Edward Hasbrouck, aka the practical nomad, has been delving into a privacy impact assessment for the US-VISIT scheme whereby visitors to the US get fingerprinted and photographed.

"The requirement for fingerprinting and photographing of visitors to the USA (except for short-term tourists from a few
countries, almost all of them inhabited mainly by white people) has gotten most of the attention paid to US-VISIT. But the real
privacy invasion feature of US-VISIT is buried deeply, and its significance evaded, in the Privacy Impact Assessment:
US-VISIT will be used to maintain a lifetime travel dossier for anyone who ever visits the USA, just as CAPPS-II will enable
the maintenance of lifetime travel dossiers on anyone who ever travels by air to, from, or within the USA...
In order to implement US-VISIT more quickly than would otherwise have been possible, it is being treated for Privacy Act
purposes as merely a "modification" of existing systems, rather than a new system. The US-VISIT data flow diagram on page 4
of the Privacy Impact Assessment includes a "modified database" labelled "biometric and biographic travel history", to be
included within the ADIS (Arrival Departure Information System).

These "travel histories" aren't mentioned anywhere in the so-called "assessment", which says of ADIS and other records only
that, "The policies of individual component systems, as stated in their SORNs [System of Records Notices under the Privacy
Act], govern the retention of personal information collected by US-VISIT." To find out anything about the policies governing
these records, one has to look at the most recent SORN for the ADIS system , which was published in the Federal Register on
12 December 2003.

Only there, deep in the acronym soup at 68 Federal Register 69412-69414, does one learn that these records may be
disclosed without restriction to any law enforcement agency in the USA or any other country (even if not actually relevant to
any specific investigation) and, even more significantly, that "Records will be retained for 100 years." Full stop."