[Vinnl]

It's not clear to me if this would allow access to all biometric data, or "just" to that of people crossing the US border?

And for the latter, what data are we talking about? If it's mostly fingerprints, don't those already get collected upon crossing the border? And can't they already be read from a passport's chip?

[andix]

I guess the US can freely request data on any citizen. The home countries don't know if you are actually traveling into the US. Direct flights are not the only option to reach the US.

[some_random]

It's just for people crossing the border, and yeah it's mostly fingerprints. The point is mainly to detect fraudulent passports, and the rest of the data is self explanatory (the US obviously is interested in people visiting that EU agencies have flagged for being potential terrorists).

[calgoo]

do they actually say that they can only do a lookup when checking a visa, or are we giving api access to the US government and saying "Dont do evil" >

[some_random]

If you expect that level of incompetence from your elected officials than maybe the problem isn't the US.

[tremon]

Your comment presupposes that there can be only one problem; I don't think that's a valid assumption.

[NietTim]

Supposedly it will be only requested for people crossing into the US. But it's not 2012 anymore and we all know better.

[MarceliusK]

If it lets the US use that identity to query European databases and retrieve associated information, that is a much larger change