Smuggling organization

Smuggling is a behavior that has occurred ever since there were laws or a moral code that tax or forbid access to a specific person or object. At the core of any smuggling organization is the economic relationship between supply and demand. From the organization's point of view, the issues are what the consumer wants, and how much the consumer is willing to pay the smuggler or smuggling organization to obtain it.

The Developmental Smuggling Model is a unified model in that it describes phases of smugglers and organizations. Smugglers are reported to fall within one of three different phases. Organizations in which there is smuggling occurring also fall within one of three different phases. Phase II is subdivided into three types of corporations.

Phase I smugglers are usually smuggling contraband to meet their own needs although they might smuggle enough to cover their expenses by selling some of the contraband. Mules and those who meet law enforcement "smuggler profiles" fall within this cluster of individuals.

Occasionally, individuals are enticed to carry contraband by more experienced smugglers because the professional smuggler wishes to test the security through which the mule must travel or to create a diversion when the novice smuggler is caught; thus, allowing a breach through which a larger shipment of contraband can be moved. Once the contraband is placed, the individual or family is referred to as the virgin (See Lichtenwald, 2003). The use of a "virgin smuggler" allows the professional smuggler to check his or her assessment of the security and to make sure that the contraband was not detected because "the virgin smuggler" could not control his or her emotions or behavior or because of the way the contraband was packaged, or because a bribe was not effective. The use of a "virgin smuggler" also allows the professional smuggler not to be identified.

Phase I smugglers is the group most frequently caught by the police and government agencies. These agencies focus their security and enforcement efforts on arresting individuals within this group. In May 2005 the MITRE Corporation released a press announcement reporting that they had created a computer simulation program capable of modeling the complex adaptive behaviors of smugglers. The Modeling Complex Adaptive Behavior Project was headed by Daniel Venese and sponsored by MITRE's Center for Enterprise Modernization. The program is capable of generating a steady stream of novel smuggling techniques so that strategies can be crafted to combat them. Once an agency produces these strategies, it can feed them into the simulation to test how smugglers may adapt their methods in response. Information regarding The Modeling Complex Adaptive Behavior Project can be found in The MITRE Digest.

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