Border Security Technologies: Local and Regional Implications

Abstract

The Bush administration's "Smart Border" accords with Mexico and Canada present a number of important implications for North America's border communities and regions. As part of the plans, new security technologies have emerged as the preferred policy solution to the difficult problem of screening for weapons and terrorist incursions into the United States through its international boundaries while maintaining flows of goods and individuals, key drivers of globalization and hallmarks of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) era. These new technological systems have various capabilities, ranging from prescreening cargo to identifying problematic travelers to detecting nuclear material in trucks. Deploying these systems in border communities, however, invokes a range of important economic, social, and political challenges, all of which are under examination in this work. Using a risk-centered approach to United States border security, this article explores several technologically oriented border control systems: screening, biometrics, and information technology. The research is based on regional field research and a public policy analysis method that uses Birkland's "focusing event" framework, a model that provides insights into the postcrisis policy formation process. The article concludes by offering an initial appraisal of these policies within the context of risk, interdependent border communities, and an open democratic society. Copyright 2005 by The Policy Studies Association..

Bolstering the State: A Different Perspective on the War on the Jihadi Movement

“…Biometric data is being used extensively in travel documents and states’ databases. Some states still debate the efficacy of such means, struggle with the technological difficulties and high costs and worry about the implications for civil rights (Cuéllar 2002; Ickleson 2005:148). Lack of international consensus on the type of biometric data that should be recorded and shared is still a major impediment (Schoenholtz 2003:179) but states appear to have already passed the fundamental debate about whether such means should be used at all: they increasingly accept the inevitability of taking such steps (UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team 2005a,b:36).…”

“…Border controls do not concern only human beings; new technological means to facilitate more accurate and more efficient electronic screening of cargo are also being developed and deployed worldwide (Ickleson 2005: 144–46; Lee 2005). Yet, despite the progress made so far, much more still needs to be done to screen a greater share of cargo and to perform this task faster and in a more economically cost‐effective manner.…”

Biometrics: Intersecting borders and bodies in liberal bionetwork states

“…The system collects digital photographs and fingerprints of all visitors to the U.S. to assist border officers in making admissibility decisions and to verify departure. By October 2004, all countries with "visa waiver" status (including current EU member states) were required to provide biometric information upon entry if their passports did not already contain similar data (Ackleson 2005;Koslowski 2005). …”

“…The widespread use of biometrics for tracking and profiling purposes could, first, increase the visibility of individual behavior and make possible the matching of a person's behavior against pre-determined patterns to generate suspicion or classify individuals in new ways; second, expose individuals to politically damaging or personally slanderous disclosures, blackmail, or even extortion, thus harming openness and democracy; third, expand the range of circumstantial evidence available for criminal prosecution, arguably inflating the prospects of wrongful conviction (though proponents of biometrics point to the improved ability to track a suspect back to the scene of a crime); and lastly, aid in repressing easily locatable and traceable individuals, thus empowering official authorities, as well as corporations, to deal a heavy hand against "troublesome" opponents, such as competitors, regulators, union organizers, whistleblowers, protestors and activists, customers, and political candidates (Ackleson 2005).…”

“Other Than Mexicans”, “Islamic Fascists” and the transatlantic regulation of risky subjects

“…Additionally, studies of immigration geopolitics illustrate how US-Mexico border control mechanisms and policies have increasingly come to encroach on the US domestic interior such that ''undocumented migration'' provides an ideological bridge linking the ''war on terror'' with the signification of ''Latino threat'' through criminality (Ackleson, 2005;Andreas, 2003;Coleman, 2007). Following from this work it is striking that the Other Than Mexican (OTM) US immigration category, which has gained media prominence in the post-9/11 era, has been the subject of very little academic attention (Kyriakides, 2012;Kyriakides and Torres, 2012).…”