence?

I forgot to remove any porn because my friends in the Philippines, they download it.

They’re all over 18, it’s nothing underage.


Despite knowing that all the actors involved were over 18 and not underage, Mansfield

admitted to not having seen the film and said “I don’t know what it is”


So he has no idea what’s in the video, but knows all the actors are 18 and that it’s not child porn.

Cmon mate, fair shake of the sauce bottle; we’re not idiots.

You got caught out with fetish porn on your hard drive… fair is fair, why try to peg this one on some imaginary Filipinos?

I mean why would they even bother downloading porn specifically to your hard drive? An external hard drive needs to be hooked up to a computer so why would your ‘friends’ just download porn onto the local hard drive?

A movie titled ‘brother rapes sister’ sounds like your typical Kazaa/Limewire/Gnutella third world network file sharing bogus renamed video file. It’s not something you’re going to find for download randomly.

Especially considering Mansfield is claiming the movie is ‘nothing more than standard porn‘.

Nearly every guy that passes through customs with a laptop or hard drive is going to have porn tucked away on it somewhere… most guys know, especially when travelling, that you never know where you might get stuck.

If scouts taught us anything it’s to always be prepared.

What amuses me is that Ross Mansfield’s secret porn stash was found in spite of customs asking passengers if they were carrying pornography with them into Australia.

The practice was introduced last November and requires passenger to declare on a ‘incoming passenger card’ whether or not they are carrying any pornography.

Amusingly enough Mansfield seems to have been caught despite apparently answering ‘no’ on his passenger card.

I forgot to remove any porn.


Having forgot to remove any porn one can assume Mansfield would have checked ‘no’ to the ‘do you have any porn on you?’ question.

Personally I’m against customs asking passengers if they have any porn. I don’t really see it as an invasion of privacy though, well not until there’s a hefty fine for lying about it.

Nine of of ten, well ok let’s be honest, one in one hundred thousand people are going to willingly declare they have porn on them (the question covers all types or porn, not just digital movies). Customs have long been able to randomly search computer drives so nothing much has changed there.

So long as the penalty is rubbish I kind of see the entire thing as a waste of time.

(A) spokesman said the “express reference” to pornography was intended to make travellers aware that some forms of pornography were illegal to bring into Australia.

From the above quote, the motivation behind the policy introduction is clear. However how many people bringing suss porn into Australia do you think are going to declare it?

‘Oh yeah hang on a sec I’ve got 10 gigs of child porn… do I need to tick this box?’

Illegal RC porn is still going to get in because not all hard drives are inspected on people who don’t declare they’ve got porn. Given that nobody carrying illegal porn (or dubiously named porn in the case of Ross Mansfield) is going to declare it, the introduction of the policy seems moot.

On a lighter side with the requirement of examination of declared pornography, imagine explaining that job to people.

‘Hi there sexy, so what do you do?’

‘well… I work for Australian customs. When someone declares they are bringing pornography into the country I have to inspect it.’

‘…so uh, you sit around all day watching porn.’

‘oh no, it’s much more involved then that. We have to make sure the porn coming into Australia is clean and there’s all sorts of different porn out there. The job has a lot of variety.’

‘…but at the end of the day, you’re sitting around watching porn all day.’

‘well yes, I guess. So anyway, what do you do?’

‘I work for Kleenex.’

‘…’

‘…you guys are like our number one customers.’

Ross Mansfield claims the finding of dubiously named pornography on his hard drive by customs has ‘ruined his life‘. Despite the fact he seems to be the one that’s gone public with it.

What about you, would you declare pornography to customs?


Related posts that might interest you:

1. Stephen Conroy: Australians are opting into child porn
2. Conroy can’t guarantee only child porn will be filtered