New EU fingerprint scheme fans privacy concerns

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - An EU plan to fingerprint all foreigners visiting the European Union has sparked criticism that the 27-nation bloc is building up huge databases of personal information without a clear strategy or safeguards.

Some lawmakers, police and privacy advocates say the European Commission is thoughtlessly copying the United States with its proposal to store biometric data of all foreign visitors in an electronic database.

The Commission plan is to be unveiled on Wednesday.

"It's boys with toys. They want to have the toys the Americans have," said Gus Hosein of the Privacy International watchdog, referring to the U.S. practice of scanning the fingerprints and picture of foreigners entering the United States, adopted by Washington after the September11, 2001 attacks.

"They take one (U.S.) measure after the other without any evidence that this is going to work. It is time to stop and think," Sophia Int'Veld, a Dutch liberal member of the European parliament, told Reuters.

But the European Union's executive Commission says the scheme is needed to protect the bloc's external borders, now that travelers can cross national boundaries without checks between 24 member states in the enlarged "Schengen" zone.

"It's a bit lacking in caution, strange and naive not to have a system where one knows who enters and leaves (the EU)," said Commission spokesman Friso Roscam Abbing.

"When you enter this fantastic (Schengen) space without borders, you are freer than anywhere else in the world, with 24 states with no borders ... Is it strange to compensate this by strengthening external borders?"

Roscam Abbing said the EU would compensate for the extra security measures by encouraging governments to introduce fast-track check-ins for air travelers who agree to register voluntarily, for instance by having their iris scanned and stored in a database.

PRIVACY CONCERNS

Many Europeans are instinctively cautious about handing over their private information, fearing a growth in state surveillance and the potential for data to be abused or lost.

Among its existing array of databases, the EU already stores asylum-seekers' fingerprints and plans to do the same for visa applicants. Last year, interior ministers agreed to give their police access to each other's DNA databases, to some unease.

The new fingerprint move will not affect EU citizens, but nearly all of them already have to give fingerprints and picture to be stored in an electronic chip on new passports.

Even some police representatives and European diplomats are voicing doubts about the harvesting of data, saying the bloc is adding one database after the other with no overall strategy and that this could worry privacy-sensitive citizens.

"It is not good to have a proliferation of databases without a clear vision," said Jan Velleman, a spokesman for Eurocop, a European police union. "The link between them is unclear and leads to gaps."

A senior Brussels-based diplomat added: "It's not good to pile up decisions without having an overall debate in public."

"The terrorism threat is there, but we need to better explain why we need this or that instrument," the diplomat said.

In another U.S.-style security move, EU interior ministers have given preliminary backing to a plan to make airlines provide data on incoming passengers, including their credit card details and addresses. Such data would be kept for 13 years.

But some are concerned about the proliferation of measures.

"I worry that this will be a further step towards a preventionist state that is already monitoring and policing citizens without prior cause," German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said.

Lawmaker Int'Veld said the bloc had no rules to compensate for the increased collection of private data and that a current proposal to do so was "a Swiss cheese".

"The European Commission and the EU member states talk a lot about privacy but it's all lip service," she said.

"In any large database ... data is going to be lost, data is going to be abused," said Privacy International's Hosein, adding that there was no redress in such cases.

The Commission's Roscam Abbing said that Wednesday's announcement on the entry/exit register would be followed by a legislative proposal at a later date, depending on how it is received by EU governments and lawmakers.

The EU's executive would also launch on Wednesday a study into whether it should force all air travelers to fill in a form on the Internet before flying to the bloc, he said.

Roscam Abbing could not say when these systems would come into force and declined to respond to criticisms that the EU lacked a strategy in creating privacy-sensitive databases.

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan, Richard Meares and Jon Boyle)