But that's what passports are for. They even have fingerprints nowdays, so you can always check that passport issued in a given name actually matches a person w

But that's what passports are for. They even have fingerprints nowdays, so you can always check that passport issued in a given name actually matches a person who presented it. Once you are confident in a name, you can run all kinds of checks on the person. And no, it doesn't work for reverse search that good -- you store fingerprints, you scan fingerprints and you match fingerprints stored in a passport to ones scanned by the device. What they probably want is getting fingerprints for a specific person in automated way. Getting fingerprints per police request is kinda reasonable, but as far as I remember, European law on this stuff limits gathering biometrics for a specific reason -- document issuance. I doubt even police of the same European country would have automated unrestricted access to this database for investigation purposes. For identification purposes and when permitted by a judge -- maybe.