All right.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Throughout the world, biometric technologies are used in border security to varying degrees. A panoply of machine-readable travel documents are increasingly prevalent, particularly among so-called trusted or registered traveller programs, as well as in permanent resident, green card, and visa schemes.
Even in these cases, serious questions regarding the continued potential insecurity of breeder documents tend to be ignored, and the dangerous consequences of social sorting are deliberately avoided. Social sorting refers to the manner in which increasing amounts of digital information on individuals begin to create a so-called data double, which, although desirable to marketers and law enforcement, has shown to be less effective in predicting risk and more effective in predicting your next purchase on Amazon.
Still, some jurisdictions have taken biometrics to a much higher level, such as the development at the University of Arizona of AVATAR—the automated virtual agent for truth assessments in real time—which is effectively something the size of an ATM machine and replaces a border agent, using artificial intelligence and biometrics to carry out a typical initial inspection.
In all these cases, there are significant questions that remain unanswered and relatively unexplored about biometrics.
Using these technologies as well as various other forms of surveillance have significant problems in terms of public buy-in. Certainly part of the problem is the lack of public participation in the process and the adoption of these technologies. It is often unclear why particular biometric technologies are adopted: what makes a specific biometric technology apt for a particular problem?
Like many tools, they oversimplify complex political, social, and legal networks according to a new classification of biometrically enrolled subjects.
There is what Joseph Pugliese refers to as “infrastructural diffusion”, where certain norms of gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status are bred into the technologies themselves. A prime example would be the failure of facial recognition biometrics on African Americans tested at Miami-Dade airport.
The development and application of biometric technologies tends not to focus simply on helping to resolve with greater certainty “who” you are, but, with the increasing interconnection with other pieces of personal digital data, determines “what” you are. Are we aware and comfortable with the way in which this transforms our manage of the border and the mobile subjects who intend to cross it?
Beyond deeply important ethical, political, and social issues, there are straightforward problems with biometric technologies that deserve consideration.
A recent study at the University of Notre Dame, published in Nature magazine, found that the so-called false-match rate increased 153% over three years.
A five-year study released in September by the National Research Council in Washington, D.C., labelled biometrics as “inherently fallible”: they only provide probabilistic results and not yes and no answers.
We are in dire need of increased research on the biological underpinnings of human distinctiveness. How stable the actual physiological characteristics are that the technology is designed to measure remains in serious question.
The AVATAR program, which is now being tested along the Arizona-Mexico border, biometrically measures 15 of 500 possible cues, which is lower than the 5% threshold set by the developers themselves. Happily for them, politicians are more excited about the gadgets than reflecting on the science they themselves have laid out.
There are some important questions we need to ask. What precisely do we expect these technologies to solve? What are the specific problems we believe they will address? Is the government willing to invest in public and intellectual engagement to consider seriously the specific efficacy, efficiency, and inherent problems associated with the use of these technologies? The research demonstrates that the industry is not compelled to do so on its own.
In conclusion, first, the signing of the Beyond the Border agreement already puts into policy what Nick Vaughan-Williams has referred to as the border not being “where it is supposed to be”. It is clear that this agreement will compel Canada to engage on a variety of bilateral fronts on the management and enforcement of mobility and circulation, but the extent to which this has occurred with little significant public consultation, and to what extent it requires the total adoption of these specific biometric technologies, may still be something that is salvageable.
Two, the increased reliance on biometric technologies together with other forms of digital surveillance move us away from a question of who the person is to what kind of person this is. This significantly alters how the border operates.
Three, the United States and Europe have multiple skilled and effective independent and non-governmental institutions devoted to evaluating border security—the practices, strategies, and technologies to be applied therein.
Canada has none.
The absence of this capacity will do little to enable policy innovation, effectively evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of strategies to secure the border and enhance mobility, or move us away from being little more than reactive to the foreign innovations of other policies.
Thank you.