The USA wants to check those who turn up at their border is who they say they are, and they also want to know if they are a good egg as far as the authorities know where they are from. Both of these sound iminently reasonable.
Anything happening at the scales international travel flows at needs to be automated.
> The USA are known to be careless and/or evil when it comes to dealing with sensitive data.
What is the specific carelessness or evil you are worried about?
> Why can't they just run someones fingerprint at the airport against their national databases
I assume they do. But of course if someone has lived most of their life outside of the USA any criminal record they might have will be outside of the USA.
> and any international terrorist databases that might exist?
Why should they only be concerned about terrorism?
The US government has just lost databases with biometric data of millions of afghan people, together with the information whether they worked for the ISAF forces which puts those peoples life in immediate danger. When confronted with that, the US government did not indicate that they care about it.
Yes! This is a curious thing too. Biometric passports already have biometric data. The USA will already have your biometric information read out from your passport. One possibility is that they have reasons to not trust the biometric passports completely. Perhaps someone found a way to fake them.
Even if not, it seems prudent that they want to check all 3 things. What is in your passport, what are your own biometrics and what the issuing country has on file about you.
> No need to access European databases.
You are stating this as if obvious. X turns up at the border, why wouldn't the USA (or any country really) would want to know if they are all okay as far as their own country is concerned?
"Hey X is at the border, are they ok?" And 95% of the time the answer will be "yup". 4% will be some petty crime which has been already resolved in their own country, and then the admitting country can decide if they want to let them in. (as is their right.) Less than 1% of the cases will be something weird. Like the person is already recorded as deceased, or they are sought in relation to a crime or should be in prison or something. You check because of that small "weird" group.
> The US government has just lost databases with biometric data of millions of afghan people
The US let down the people of Afghanistan in a milliard ways. The whole thing is a shitshow. From the war, through the occupation, the drone strikes. A lot of things are terrible there. If it makes you distrust the USA I understand you.
Luckily, my country does not even have my biometrics in a database that the US could be querying.
Everyone wants to know as much as they can, that's not a reason to tell them. As far as I'm concerned all my country should be telling the US is whether I hold a valid passport or not. If they want to see other data from my country's database, at a minimum they should need my authorization for that. They may insist I authorize that as a condition of entry to the US (or subject me to extra checks if I refuse), but they certainly don't need to be able to query my information whenever they like.
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.