US wants all 10 fingerprints on entry

Found on The Register on Tuesday, 20 March 2007
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Currently foreign travellers must have their index fingers scanned into a database when they enter the US by agents of the Department of Homeland Security. Those prints can then be checked against a database of fingerprints held by police forces or the FBI.

That number will increase to all 10 fingerprints on a trial at 10 US airports. It is planned that the programme will be in place in all airports in around a year, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.

There are already concerns in Europe about the amount and importance of data held by US authorities on European air passengers. The US has a less stringent privacy regime than Europe.

Airlines are currently forced to hand over 34 pieces of information about every passenger that travels to the US. Called Passenger Name Records, the information is transferred in line with a deal signed by the European Commission and US authorities.

The Department of Homeland Security is said to have arrested 1,800 suspects since biometric identification was introduced, but in order to do that they collected the fingerprints of 80 million passengers.

That were only 0.0000225 percent; and to make it worse, a suspect is neither a criminal nor a terrorist. Obviously the DHS hasn't caught anybody from the "Most Wanted" list; it also looks like that database didn't help foiling anything related to terrorism or they would have bragged about it. And if you want to take the article literally, you could say that they didn't even arrest those suspects because of the database. For more information, visit Wikipedia.