Transforming travel and border controls: Checkpoints in the Open Society

Prior concerns regarding terrorism resulted in a rush to legislate. Now terrorism is not the only issue in the new security agenda, and we appear to have stopped rushing our legislative processes. Yet, policies are still emerging with a lack of public discourse and legislative deliberation. This article reviews two such policies: access to personal information held by airlines and new border practices that include the collection and processing of biometrics. By looking at the negotiations between the U.S. and the European Commission on passenger name records (PNR), the debates in Canada regarding the collection of passenger information, and the deployment of the US-VISIT system, we identify a number of policy dynamics. We can see within these dynamics of policy formation some essential ingredients for discourse and deliberation, which may inform future debates. In particular, this article argues that we may inform policy by looking at the international, regulatory, legal, and technological dynamics of policy.