BIG Data at the Border: Balancing Visa-Free Travel and Security in a Digital Age

Nathan Alexander SALES

The United States and other developed nations increasingly are replacing their traditional, visa-based systems for regulating international travel with new regimes that combine visa-free travel with computer systems that analyze large troves of data in an attempt to identify risky travelers. While this shift has helped facilitate trade, tourism, and global interconnectivity, and offers important national-security benefits, the data collection on which it relies raises important questions about privacy and civil liberties.

Introduction

It has never been easier to cross international borders. In recent decades, a number of industrialized nations have implemented new, visa-free approaches to international travel: the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) in the United States, the Schengen Area in Europe, and so on. Yet standing alongside these permissive regimes - especially in the U.S. but increasingly in other countries as well - is the expanding governmental collection and analysis of large troves of potentially sensitive information about inbound travelers. These two trends are not isolated developments but rather operate together as an entirely new system for regulating international travel.

This short paper discusses this new approach and its legal and policy implications. The paper begins by describing the two elements that comprise the emerging visa-free, data-centric regime as it is implemented in the United States: the VWP, which allows citizens of certain countries to travel to the U.S. without a visa, and the Automated Targeting System (ATS), which collects and analyzes airline reservation data to identify potentially risky travelers. The paper concludes with some observations on some of the costs and benefits of this new regime. In sum, the combination of no-visa travel and data analysis produces substantial economic, cultural, and national-security gains. Although this new regime relies on government access to large volumes of passenger data, it paradoxically has the potential to preserve individual privacy more effectively than the visa-based system it replaces. Data-based screening also could be a crucial tool in efforts to track foreign terrorist fighters who are traveling between their homes in Western nations and war zones in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

I. Visa-Free Travel

Congress established the Visa Waiver Program in 1986 to facilitate travel between the United States and its closest allies. The program allows citizens from member countries to travel to the U.S. for business or tourism for up to 90 days without first obtaining a visa.¹ There is no longer any need to complete detailed visa application forms, compile bank statements and other supporting documentation, travel considerable distances to cities housing U.S. diplomatic missions, and undergo time-consuming interviews with consular officials. VWP travelers can simply book a flight and hop on a plane.