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.
US authorities claim that the current scan of
two fingers takes around 15 seconds and that the new process will
not take significantly longer than that. Tourism bodies in the US
have expressed concern that such measures are harming the tourist
trade, however.
"We
applaud the US Senate for striving to fix a flawed travel system,"
Stevan Porter, chairman of the Discover America Partnership, told
the Telegraph. The Discover America Partnership is a representative
body for tourism bodies.
"The policies implemented over the past five
years appear to have strengthened our security. Lost, however, were
efficiencies and a semblance of customer service," Porter said.
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 European Parliament has opposed the deal,
though, and a new agreement is due to be signed later this year. An
earlier agreement was deemed illegal by the European Court of
Justice on a technicality, but a near-identical scheme was set up
in its place.
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.
Visitor numbers from the UK to the US have
dropped since 2001's terrorist attacks in the US and the security
measures put in place in their aftermath. Around 4.7 million UK
citizens visited the US in 2001, a figure that fell to 4.3 million
in 2005.
