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Release Date: 04/11/06 00:00:00
Washington, D.C.
World Travel and Tourism Summit
April 11, 2006
Secretary Chertoff: Actually, this is my first time in this building, although I’ve lived in Washington on or off for three of the last five years. So, I guess I’m kind of a tourist in the building today. It’s very impressive.
I’m also very pleased to be present before this group, the World Travel and Tourism Council, because so much of what we do at the Department of Homeland Security really has a major impact on what you do. And of course, what you do has a major impact on our responsibilities. So, it’s great to have the opportunity to be able to have a conversation with you about where we go forward as we work together to try to make tourism and travel safe, secure, efficient and friendly in this country and in other parts of the world.
I want to thank Vince for introducing me. I want to thank Jean Claude for greeting me. We have a couple of people from DHS here today; Al Martinez-Fonts, who is the Assistant Secretary for the Private Sector Office. And I see Jim Williams, who is the Director of US-VISIT in the audience. I also want to say, of course, that we appreciate this summit being held here in the United States because this is a very, very important sector of the American economy. It’s important because, first of all, it generates a lot of jobs for Americans; but it’s also important because a big part of our strategy in making this world a safer place is introducing people all over the world to the United States. Americans are really their own best representatives. And when people come from overseas and get to see Americans in the places that we live and work and play I think they leave with a better impression of America.
And the good news is a lot of people want to come to the United States. I just completed a trip to Asia, in fact, I just got over my jet lag this weekend; and one of the things I found uniformly in Japan and Singapore and in China was how eager government officials were to talk about how to facilitate travel and trade into the United States. And my message to them is: We very much want to have a system that encourages secure, safe, but welcoming, travel and trade all over the world. And I recognize we live in an era where there is a certain amount of anxiety about threats to the United States. We’ve seen some episodes recently, which suggest that sometimes there is a little bit of suspiciousness about foreigners. And the message I carried to Asia, and the message I want to carry here today is, we are emphatically behind the idea that we must in this country be full partners with the rest of the world in a robust and free-flowing pattern of travel and trade. Americans lose when we put up walls, when we keep people out who are good people who want to come to work, study and play in the United States. That’s not to minimize the fact that we have real threats, but it’s to recognize that we damage ourselves if we don’t distinguish between the vast majority of people in the world who are our friends and that small number who are our enemies. And we always have to treat our friends well, and obviously our enemies we have to treat with toughness and with security. So, we want to keep that distinction critically in mind as we talk about how we deal with those who want to come into the Untied States.
I also know that a visitor’s first impression of the United States is a lasting impression. We lose a lot of ground if people come to this country and have a bad experience. And so, when we protect our borders, and I’m second to none in my determination to make sure that our borders are protected. We have to protect them in a way that doesn’t close them, but that simply makes them safer and more secure. We want to have safe borders but open borders. Now, how do we do this? Well, earlier this year Secretary Rice and I, at the State Department, announced a series of initiatives to promote easier and more welcoming flow of people into the United States.
And so first, we recognized that the United States will benefit when people are encouraged to work, study and travel in this country. And therefore, we have to continue to increase the numbers of visas for students and for technological workers. This is a critical part of what we have to do to keep this country competitive in the 21st century. It’s part of making people feel more warmly to the United States. You know if they come to this country to study and tour, and they go back and they’re happy those are good-will ambassadors for this country. If they come and work and bring their intellectual capital they make us more competitive and they allow us to do a better job raising the standard of living for people who live in this country.
So, among other things, we’re expanding the length of time that foreign students can arrive, stay and study in the US from 90 days to 120 days. We’re also using modern technology to expedite the process of getting visas, to make it more convenient for people; especially more convenient for those who might otherwise have to travel a long distance from their homes in order to start the visa process. And we hope to take this even further in the future and to have a paperless visa process which uses modern technology to be more convenient for people overseas.
Finally, we are taking steps to actually retool our airports to better assist and welcome foreign travelers. We have pilot projects in Houston and here at Dulles Airport in Washington that will include customized video messages to give travelers information and have other features so that travelers feel more welcome and also have a better sense of what to expect when they actually arrive in the United States.
Now, a second element of making sure that we are increasing the level of security, even as we are continuing to lay out the welcome mat, is to take advantage of 21st century technology in terms of travel documentation. That means we’ve got to move the world to biometric electronically-based and secure travel documents that cannot be forged, copied, stolen or misused. That kind of documentation will make it easier for us to allow people convenient access in and out of the country, but will also make sure that we are safeguarding the country against that small number of people who want to come in and do us harm. And by the way, one of the benefits of this is it actually secures travel documents of individual travelers against identity theft, which is of course, a benefit for privacy and personal security as well as for our national security.
So, how are we doing this? Well, as you know, Congress has passed a mandate that we roll out a western hemisphere travel initiative which sets a new travel document requirement for those entering or transiting through the western hemisphere. Now, I know this caused a lot of a concern; a lot of concern not only in the travel industry, but a lot of concern in our border states and border communities; and concerns in Canada and Mexico and in other parts of the western hemisphere. But what we’re looking to do here is not to impose a passport requirement on people who want to come in and out of the country through the western hemisphere. What we’re looking to do is to find a way to come up with a travel document that will be convenient, inexpensive, satisfy the requirements of the law, increase our security, but in fact, make it more efficient for people to come and go in and out of this country as literally hundreds of thousands do every single day.
One of the approaches is our new people access security service system, or PASS system, which will be particularly useful for people who have multiple crossings every day in the course of their daily lives. Essentially, this would be a kind of a driver’s license, wallet-sized card; a simple identification card that would have a biometric – some kind of computer chip, be very convenient, and allow us to make sure that we know who is coming across the border, but not something that would require people to carry around a lot of documentation.
We’re working with the Department of State diligently to produce this PASS card by early next year. This will be an important first step in implementing a broader shared vision for a user-friendly system that will also include at some point a trusted traveler program that will allow people to have even more efficient access back and forth in the country.
Travelers who are members of existing programs, trusted traveler programs like FAST, NEXIS and SENTRI will continue to receive those programs benefits. But we want to create a global enrollment network that will unify all of these individual programs into a single comprehensive system that will be the overall PASS system. And the idea is also to build the kind of biometric card and reader that will allow people to use the same card in multiple different ways to deal with their access requirements and their security requirements. Again, the idea is to really build an architecture that lets people carry a single card and satisfy all kinds of different needs that we’re going to have to protect security in the 21st century.
Yet another thing we want to do is to use modern technology and modern systems to develop smarter screening that utilizes next generation technology to reduce delays for legitimate travelers while continuing to raise the bar to keep out people who might be threats to this country.
One area, I think, of real success in this respect has been US-VISIT. US-VISIT has now been fully deployed. It is operational in 115 airports, 15 seaports and 154 land-based ports of entry in the US as far as entry is concerned. We also have pilot programs of exit US-VISIT at 12 airports and two seaports. And I think we have a demonstration booth in the entry – of both the entry and exit technologies for you to look at outside in the exhibit halls. What this system lets us do is to confirm the identity of visitors quickly, screen out potential threats and yet, through the biometric capability, protect the privacy of travelers and, again, safeguard against identity threat and fraud. Since 2004 we have processed over 52 million travelers, and have intercepted more than 1,000 individuals with prior immigration violations; and those suspected of murder, rape, drug trafficking and other violent crimes. And we have been able to screen those people out without making long waiting lines for people who are trying to use US-VISIT.
Also, as we screen people we need to always continue to emphasize the importance of using data in an intelligent and limited fashion that’s precise and that doesn’t impose on the privacy of people who are innocent. So, a key to doing this is making sure we continue to work with other countries to share information, to do it in a way that protects privacy, but also to do it in way that gives us a common set of standards that raises security overall.
Finally, as we continue to look at ways to increase our use of technology to both facilitate travel and promote security we have to be mindful of the fact that mistakes will be made. We have to have systems in place that allow us to correct those mistakes and to address individual injustices.
Our goal at the end is to have a government-wide trusted travelers screening redress process before the end of the year that will enable travelers to have complaints to resolve those complaints with one single stop. And by the way, let me tell you I know how important this is because one measure of the irritation quotient for people who wind up getting pulled aside unfairly in these screening processes is the number of times I get personal complaints from people I know, including prominent people, who usually are pretty good humored about it but who are obviously a little bit disconcerted by the fact that they repeatedly get pulled out.
I have to tell you that one of the solutions here is to look at programs that allow us to acquire a little bit more pretty innocent data about people so that we can screen identity with a little bit more precision. For example, sometimes adding a date of birth or an address to a screening tool allows us to remove most of the people who might have – share a name with a terrorist from being put into secondary or being questioned because we can use the date of birth or we can use the address to take them out of that large pool of people who have that common name.
Some people resist this. They say, “Well, you know, if you have my date of birth that’s an invasion of privacy.” But I want to suggest to you to think very carefully about whether people feel that they have their privacy more deeply invaded when they’re pulled aside and questioned, or when they are required to give their date of birth so that we can distinguish between those we are really worried about and those who are truly innocent. I want to suggest to you that sometimes it actually promotes personal privacy to have a little bit more information entered into our travel data, because that allows us to stop fewer people, and it also allows us to protect against those bad individuals who want to hijack the identities of other people.
So, here is where we come out. At the end of the day we want to continue to ease the path for those who want to work, study and tour in the United States. We don’t want to create additional obstacles but we do want to continue to enhance our security doing it in a way that is smart, that’s efficient, and that promotes what’s good for our economy and for the people of the United States.
As an industry you understand the importance of these issues and the importance of the twin goals of facilitating travel and trade while making sure that we do so in a way that is safe. We’ve been consulting with you; we will continue to consult with you about the way to achieve these mutual goals. This is a situation that is a win-win for the government, for the industry, and for the people of this country as long as we continue to talk together and work together to do these things the right way. As we enter the 21st century we’re going to have better technological tools, better business processes and a stronger partnership in promoting and facilitating world travel, world tourism, and world security.
I look forward to continuing to discuss with you and with your leadership a lot of these very critical and sensitive issues. I look forward to seeing us make progress on our systems and our technology. And most of all, I look forward to continuing to welcome increased numbers of tourists from overseas to come into this country safely, to come into this country in a friendly fashion, and to leave this country with good feelings about the United States, which I’m going to tell you, I think is our number one tool in fighting and winning the war against terror worldwide. Thank you very much.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on 04/11/06 00:00:00.