Information and Freedom

‘Is it possible to blog for years about Point Roberts?’ my daughter inquires, and then answers the question herself: ‘I guess so. After all, while the rest of us will always have Paris, you will always have the border.’

Alas, she is probably right. I met a fellow recently who had experienced the border people’s refusal to renew his Nexus card, the card that gets you through the border with some speed. The point of such a card, for those of us who cross the border frequently, is that since you have do it all the time, you ought not to have to wait for hours each time while they decide, each time anew, whether you are a decent person. With Nexus, you pay them some money, they check you out, you get a card with your picture on it, and then you can go through the fast lane. You still have to declare goods, there are a whole set of rules you must master in order to use the card, and you still are subject to random searches. It’s just that most of the time, it’s a quick experience. They look at you, they look at your card with its picture of you on their computer, they see that it’s okay, you tell them what you need to, and they send you along. Good process, good idea.

The Nexus program thinks of this all somewhat differently, though. They refer to it as ‘The Trusted Traveler Program,’ so in some unclear way it depends upon whether they trust you. Having a card doesn't mean they trust you. At least that appears to be their view. Thus, the border people had refused this guy’s renewal on the usual unknown grounds. (I run into these people regularly: people who've had renewals or initial requests denied for no reason given.) ‘No,’ they say. ‘We don’t trust you and we don’t give information to people we don’t trust. Additionally, we are not going to tell you why because we couldn’t possibly be wrong, so there’s nothing you need to say to us and nothing that we need to hear from you.’

Some people lose their Nexus cards for actual reasons: a daughter’s jacket left in the car, something in the car that the Nexus rules declare you ought not to have in a Nexus lane. We could argue about the appropriateness of these reasons, but you can’t argue about whether ‘No Reason Given’ is an adequate reason to deny you your renewal. This guy had had his renewal refused for no reason, had requested that the decision be reviewed, and after a review, they refused it again for no reason. Next, he decided to put in a Freedom of Information Act request for information the border was holding about him, presumably information that was being used to justify their refusal.

I’ve never seen a FOIA letter and when he showed the papers to me, I was pretty interested. It included a half dozen or so pages relating to individual border dealings, and almost all the information on the forms was redacted, other than the guy’s name and the bottom line that all searches, whatever their occasion (and no reason for anything is specified), were Negative. Some guy in Washington gets to go over each of these pages and black out sections and give a number for each black-out. (Now, there’s a job you wouldn’t much want to have.) The number is to tell you one of the dozen or so possible reasons for this redaction. In this particular case, every redaction seemed to be justified by the page’s naming specific border agency people or specific border protocols.

So, he concludes that Nexus has no reason to find him untrustworthy. On the other hand, it must be that somebody, somewhere else in the government, has decided he can’t be trusted. And if he can just figure out who that person is, and where that person works, then he can, I guess, make another FOIA request. There are other alternatives, of course. He can never leave the Point, can come and go only in the middle of the night when there are no lines, or he can burn up a lot of gas waiting in the long lines of the regular lanes during normal transit hours. Or he can just sit down with a nice copy of Kafka's relevant work, and get over it.