[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.