Can Airport Scanners Store Passport Photos for Later Retracing of Individuals?

[Spin_Network]

Is it feasible that Airports that have scanners instead of Human 'observers', at airports for instance, could have the capacity to store Passport Photo's?

Going through airports the human factor of visually inspecting travellers I.D, is open to abuse and flawed.

If there was a 'scanner' at every airport, then retracing data such as names..photographs of individuals, could prove important at certain times..later fro instance.

If Dr Elnashar could be traced to Madrid a number of months before the Bombing, as he is known to have been in the UK previous to the London Bombing, and coincedentally was known to be at North Carolina State University in 2000..(dont know if this is relevant,9'11 )is this co-incedental information, able to be retracted from photographic scanners?

Is the technology here to enable 'after-event-retracing' of individuals?

I would have thought an ordinary computer like scanner, would be able to do the job much better than humans?

P.S Magdi Mahmoud al-Nashar is wanted in UK over links to London Bombers?:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4686089.stm

In a recent interview his brother in Egypt stated that he just came over to Egypt for a holiday and was saying that he was happy in the UK and was in the process of shopping around for a new flat ?

 

[brewnog]

Technically, I'm sure that yes, it would provide an excellent system for reading, storing and sharing information. I also believe that such technology is available, or at least easily developed. It's just a scanner, with OCR technology, hooked up to a big storage system I suppose.

A few issues I can think of:

- Customs & Excise officials are extremely good at picking out shifty looking characters from large numbers of people. Often, they just get a feeling that something isn't quite right, and notify their security staff that there might be a problem. A lot of the time, it's the passport checking chaps who give the 'heads up' to the customs guys that a passenger might be carrying drugs, or a weapon.

- As far as I'm aware, no record is made as to who is in what country. As far as UK law is concerned, the government has no right to know, or hold information on whether you're in the country or not. Obviously there are mechanisms in place to trace terrorism suspects through airport CCTV, flight details etc, but I'm sure many would see such scanners as an invasion of privacy. Perhaps someone will have more information on this issue.

 

[Antiphon]

The automated tracking of individuals is being implemented now by placing RFID
chips into passports. You will be scanned and database entries automatically
made as you come and go across borders.

Law enforcement can then correlate that with all your banking records to figure
out if you are a suspect or not.

The Ministry of Love will straiten you out, Winston, if you fall off the
strait and narrow.