Passport tracking catching bad guys

An excellent February article in FedTech Magazine describes how at least two criminals – an embezzler and a murderer – were caught through international cooperation between identity information systems. The United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology system identified the embezzler when he applied for a U.S. visa, and he was arrested in Costa Rica, where he applied for the visa. “As a result of that success, Interpol sent US-VISIT another set of prints, and U.S. authorities got a match with a commercial truck driver who drove regularly from Canada to Lewiston, N.Y. The man was a citizen from the Republic of Georgia who was wanted for murder in Germany. He too was arrested,” the article goes on. The lesson to criminals wanting to remain anonymous is don’t apply for new visas, passports and other international identification systems using your real identity. But the lessons for the rest of us are a lot of unanswered questions, starting with how far can we trust government bodies with access to systems housing everyone’s personal information? And what if the so-called ‘criminals’ popping up on these lists are political or religious dissidents, witness protection, ex spies, etc., who really can’t afford to be found and returned to their homelands? Where do you draw this line? How do you uphold diplomacy among nations wanting access to this information for less than sterling purposes? And, finally, what, pray tell, will keep the organized criminals with technical resources out of these systems and away from information they can use or manipulate in their own nefarious ways?