Speeding
Towards
a Privacy Disaster
Enhanced Drivers’ Licences and
the Security and Prosperity Partnership
The Harper government
is driving us towards a
one-stop identity flash
at the border.
Despite the lack of a
national discussion on
new security technologies,
and an overwhelming
rejection of the idea of a
national identification card when it was
first proposed by the Chrétien government
in 2003, the current Harper government
is encouraging provinces to create
so-called Enhanced Driver’s Licences
(EDLs) as an alternative to passports for
crossing the Canada-U.S. border. These
new licences would contain biometric
information, such as a person’s nationality, and security features including a
barcode for proximity scans and a radio
frequency identification chip that border
agents could scan and read 20 feet away.
The new technology is being created
to satisfy U.S. demands, as part of the
Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative,
that anyone entering the country after
June 2009 has a valid passport or some
other secure document to prove nationality.
The Canadian and provincial
governments are selling the EDL as a
convenient way to get across the border
quickly for those who might not want
to pay for a passport.
So far, the governments of British
Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan,
Ontario and Quebec have all announced
EDL projects.
Some may argue this technology is a
harmless and voluntary means of crossing
the border a little quicker without
a passport. Not so. It is unnecessary
and invasive, and in fact a back-door
approach to a North American identification
card. EDLs will not make us
safer from terrorism, and they will not
ease traffic flows at the border. What
they will do is facilitate the creation of a
North American surveillance society.
Canada’s privacy
commissioners reject EDLs
In February 2008, commenting on
British Columbia’s new enhanced
licences, Canada’s federal and provincial
privacy commissioners said that no EDL
project should proceed on a permanent
or even a temporary basis unless there
were clear assurances that the personal
information required by participating
drivers would remain in Canada.
Canadians’ personal information cannot
be protected under our privacy laws
once the information is shared across the
U.S. border. Similar U.S. privacy protection
laws apply only to U.S. citizens.
The United States government is under
no obligation to protect Canadians’
personal information and, in fact, could
use it to create profiles on any number
of citizens in order to restrict or more
closely monitor the movement of people
the government considers risky. This
would be unconstitutional in Canada.
We know that Canadian security agencies
are already voluntarily sharing information
with their U.S. counterparts,
which has resulted in Canadian citizens
with arrest records – not even necessarily
convictions – being warned not to cause
any trouble while in the U.S., or being
barred from the country altogether.
We also know that, despite public opposition,
the U.S. government continues
to work towards a system where various
unrelated databases can be linked in
order to “mine” for certain behaviours
and “risk-score” travellers based on various,
expanding criteria. It will be difficult,
if not impossible, for a Canadian
to challenge a U.S. scoring system.
Voluntary now does not mean
voluntary later
Clearly the usefulness of EDLs depends
on their widespread use – otherwise
it would be more reasonable to insist
that people get a passport to cross
the border. The U.S. Department of
Homeland Security has already said it
wants to expand its own EDL program,
the REAL ID Act, which forces all U.S.
states to develop compatible driver’s
licences and create linkable databases
containing the personal information of
cardholders. Currently, U.S. EDLs are
used to board federally regulated airlines
and enter federal buildings. While it isn’t
clear how the system will be expanded,
it is easy to imagine other situations
where state agencies will find it tempting
to scan a driver’s licence for instant
access to a person’s profile.
A North American ID card
in disguise
The Canadian Department of Public
Safety is working with the provinces
and the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security to set common standards for
the various provincial identification cards
being planned. Documents acquired
through access to information requests
in the U.S. show that bilateral discussions
related to a “one-card” solution to
travel security were being held through
Security and Prosperity Partnership
of North America meetings as early as
2005. The EDLs appear to be a way
to sneak a North American identification card past Canadians, even
though Canadians have clearly
opposed the idea.
The potential for
abuse is high
Voluntary or not, EDLs will
potentially confer mobility
rights along racial or class lines
– just like their elite predecessor
the Nexus card, which is
reserved for “trusted” highvalue
customers who can clear a
Canadian and U.S. security check. The
border has already become a source of
racial profiling as people from certain
countries deemed “high risk” by the
U.S. government are harassed on the
basis of little or no evidence to suspect
them of wrongdoing. Not having an
EDL, or a new enhanced ID card being
proposed in Ontario, could one day
automatically make you a target of extra
searches or questioning. If you’re in the
“slow lane,” so to speak, you must be
trying to hide something – or so some
border agents might think.
Canada need not part icipate
While the United States government,
according to the norms of international
relations, has every right to restrict who
can and cannot enter its territory,
Canada should not be going out of its
way to help establish integrated North
American systems that will threaten our
privacy for nominal or no extra security
value. Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said this year that the
EDLs “may be an attempt to encourage
us to harmonize with them … we think
it’s unnecessary. We think it’s intrusive,
and we think it’s a route that Canadians
don’t need to follow.”
Canada needs a chance to debate this
new technology before any province
implements it at the border. We have the
chance to put the brakes on this process
of security integration and harmonization,
which is supposed to ease the flow
of goods across the border, but is actually
moving us another step towards the
surveillance society.
Stuart Trew is the Ontario/Quebec/Nunavut
Regional Organizer for the Council of
Canadians.
Printer-friendly version: Speeding Towards a Privacy Disaster in PDF Format (180kB)
Photo: Enhanced Driver’s Licences may soon become
mandatory at the Canada-U.S. border
despite rising concerns with the lack of protection
of personal information that would be
included on them.
