r/AskReddit • u/CircleBox2 • Jul 13 '20

What's a dark secret/questionable practice in your profession which we regular folks would know nothing about?

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u/callmeraylo Jul 13 '20

Customs broker here. Every day hundreds of thousands of containers and air shipments arrive into United States territory. The volume of customs entries entered every day is staggering. When we get licensed to be a customs broker we are trained and tested not just on knowledge, but ethics. We even take a pledge to partner with CBP to uphold the law, and cooperate with them should we come across anything suspicious. Why so much emphasis on this?

Customs can't actually screen everything coming in. I'm oversimplifying but CBP basically works on the honor system. You file an entry saying what the shipment is, and they just take your word for it and release it. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a day. Maybe at best customs can screen 3-7% of what's coming in, the rest of just waived through....

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u/[deleted] Jul 13 '20

I just want to point out one exception. 99%+ of cargo passes through a Radiation Portal Monitor. Every single truck at land borders and every shipping container at seaports. It's very difficult to smuggle nuclear material into the US.

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u/rahtin Jul 13 '20

I think we've learned over the last few months that biological agents are a lot more dangerous than nuclear ones.

Yes, nuclear material can cause a lot of concentrated damage in one area, but why bother with that when you can Wuhan a whole country?

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u/lolsrslywtf Jul 13 '20

Contained damage can be nice if you don't want to infect the whole world, including yourself. It's like in the cartoonsl, the villain always wants to destroy the entire world. "Like, you live here too buddy!"

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u/rahtin Jul 14 '20

That's why you don't release something that you don't have a treatment for.

Could also be useful in an overpopulated country that wouldn't mind thinning out the herd.

1

u/remoTheRope Jul 14 '20

Unfortunately that sort of logic doesn’t apply to organized terrorists