Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Oct. 3rd, 2012

[George Platsis]

I think you mentioned in there, to use as a departure point, that biometrics should not be used as a collection point. To echo the Admiral's thoughts, it's more of a verification process. We need to know more about people before they actually show up at our borders.

There's been a little chat right now about HUMINT, and HUMINT is not necessarily, again to quote the Admiral, the James Bond type of situation. Human intelligence can range from something as simple as community engagement. For example, Canada has the most multicultural community in the world. We have everybody from every side here. We need to get some more community engagement, because if you actually think of it, global security is a function of local security, so how can we help verify this information about people coming in, engage these communities that we have?

For example, in the greater Toronto area I'm sure you could find pretty much anybody from anywhere you want. This is human intelligence that is being built up to create information, not necessarily only about a person, but, for example, a particular region, because these people call back home, they have relatives there, they have family there. It's all these little pieces of data that start coming together, so that we have a better understanding, if not necessarily of a particular person, then of the context of a particular part of the world.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

I find that very interesting. What could you recommend concretely for this government to do in order to engage those communities?

[George Platsis]

I think you could start with even local law enforcement. I have seen and know of senior law enforcement officials who have been very active in engaging diverse communities. As opposed to waiting for these communities to come and talk to us, we should be going to them and talking to them, saying, “Tell us a little bit about your part of the world.”

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

That's interesting.

On a related topic, you did mention a few minutes ago accuracy of information that comes from, if I'm not wrong, RCMP or CSIS, to CBSA, for instance. On March 15 you mentioned that:

If the RCMP or CSIS has somebody on their watch list, but they do not inform CBSA, it is not the fault of CBSA that they let the individual into the country. It is the fault of the system for not ensuring that necessary agencies can easily integrate and share their information.

Better information sharing between departments was also recommended by the Auditor General. I assume you agree with the recommendation. How do you suggest we could actually have better information sharing?

[George Platsis]

You could say this of government and many other sectors: we suffer from institutional silos. There are both institutional barriers and there are cultural barriers. There's plenty of information that I think you can find on this in numerous research studies, that certain departments have traditionally not worked well together because there's a cultural base.

To go back to almost the same idea from the previous response, it's dialogue. Within your own institutional silo, you could probably handle your issue. But once we start crossing into different departments and into different spectrums, person A from organization A might not work that well with person B. We need to actually start chipping down these silos and getting a more inter-agency response going on.

As a function of that, we are going to start sharing a whole lot more information between each other, and the more information we share with each other, we create a larger database. The larger database that we create is something that we need to safeguard, because like most databases, they become a target; they are a risk. Unless we start chipping down these institutional silos, which could be between departments...and I would even suggest internationally, with some of our traditional allies, we need to talk a little bit more. To take a quote from one of my other fields, in disaster and emergency management, the time to exchange business cards is not when the disaster happens, it's before.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

You walked right into my next question, which is, what kind of security provisions should we have to basically ensure the safety and security of this information, if we're going to be having much more information sharing, etc.?

[George Platsis]

That's a long question. I'll try to give a short response.

There's both the technological side and the human side to this. For example, you can have the absolute greatest technological solution, but if you have someone, say, from this committee walk to a computer and plug in a USB key with a piece of malicious code, you have just compromised the entire system. Not only do we have to have this technological safeguard, and you can see this on numerous reports—the most recent one would probably be the CSIS one that came out last week; we are getting attacked daily. If you want me to get you some statistics on how malicious.... Do you want statistics? Okay.

Again, you have to understand that these are estimates, because not everything is reported, and these are coming from places like McAfee and Google—

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Thank you very much. Could you finish your sentence?

[George Platsis]

We are attacked daily by a cyber threat. We need the technological solution and we need a human solution.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Thank you.

[Mylène Freeman, NDP, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Our next speaker is Député Lamoureux.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I will have both of you provide some comment.

One of the big issues for many Canadians—if not the majority of Canadians—is to be able to travel. Given that you are here, Admiral, I am going to focus on the United States. Whether it's cross-border shopping, commercialization, big trucks, visits, and all sorts of reasons, we have Americans coming north and Canadians going south. Part of the concern is when you look into the crystal ball and ask, “What is it going to take in order to board the plane?” For now, we'll talk about the cars crossing the border.

What do you believe is necessary in order for us to allow for that flow in a reasonable time span? Is there something specific that government could be doing that maybe it's not doing? Is there enough interaction between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian security services?

Given that this will probably be my only question, because there are only five minutes and both of you will respond to it, if you want to touch on the airports, that would also be beneficial.

Thank you.

[George Platsis]

To clarify, are we talking Canadian and U.S. citizens only, or are we talking at large?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

It's citizens of both countries exchanging across. Let's just assume they are all doing it in goodwill and are no real threat. What kind of process do we—

[RAdm Donald Loren]

That's an absolutely great question. It's a question that I think gets to the very heart of how our two nations need to address a continental, if not a regional—two thirds of the continent—problem or challenge. Yes, we have made tremendous progress over the years—certainly since 9/11—in cooperation and information sharing. ITAC and NCTC both work very closely. You are exactly right. This is that complicated interaction between terrorist information, intelligence, law enforcement information, and relationships between our largest trading partner.

How do we make that all work? I would suggest to you—I'm going to be a little bit cynical here and probably predicate it on only a marginal amount of fact. I would be surprised if we were to say our processes, while evolving, are all predicated on how we protected against rum runners coming across the border during Prohibition. I'm not sure I want to spend a lot of time on bona fide commercial traffic going across the border, so I'm with you. For the legitimate traveller and businessperson, we need to work to solve those relationships. The problem is, we have to have absolute transparency and understanding and the ability to control our borders from the exterior.

I would venture to say the typical resident of Ottawa and the typical resident of Washington, D.C., are not the threat coming across the border. What we have to do is make sure we have the right application of technology and processes that allow us to verify that truck coming from DuPont into Canada contains the materials that are on the bill of lading and that it's driven by a driver who has correct identification. Whatever we can do to make that easy, whether it be RFI technology, biometric technology, as well as sound, protected processes within our individual nations....

I personally believe we should work to the best of our ability to eliminate as many of the controls as possible across the northern border of my country and the southern border of yours, but that means we have to get a number of other things right first. I am not worried about the typical inhabitants of Ottawa. I am worried about people who come up illegally through my country, either to gain access to my country, or to potentially gain access to your country, or people coming in from the north or other points of entry into your country and then trying to come across an unprotected border to the north of mine.

We have to make sure we have the processes and correct interaction between agencies. Again, this gets back to the—intelligence always took place in another part of the world. Now it's law enforcement. I would venture to say—

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Perhaps you could finish off your thought, please.

[RAdm Donald Loren]

—in my country, we were much better prepared to do foreign intelligence than we were when the threat came to our own shores.

[A voice]

That's a good point.

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Thank you very much.

For the next speaker, actually, we have two for the price of one. It is Député Weston and Député Menegakis. They're going to be sharing their time slot.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

How much time do we have?

[The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jinny Jogindera Sims), NDP, Jinny Sims]

Seven minutes in total.

[John Weston, Conservative, West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, BC]

Okay.

Welcome both. Nice to see you back again.

I'll put in a little plug for Mr. Platsis, given that you're at my alma mater, Osgoode Hall. I wish you well there. It's rare that you get someone who's so involved in both teaching and studying at the same time. I don't know how you do it all.

I'm glad you were both here to hear the other witnesses, because I listened very closely to what they had to say. I was listening to their criticisms of biometrics, and it seemed to me that the most trenchant criticism they have is that it's not perfect. In fact, one of the last comments from Mr. Muller was that these are not infallible technologies.

Early on in your testimony, I think it was you, Mr. Platsis, who said these technologies should be a tool, not a crutch.

Can I just ask you to address the concerns that were raised in the first hour? Should we be throwing out biometrics because they're not perfect? Should we be saying that because there are false matches sometimes, therefore biometrics should not be used?

Maybe you could each spend a couple of minutes on that.

[George Platsis]

Do you want me to take the first crack? Okay.

No technology will be perfect. That's something the committee should understand, not only for this committee, but any study. For any technology, it's simply a function of time before it breaks down—any secure system. It could be a matter of seconds, it could be a matter of years, depending on the security infrastructure that's there.

Will mistakes happen? Yes, mistakes do happen. Of course, I'm not going to name names. I'm going to give an example of where a NEXUS cardholder, someone who has been processed by both countries, has been vetted by both countries, somehow randomly, somewhat frequently, still manages to get four S's on their boarding pass when leaving from a certain airport and not going to a particular other state. The four S's, for people who don't know, is a secondary security threat.

That's a little bit of a problem when you rely solely on the technology to be doing this.

I do not think that tossing away the benefits or the technology writ large of biometrics would be the best of ideas. It's an evolution of how we do identity, and I think the Admiral explained that quite well. We went from tombstone data to photographs to fingerprints. I think the information needs to be secured, with the understanding that it will not be perfect.

So if we're going to invest in these sorts of systems, be it information sharing between departments or biometrics, we have an inherent responsibility also to safeguard the systems, the databases, the infrastructure that they are predicated on.

Again, any sort of database—and this is a great example—becomes a target for others. So we have a responsibility, as we're collecting personal information, that while we do use it to verify and make sure that the right people are coming here, we need to protect it.

This is just my last point before I pass it over to the Admiral.

Starting a biometric file on someone or starting a file at all on someone when they just show up to our border doesn't really do much. We need to know more about the person before they actually come to us. I could just show up, for example, to the United States and give a fingerprint scan. If there's nothing to talk about—George Platsis or this fingerprint or this retina—the file starts there.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Kevin Lamoureux]

We're just going to go to Mr. Menegakis, because you actually have about three minutes left now. Is it okay?