The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency is updating its Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) that will impact its Enterprise Geospatial Information Services (eGIS) mapping system.
Specifically, CBP wants eGIS to document its use of privately-owned land and contact information to support its need to expedite Rights of Entry and to acquire land to place proposed and approved border surveillance technology. Generally, landowner and contact information is publicly available, but in hard copy forms that are not readily accessible to U.S. Border Patrol agents.
“eGIS facilitates the integration of multiple CBP enforcement systems to expose spatial patterns and trends, and provides CBP with mission critical features including real-time intrusion sensor alerts; arrest and interdiction locations; assault and significant incident tracking; facility and infrastructure data; field information reports; and recidivist arrest analysis,” the PIA stated.
The PIA will test the viability of eGIS’ use of personal information in the form of landowner and contact information, but CBP maintains that this information “will be displayed using eGIS Map Viewer in a special-access layer.”
“The landowner parcel and contact information will be viewed during the user’s session but retained in the original data source,” the PIA said. “No landowner parcel and contact information will be retained in eGIS once the user’s session is closed.”
