NACC

Workers

Water

Energy

Security & civil liberties

Military

Safety & regulations

Transportation corridors

SPP resources

• Deep Integration Timeline
• Backgrounders
• Multimedia
• Media
• Logos
• Facebook

SPP Summit - New Orleans
April 21-22, 2008

• Summit highlights
• Photo gallery
• Media

SPP Summit - Montebello
August 19-21, 2007

• Summit highlights
• Photo gallery
• Highlights from public forum

Teach-in
March 31 to April 1, 2007

• Teach-in resources
• Final teach-in report
• Photo gallery

Quebec to become third province to offer enhanced driver's licences

May 22, 2008
Posted by Stuart Trew

According to an article in the Montreal Gazette last weekend, SPP-linked enhanced driver’s licences (EDLs), “raise the spectre of multiple databases carrying surprising amounts of information on citizens.”

At the end of this year, Quebec will join British Columbia and Manitoba in offering the new drivers licences, which embed personal and biometric information in radio frequency identification chips (RFIDs) that can be read at border crossings, to satisfy U.S. security demands under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

“But privacy and human-rights advocates warn that the card could become a Trojan Horse, making it easy for authorities in both countries to amass data files on law-abiding citizens, and track their movements to and from the U.S.,” wrote the Gazette.

“The critics worry that, beyond tagging potential terrorists and criminals, authorities could use the technology to help build profiles of political dissidents and people not convicted of any crimes, particularly in Muslim, Tamil and other communities.”

Roch Tassé of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group told the paper he’s worried that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will use information contained in biometric licences, including a person’s nationality, to build profiles of Canadian travellers and store them in massive databases that can be “mined” for alleged criminal or terrorist associations.

A spokesperson for Canada’s Privacy Commissioner told the Gazette that while the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms applies to everyone, the U.S. Privacy Act only applies to U.S. citizens. In other words there are few limits on what the U.S. government can do with the information it collects on Canadian citizens and stores in joint databases like the ones being created between Canadian provinces and U.S. states to house EDL information.

Tassé also warned about the U.S. requirement that Canada’s EDLs be readable at a distance of 10 metres, making it possible for police officers with RFID readers to scan crowds in one easy swoop to record and find persons of interest to security officials.

An accompanying story by Kevin Dougherty described some examples of the people getting caught up in these SPP-related schemes to harmonize security practices and databases across the continent:

1. Liberal MP and former foreign affairs minister Bill Graham, and 15-year-old Saskatchewan boy Alistair Butt are on Canada’s “no fly” list, which Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff wants harmonized with the U.S. list.
2. Teresa Healy of the Canadian Labour Congress was pulled aside at the border with traces of radiation from a recent hospital test. The border agent had files on her arrest at a protest in the 1980s, and warned that they had fingerprints if she tried anything else while in the United States.
3. And Andrew Feldmer, a 67-year-old Vancouver psychotherapist who once did experiments using legally obtained LSD, who is banned from entering the United States because they claim he is an admitted narcotics user.

These EDLs will also create a de facto North American ID card based on the requirements of the much-criticized U.S. REAL ID program, which harmonizes state licences to Department of Homeland Security requirements. The U.S. security agency has promised that the program will expand over time, which has critics fearing it will be used to trample on privacy rights by screening for all kinds of interested persons – not just alleged terrorists.