Canada’s border agency plans to use AI to screen everyone entering the country — and single out ‘higher risk’ people

2025/08/30 Leave a comment

Inevitable given the numbers involved and the need to triage applications:

Canada Border Services Agency is planning to use AI to check everyone visiting or returning to the country to predict whether they are at risk of breaking the law. 

Anyone identified as “higher risk” could be singled out for further inspection.

The traveller compliance indicator (TCI), which has been tested at six land ports of entry, was developed using five years of CBSA travellers’ data. It assigns a “compliance score” for every person entering Canada. It will be used to enforce the Customs Act and related regulations.

The AI-assisted tool is expected to launch as early as 2027 and is meant to help border services officers at all land, air and marine ports of entry decide whether to refer travellers and the goods they are carrying for secondary examination, according to an assessment report obtained under an access to information request. 

“We use the obtained data to build predictive models in order to predict the likelihood of a traveller to be compliant,” said the report which was submitted by the border agency to the Treasury Board.

“TCI will improve the client experience by reducing processing time at the borders. The system will allow officers to spend less time on compliant travellers and reduce the number of unnecessary selective referrals.”

However, experts are alarmed by the lack of public engagement and input into the tool’s development. They worry that the system may reinforce human biases against certain types of travellers such as immigrants and visitors from certain countries because the quality of the analytics is only as good as what is inputted.

“If you’ve historically been very critical over a certain group, then that will be in the data and we’ll transfer that into the tool,” said Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Will Tao, who obtained the report.

“You look for the problems and you find problems where you’re looking, right?”

The government report said the border agency serves more than 96 million travellers a year, and trying to keep up with expected growth would require the addition of hundreds of border officers. In addition, physical limitations make it impossible to add extra booths at some points of entry.

The AI tool, the report said, will help keep border processing times at current levels even with an expected increase in the number of travellers. 

“No decisions are automated,” the report said. “Rather the current primary processing is being supported with a flag indicating whether a traveller’s information matches a compliance pattern.”

However, if an officer follows a mistaken recommendation from the tool, it could have impacts that could “last longer,” the report added.

“Once a risk score or indicator is presented to an officer, it can heavily influence their judgment, which in practice means the system is shaping outcomes even if the final authority is technically still human,” said University of Toronto professor Ebrahim Bagheri, who focuses on AI and the study of data and society.

“A false positive is when the system flags someone as risky or non-compliant even though they are in fact compliant. In the border context, that could mean a traveller is singled out for extra questioning or secondary examination even though they’ve done nothing wrong.”

The system is designed to display information of interest to an officer, such as a traveller’s means of transport and who accompanied them. 

It also captures “live determinants” which can include information such as whether the person is travelling alone, the type of identification they presented and the license plate of the vehicle they used, as well as any data from the traveller’s previous trips in CBSA’s records….

Source: Canada’s border agency plans to use AI to screen everyone entering the country — and single out ‘higher risk’ people

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Government officers told to skip fraud prevention steps when vetting temporary foreign worker applications, Star investigation finds

2024/08/28 Leave a comment

Sigh….

As the Trudeau government promises to crack down on a temporary foreign worker program it admits has been abused, a Star investigation has revealed the government is fast-tracking applications by directing processing officers to skip crucial steps designed to prevent fraud. 

Beginning in January 2022, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) directed staff to apply “streamlining measures” when evaluating the legitimacy of applications by employers who want to hire temporary foreign workers.

According to internal ESDC documents obtained by the Star and interviews with a current ESDC employee, routine checks meant to ensure the system is not abused by unscrupulous employers have been suspended in an effort to process applications faster.

Those checks include contacting employers to confirm they actually applied to hire a worker, verifying that lawyers and consultants applying on behalf of employers are in good standing with their regulator, and clarifying the overtime, vacation and benefits promised to the worker.

“This really shows a complete contradiction between the public-facing government policies and how the program is actually run,” said Catherine Connelly, a professor at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business who has been studying the temporary foreign workers program for more than a decade who examined the internal ESDC documents.

“On one hand, we’re told the government will crack down on everything, and then on the other hand, we see from the documents that this is clearly a rubber stamp,” she said. “If the government is not going to do even basic checks, how can the public have any confidence in anything?”…

Source: Government officers told to skip fraud prevention steps when vetting temporary foreign worker applications, Star investigation finds

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‘Our current government hasn’t been heeding national security advice’: Former immigration minister Chris Alexander on how Canada vets immigrants—and how ISIS operatives may have slipped through the cracks 

2024/08/10 Leave a comment

Worth reading, both as an explainer as well as the political commentary:

Significant questions are being asked of Canada’s security and immigrant vetting processes following the arrests last month of Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi, 62, and Mostafa Eldidi, 26, a father and son facing charges that include conspiracy to commit murder for the benefit or at the direction of a terrorist group—in this case, ISIS.

Reports have emerged that the pair were able to immigrate to Canada despite the elder Eldidi having participated in violence, including torture and dismemberment, against an ISIS prisoner. The assault was recorded on video and released by ISIS prior to the pair’s immigration to Canada.

Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi is a Canadian citizen while his son, Mostafa, is not.

Police claimed the father and son were “in the advanced stages of planning a serious, violent attack in Toronto,” before their arrest.

To better understand Canada’s immigration vetting process, Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large, exchanged with Chris Alexander, Canada’s minister of Citizenship and Immigration from 2013 to 2015, who offered his expert insight on how the pair may have slipped through the cracks without raising alarm.

SEAN SPEER: How does the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship draw on intelligence and national security analysis when judging the admissibility of an immigration applicant? Does the department have its own capacity or does it draw on the capacity concentrated in CSIS and other national security agencies? If the latter, what’s the mechanism or process for such analysis to be pulled into the department’s decision-making?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: The Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship uses national security-related information to make decisions, but this information invariably originates with CSIS, the RCMP, or our trusted allies and partners that share such information with us. When an applicant has never before been flagged for national security-related concerns, then IRCC is relying on CSIS, relevant police services, and their international partners to ensure nothing new has come to light. Timelines are often short; resources are invariably stretched; and matching applicants to data generated by national security review across languages, alphabets, and administrative systems can pose challenges.

SEAN SPEER: What type of national security review is typically used for immigration applicants compared to more extraordinary cases? What’s the triage process for determining the level of national security review?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: Applicants for permanent residence receive a more thorough review than say, international students or temporary workers. Anyone with a background in police, the military, or security services will receive additional vetting, especially if they come from a country with a less-than-stellar human rights record. The country of origin and any other places where the applicant lived, studied, or worked are also taken into account: if any of these countries are theatres where significant terrorist or extremist groups operate, where wars, civil wars or other armed conflicts are underway, or where hostile intelligence services may be recruiting assets, then there will be additional vetting as well. The parameters for Canada’s national security vetting are always shifting as the threat environment evolves, and our assessments catch up (or fail to catch up) to fast-changing realities on the ground around the world.

SEAN SPEER: Based on what we know about this particular case, what might have happened such that this individual’s participation in an ISIS-related execution was not factored into his admissibility?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: The information on the file might have been incomplete. For sound operational reasons, those monitoring ISIS comms and participants in ISIS war crimes may not have made their information fully available to national security databases. Stove-piping still happens; delays happen. Names also get garbled: “credible” sources may have claimed this was not the same person. Mistakes are human nature. In addition, our national security machinery has shifted gears in recent years away from terrorist threats to focus more on China, Russia, and homegrown extremism—the flames of which are often fanned online by state actors that engage in large-scale disinformation and active measures, such as Russia.i

SEAN SPEER: Is this a widespread problem in your view? To what extent does it suggest that there are others—perhaps many others—in the country with broadly similar backgrounds or past actions?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: Our system is not prone to widespread, systemic failures—it’s quite solid. But over the decades we have failed on several fronts. One example is the number of Iranian and Syrian regime officials—some with allegations of having committed terrible crimes in those countries—who somehow slipped through our vetting system. But the main challenge today is that the number of threats—from terrorist and criminal groups, as well as hostile foreign states—has grown significantly while our national security capabilities have failed to keep pace.

Add to this tension the unprecedented numbers of immigrants, temporary workers, international students, asylum claimants, and other visitors flowing into Canada over the past two years—roughly double the usual levels, with asylum backlogs rising rapidly—and you have a recipe for more frequent failures. For instance, over the period when Mexicans were coming to Canada visa-free, how many drug cartel operatives eager to open new routes into the U.S. came to Canada? We may never know. The same may be true for ISIS, representatives of China’s United Front Work Department, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) or Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and even Hamas or Hezbollah, which have historically had quite robust networks in Canada.

As we have all observed to our dismay, our current government has not been heeding national security advice and, to put it very mildly, has not been vigilant on these issues over the past nine years. Our allies (particularly in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing community) have noticed, and our reputation has been tarnished as a result.

SEAN SPEER: What, if any reforms, do you think should be undertaken to strengthen the process for assessing immigration applicants through an intelligence and national security lens?

CHRIS ALEXANDER: The key to successful national security review is rapid, continuous, skillful integration of available information. The right insights are out there, but they only shape immigration outcomes in the right ways when the data is well-organized, easily accessible, and properly brought to bear on decision-making. My guess is that those responsible for these issues have been run ragged in recent years: they need backup, a full review of our procedures, and (where necessary) modernization and integration of the relevant secure communication systems and databases.

We need to put sound national security practices back at the centre of our immigration policy—as well as our policy across government. In a world where all categories of threat actors are looking for the line of least resistance worldwide to launder money, move operatives, recruit new supporters, and disrupt democracy, Canada has become an easy mark in recent years. We need to restore our reputation for a best-in-class immigration and refugee programmes rooted in sound, reliable national security vetting. We also need to harden our defences, increase our military spending, and upgrade and broaden our national security capabilities to protect Canadians in general as well as the integrity of our immigration and refugee determination system at a time when hostile state and non-state actors have become more hostile almost across the board.

Source: ‘Our current government hasn’t been heeding national security advice’: Former immigration minister Chris Alexander on how Canada vets immigrants—and how ISIS operatives may have slipped through the cracks 


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Ottawa strengthens vetting after officials failed to pass on new human-rights chief’s alias to RCMP, CSIS

2024/07/11 Leave a comment

A possible general rule, avoid appointments to those who have used aliases and, of course, if they have used aliases, check them out. Remember when working in multiculturalism on grants and contribution funding, we were shocked when Minister Kenney’s staff would check social media of those applying. But seeing what they uncovered, recognized the merit of doing so:

…Mr. Dattani disclosed his alias Mujahid Dattani in the process of applying for the role. The federal government’s background check consent form includes a line for applicants to provide any other names they have used.

But the Privy Council Office (PCO), which is responsible for background checks on government appointments to senior positions, says it failed to pass on Mr. Dattani’s alias for security checks to CSIS, the RCMP and the Canada Revenue Agency, which helps with screening.

The PCO also did not search under Mr. Dattani’s aliases using open sources on the internet, before he was appointed. The PCO “regrets its error,” Daniel Savoie, a PCO spokesman, said in a statement Monday.

It also failed to tell the Justice Minister’s office and the Prime Minister’s Office about the aliases….

Source: Ottawa strengthens vetting after officials failed to pass on new human-rights chief’s alias to RCMP, CSIS

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Documents reveal why Canada rejected dozens of Syrian refugee claimants

2017/03/01 Leave a comment

Interesting insights into how the vetting and selection process worked:

One had been a senior government official complicit in human rights abuses. Three had been involved in “subversion by force.” Another was considered a danger to the security of Canada.

Government documents obtained by the National Post reveal why Canada rejected dozens of Syrians as refugees, and provide a “high-level overview” of the backgrounds of those who were selected.

The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada documents, released under the Access to Information Act, summarize the results of interviews of Syrian refugees conducted by visa officers in Beirut.

The refusal rate for Syrian refugees was 4 per cent according to the documents, which, though released only recently, date to the early stages of the Syrian refugee program, when the Liberal government was trying to fulfill a campaign promise to resettle 25,000 by the end of 2015.

During the first month the Liberals were in office, Canadian visa officers refused Syrian refugee claimants 35 times for everything from failing to answer questions truthfully to uncertainty about their identities.

Between 2014 and Nov. 17, 2015 83 applicants were refused — five of those for security reasons. (Because some may have been rejected for more than one reason, it is unclear exactly how many Syrians were turned away in total.)

According to the documents, the Syrians accepted as refugees came from five areas: Aleppo, Hassakeh, Damascus, Homs and the Dara’a and Sweida region along the Jordanian border in the south.

Those from Aleppo were “virtually all” Armenian families with one or two children. Most were “self-employed businessmen and tradesmen (welders, mechanic, jewelers) with moderate to high levels of wealth,” it said.

The oft repeated narrative with this group was that they were forced to take flight very suddenly, in the middle of the night or early morning upon discovering that the Daesh (ISIL) was marching on their town or village

They tended to be from neighbourhoods close to Aleppo’s old city, near the frontline between government and opposition forces. Most had fled Syria in 2012, although some had stayed until as late as 2014 because they didn’t have the money or needed to care for elderly family members.

“Those who stayed longer tended to float between neighbourhoods staying with different family members. They moved as the fighting moved and intensified in different parts of the city,” a report on the interviews said.

They cited their reasons for leaving Syria as the complete lack of security. “There was no water or power, and regular shelling of neighbourhoods. There were a few accounts of client, client family members, or neighbours having been kidnapped and ransomed.”

In Beirut, most found work in their trades while others were employed part-time at places such as restaurants. Those lacking money or jobs “tended to migrate back and forth between Lebanon and Syria,” the report said.

Source: Documents reveal why Canada rejected dozens of Syrian refugee claimants | National Post

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Trump Backers Want Ideology Test For Extreme Vetting : NPR

2017/02/06 Leave a comment

Orwellian and ineffective given that those requesting entry are highly unlikely to openly express such views, if indeed they have them (Kellie Leitch to note):

The Trump administration says it is suspending all refugee admissions to the United States until it can come up with a plan for “extreme vetting.”

So what could that mean?

Refugees are already subjected to multiple interviews and a security vetting by nine U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies that check their backgrounds, social media activity and the reasons they fled their countries. The process usually takes 18 months or more, according to resettlement agencies.

But some of those who helped form President Trump’s policies on refugees are upfront in saying this is not actually about stricter security screening. It’s about something else.

“It means a kind of ideological screening to keep out people who hate a free society even if they are not violent,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that supports tighter controls on immigration. Krikorian met with Trump during the campaign and backs the president’s executive order as a “corrective” to the vetting system in place during the Obama years.

In an interview with NPR, Krikorian said he backs an ideological test that poses questions for refugees in the vetting process including, in his words, “Do you think it’s okay to kill apostates? Do you think it’s okay to throw gays off of buildings? Or if Islam’s Prophet Muhammad is insulted, there should be a punishment?”

If a refugee says yes to any of these questions, says Krikorian, “Then we don’t want you here.”

Trump’s executive order on immigration appears to refer to these views by declaring the United States should keep out those with “hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles” and “those who would place violent ideologies over American law.”

This is all of intense concern for refugee advocates. The most pressing refugee need today is among Syrians — some 5 million have fled the country’s civil war. The vast majority are Muslim.

“It’s clearly Muslim-targeted,” says Muna Jondy, a Michigan immigration lawyer of Syrian descent who’s been fielding frantic calls from refugee families in the U.S. whose relatives are now barred from joining them.

She points out the refugee screening process already targets those with extreme Islamist views via counter-terrorism vetting, which checks for links to radical Islamist groups.

But the president appears to echo opinions of a web of supporters who have warned about the wider “dangers” of Islam and more recently have called for rigorous ideological vetting. His national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, has called fear of Islam “rational” and equates Islam with a political ideology.

One of the most outspoken of these supporters is Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Policy Studies and a leading anti-immigration advocate. Human rights groups have described Gaffney as a conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe, but his views have gained traction in the Trump administration. Trump cited his work during his campaign.

…In a broad sense, tests of attitudes aren’t unprecedented. Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, notes that an ideological test for newcomers is “deeply embedded” in U.S. history. The U.S. barred anarchists in 1903. During the Cold War, she says, “It was people who believed in communism. It’s still in our law.”

But Meissner points out these ideological tests have not had the desired outcome, because over time, the tests “have proven to be poorly equipped to actually predict what people are going to do.” And it gets more complex when the beliefs straddle the line between politics and religion.

Meissner compares Trump supporters’ fear of sharia law and their view that it’s at odds with the U.S. system with the fears and debates surrounding the candidacy of John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. Kennedy was Catholic and his detractors feared that if elected, the American president would be taking orders from the Pope.

“Then, JFK made his well-known statement about his personal faith and his responsibility to the civil system,” Meissner says.

Source: Trump Backers Want Ideology Test For Extreme Vetting : Parallels : NPR

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