Farmingdale also has long excelled in cutting edge curricula, including the application of advanced technology to security in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. Many of the issues examined by the students and faculty here, as well as the participants in today's conference, are central to the mission of the United States Customs Service.

For most Americans and other travelers, the Customs Service is represented by the person at the airport who inspects your luggage after a trip overseas. Those inspectors are an important part --- but just a part --- of an organization charged with everything from the enforcement of trade agreements to the collection of billions of dollars in revenues for the U.S. government.

The Customs Service is also responsible for intercepting contraband entering or leaving the United States. That includes illegal narcotics, laundered money, strategic technology, child pornography and weapons of mass destruction. It's a big plate. And that's where the application of new technology can help us do our job, in some surprising ways.

I couldn't help but notice that Farmingdale is one of the few colleges I know that specializes in aeronautics. You have your own airport. At Customs, we have our own air force.

The Customs Service deploys aircraft with sophisticated surveillance and tracking devices that makes narcotics trafficking by air a dangerous enterprise for the drug cartels. Our p-3 surveillance aircraft and other planes coordinate with customs high speed boats to thwart smuggler aircraft as they drop payloads of narcotics to waiting boats off the American coast. Our air wing also coordinates missions with other governments, and flies counter-narcotics missions over the Caribbean, Colombia and Peru.

The air program has succeeded in curtailing the smugglers' use of the air. Of late, the traffickers have relied more heavily on moving narcotics over water. We intercept them there too.

One of the challenges for the Customs Services and everyone else engaged in counter-narcotics is to remain flexible -- to quickly adapt as the traffickers change tactics. As long as America’s appetite for illegal narcotics remains strong, there will be traffickers trying to meet the demand.

We won't intercept everything they try to send our way. But we will get a lot of it. We will continue to make it as difficult, dangerous and expensive for the drug cartels to function. And we will use technology to help us.

America's booming economy, along with the reduction of trade barriers among our international neighbors, have created new challenges for the Customs Service. And we have we have applied new and powerful technology to these challenges as well.

The volume of international trade has grown tremendously in recent years, creating a huge sea of imported and exported goods. The narcotics traffickers, arms smugglers and others try to swim undetected in this ocean of trade.

At Customs, we're developing a range of non-intrusive technology to help us counteract this rising threat. By non-intrusive, I mean devices that lessen the physical invasiveness of the searches we must conduct to locate drugs and other contraband. This technology saves time, money, and in many cases, reduces the tensions of a search.

Among the high tech tools we are using to defeat smugglers on the ground are very large x-ray devices that allows us to examine entire rail road cars as they cross the border from Mexico into the United States. This enables us to search legitimate commerce quickly. The alternative is to subject entire freight trains to manual inspections, car-by-car.

New scanning technology also allows us to quickly read thousands of automobile license plates as they cross over the border into the United States. We have also equipped our inspectors with new radiation detection devices - no bigger than a pager - which will alert them to the proximity of radioactive material.

That's a relatively new concern, one of the results of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The slacking of controls over weapons-grade nuclear material -- over weapons of mass destruction generally in the former states of the Soviet Union -- has presented a new danger: the trafficking of strategic weapons and materials to terrorists states or organizations.

A vast array of advanced technology is being deployed against such threats. These go far beyond the scanning and detection equipment I just described. They go so far as to include the communications interception capabilities of the national security agency.

Technology is helping safeguard the United States. No question about it. But there's a danger in becoming too confident with technology. We need to remind ourselves that the same technology that is available to government is increasingly available to well-financed criminal organizations.

The profits of crime that are bled into the financial system each year are staggering and detrimental by any calculation -- in the hundreds of billions worldwide. These crimes extend far beyond narcotics trafficking - to tax and tariff evasion, extortion schemes, theft of assets destined for privatization, arms smuggling, counterfeiting, terrorism, and a raft of financial frauds.

We see the ability of individuals, using relatively inexpensive computers and common telephone lines, to move enormous masses of data around the world at nearly the speed of light. Information is easier to send and to encrypt, and money can be moved instantly, including money to finance the purchase of stolen weapons or convert poppy paste into heroin -- which means legitimate business and government need all the help they can get.

Your conference this afternoon is a great venue to exchange information and ideas on how to build a more secure environment. Big, global criminal enterprises like the cocaine cartels attempt to corrupt police and public officials. They kill those they can't corrupt. They have distorted entire economies and threaten to destroy emerging democracies.

That's why we put so much effort and money into the fight against illegal drugs and other organized criminal activity. The stakes could not be higher. We, in America, have the additional burden of devising crime-fighting strategies that do not undermine the rights of individuals in a free society...and of using technology to fight crime without invading the privacy of the law-abiding public.

This is again where our non-intrusive technology plays a crucial part. One of customs heaviest responsibilities is to conduct what we call personal searches of suspected smugglers. These inspections are used to defeat narcotics traffickers who hide drugs on and in their bodies.

Many smugglers will swallow packets of drugs to get them past Customs. We see this method used most at our nation's major airports. The personal search can be extremely difficult for a Customs inspector, and especially disturbing for a suspect who turns out to be no smuggler at all.

Through the application of new technology, the Customs Service can now have suspects remain fully clothed while they walk into a large scanning device. Much like a cat scan allows a doctor to search inside the brain without surgery, Customs can search for contraband under suspects' clothing without requiring them to remove any.

One of these devices was recently installed at Kennedy airport. Others are being installed at major ports of entry to the United States.

Obviously, the Customs Service does not subject everyone entering the United States to body searches. We train our inspectors to use selection criteria that help us sift criminals from the majority of law-abiding travelers. But our methods are not foolproof, and innocent passengers do get searched.

Some have suspected that they were searched because of racial bias. And their complaints, in some instances, have led to legal action against Customs employees.

We've applied high technology to help alleviate this problem. but we've also applied some common sense too. Technology, for all its benefits, cannot be our salvation when it comes to protecting individual rights. We often have to change our policies, and our way of thinking too.

We did that at Customs, by strengthening supervision and accountability in all our search activities. No longer can an individual Customs inspector decide to conduct a personal search on his or her own. Now the permission of a supervisor must be granted. Customs lawyers have also been made available to offer legal guidance to our personnel.

And where previously Customs used its authority to detain members of the traveling public indefinitely ---days at a time, in some instances -- we now require a federal magistrate's approval if we intend to detain someone for more than four hours.

These reforms should go a long way in maintaining the public’s confidence in the fairness of the process, while at the same time allowing the Customs Service to carry out its responsibilities. It is crucial for law enforcement in the modern era to help preserve the rights of individuals in a democracy; especially as technology makes possible the powerful invasion of privacy. Our challenge - yours and mine - is to protect society without making individual liberty another casualty in the war on crime.