The department's Office of Passport Services is "currently working on an agreement with the Terrorist Screening Center that would provide information on American citizens who are ... considered persons of concern due to a nexus to terrorism or an ongoing investigation,"

Deputy Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs Frank Moss told a hearing of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection and Cybersecurity.

The Terrorist Screening Center is an FBI operation which maintains a constantly updated watch list of people suspected of being terrorists, or terrorist associates.

Moss said the agreement, which would also cover information about people subject to a federal felony arrest warrant, would alert the center when anyone on the watch list applied for a passport, enabling them "under appropriate circumstances (to), take law enforcement action."

He said the agreement would be signed "in the very near future."

After the hearing Moss told United Press International that the department already checked all passport applicants against a database that contained the names of nearly 50,000 fugitives, and 3 million deadbeat parents who owed child support.

Adding those Americans listed by the center as possible terror suspects to the list would be "a quantative rather than a qualitative change."

"It's not that (people in the database or on the terrorist watchlist) automatically won't get a passport," said Moss, "they're just people we want to take a closer look at."

He pointed out that those who owed child support were ineligible to be issued a passport until they had paid, or in some states until they had made arrangements to do so.

"We don't want to issue a passport to anyone who is going to use it to flee the jurisdiction, or skip out on child support they owe," he said.

But former Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Policy and Planning Stewart Verdery told the panel that a name-based watch list check was not enough.

"Massive efforts" had been made by the U.S. government to obtain and share biometric information, including from suspected terrorists, said Verdery.

But "current policy does not allow U.S. (passport) applicants to be vetted biometrically against criminal or terrorist databases ... meaning we may miss potential imposters or home-grown terrorists or criminals," he told the hearing.

"I recommend that the United States match the bold step of the European Union to include fingerprints in passports and that the United States should advocate for fingerprints as a mandatory biometric in (all) passports," he added.

Verdery is the latest in a succession of former officials from the troubled department who have - freed from the binding chains of the interagency policy process - all got religion about the vital importance of biometrics, specifically fingerprints. All your fingerprints.

Currently, US-VISIT, the largest and fastest growing biometric check system in the world, which verifies the identity of foreigners visiting the United States only collects the prints of two index fingers.

The problem is, according to the National Institute for Standards and Technology that as the database grows in size, so will the possibility that using only two fingers will begin to generate an increasing number of "false positives" - prints recorded as coming from the same person when they don't.

Moreover, Verdery said "a small but potentially important number of latent fingerprints collected from crime scenes or terrorist investigations" - he later characterized them as "prints from caves, from (improvised bomb) fragments" - "may elude matching... if they come from different digits, such as thumbs, than are collected under US-VISIT."

The problem, as Verdery knows all too well, is the logistics. Already cramped, the cubicles at ports of entry and embassies where visa applicants are processed and visitors examined before being admitted, were barely large enough to accommodate the compact single-finger reader required to obtain images of the two index fingers.

Verdery, by his own account, spent time trying to find the silver bullet for this problem - a spherical fingerprint reader that could glean images of all ten fingers, whilst taking up a fraction of the space of a conventional two-hand print reader.

"We never found one," he told UPI.

Outlining a program that was possibly more concerning to privacy advocates, Moss told the hearing the consular affairs bureau already had "implemented a cooperative relationship" with the National Counter Terrorism Center - a multi-agency intelligence organization responsible for analyzing all information about possible terrorist threats to the United States.

He said the National Counter Terrorism Center was given "direct online access" to the Passport Records Imaging System Management, a database that stores images of every passport application.

The center "utilizes this information as a verification tool to support its terrorist watch list responsibilities," said Moss.

One of the center's jobs is verifying the identities of foreign persons on the watch list. But U.S. nationals on the list are the responsibility of the FBI.

A former senior homeland security official told UPI that there were nonetheless many scenarios where access to such a database might be useful.

"Somewhere where you can get basic biographical information is always an investigative tool. Suppose you have the passport number of someone monitored by a foreign service traveling with a bad guy - it is great to be able to just look him up."

The former official also added that there were cases of interest to counter-terror analysts - like those at the center - involving the naturalization of foreigners.

Suspected foreign terrorists "have acquired U.S. citizenship as a ruse," the official said.

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