Auditing Canada’s Terrorism Initiatives

Kate | Wednesday, November 24, 2004

I have fairly length post up at SDA exerpting the recent Auditor General’s report on the progress made in anti-terrorism initiatives.

After three years one would expect better than this:

… criminal intelligence data are not used to screen applicants for clearance to restricted areas at airports…

… we found significantly fewer terrorist lookouts in the Service’s tracking system than in Immigration’s database … Immigration’s records were in such disarray that we were unable to complete a full reconciliation during the course of our audit.

…Interpol Red Notices… On average, 48 days elapsed from [Interpol] publication to entry in the [RCMP] police system…

… Lost and stolen Canadian passports not on border control watch lists … the information system used on the primary inspection line cannot distinguish between active and deactivated passports …

… There is no system that transfers information on outstanding warrants to the border watch lists …

There’s lots more. Canada has no capacity for top-secret communications in the event of a national emergency. Government departments are using excuses ranging from the Privacy Act to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to resist implementing change, anti-terrorism funding diverted to domestic crime control…

The full Auditor’s report is here.

About the Author: Kate is a freelance commercial and automotive airbrush artist living in Saskatchewan, Canada. She was one of the original guest bloggers at OTB in November 2004 and soon joined the permanent stable, contributing through January 2007. Eventually, she turned to writing full time at her own blog, small dead animals, which was voted the Best Canadian Blog in the 2004 Weblog Awards and has been generally considered that country's best blog ever since.

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Tags | National Security, Terrorism

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