THE brazen theft of two computers from an intelligence area at Sydney International Airport has raised fears of terrorist infiltration at Australia’s busiest airport.

With the country on high alert ahead of the anniversaries of September 11 and last October’s Bali bombing, in which 88 Australians died, there were concerns that the robbery might allow terrorists access to highly-confidential information about Australian Customs and top-secret communications with the police and intelligence services.

A spokesman for the Community and Public Sector Union said that operations against terrorists and international drug cartels, in which customs officers monitor the movement of suspects and cargo, could also be at risk.

Two men, described as of Middle Eastern or South Asian appearance, managed to gain access to the Customs cargo processing and intelligence centre at Sydney airport, identified as security technicians sent by Electronic Data Systems, the computer provider to the Customs Service. The Sydney Morning Herald, which broke the story, said the thieves, who supplied false names and signatures, were given access to the top-security mainframe room on the evening of August 27. They spent two hours disconnecting the two computers, which they placed on trolleys and then calmly moved out of the room past the security desk.

While the Australian Customs Service claimed that no sensitive operational information was lost, the Herald claimed that some customs officials believed the two mainframe servers held thousands of confidential files, including top-secret communications between customs investigators, the Federal Police and Asio, Australia’s main security intelligence organisation.

Chris Ellison, the Customs Minister, insisted: “The two computer servers involved were for communication purposes, they do not store or retain documents and they did not contain thousands of confidential files.” But his oppositon counterpart, Mark Bishop, said that the breach raised important questions about what information was downloaded and transferred into the stolen computers, how the two men accessed and logged on to the systems and how they managed to remain undisturbed for two hours.

Bob Charles, a Liberal politician who has been chairing a parliamentary inquiry into the security of government information technology, said it was obvious that computer security needed to be investigated further. “I have just instructed our inquiry secretary to re-open the hearings,” he added.

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