Red flags

There is no question that protecting our country’s borders is important. But should it be done at the expense of air travelers?

Questions are being raised about a P10.74-billion public-private partnership (PPP) project called Civil Aviation and Immigration Security Services (CAISS), which stemmed from an unsolicited proposal submitted by American company Securiport LLC to modernize the country’s border management infrastructure through biometrics and data analytics.

The CAISS platform, which would introduce a suite of biometric and AI-enabled tools, will be deployed across 11 international airports, including Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), as well as the Zamboanga International Seaport and six border crossing stations. This would include contactless facial recognition e-gates, biometric self-service kiosks, criminal record search engines, advanced passenger information systems and fraud detection technology.

The P10.74-billion project cost will not be charged to the government; instead, it will be charged to international travelers at $4, or around P250, built into airline ticket costs. According to the Bureau of Immigration (BI), which has been pushing the project, the concession period is 20 years from commercial operations, after which the assets are transferred to the government.

Of the $4, Securiport gets $3.80 per traveler per one-way international trip or 95 percent, while the BI’s share is $0.20 per passenger per one-way trip. It has been estimated that given our number of international passengers, the company will be able to recover the project cost in 19 months.

But aside from the fact that travelers, not the government, will pay the project cost, another important issue raised against this project is that for our biggest international airport, NAIA, whatever Securiport has proposed is already in place.

NAIA has 78 Amadeus biometric e-gates and 517 biometric units courtesy of NAIA’s private operator, New NAIA Infra Corp. (NNIC) and at no cost to the BI. The bureau also signed a P1.5-billion iWave/Amadeus contract for 47 more e-gates and 57 additional biometric counters last December, 20 days after the Department of Justice approved CAISS.

This is on top of the P3.3 billion the Department of Budget and Management released for e-gates at the same 11 international airports covered by the CAISS project.

What this means is that international travelers would be paying a second time, and for 20 years at that, for hardware the national treasury and the NNIC have just paid for.

The Advance Passenger Information and Passenger Name Record component of CAISS is another redundancy. The BI has already launched an API-PNR processing in March of last year under the UN’s goTravel system, supplied and maintained free of charge.

Then there’s the OSINT/social media background screening, deception detection, CCTV-type surveillance, and a mandatory hardware refresh every four years. But these are not BI functions. CCTV is the airport operator’s job, while OSINT is not a BI function under any law. Critics say the project scope was inflated to justify a proprietary “threat-scoring” layer, not only to justify the patent requirement in the tender but also the fee.

The list of red flags goes on and on. For instance, BI documents say that Securiport, with its local partner, will finance, design, build and maintain the system. But this partner has never been named, nor have its equity share or principals. For a concession that could earn Securiport P180 billion over 20 years, its Philippine partner’s identity matters.

A private vendor with a revenue interest will process the biometrics, passport data and social media profiles of 29 million movements a year. Yet, no privacy impact assessment was conducted, nor was it disclosed that the National Privacy Commission was ever consulted.

BI Commissioner Joel Anthony Viado told the Senate that this CAISS project remains under evaluation and that no final decision has been made. He added that government must independently determine whether the project is necessary, reasonable, and in the public interest and that the project proponent must justify the proposed fee, technology, financial structure, and other commercial terms.

For NAIA at least, the answer is simple. It does not need this project. Some of the project components that Securiport and the BI have been harping about are already in place, while other components are unnecessary. So why burden the travelers with this additional cost?

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