The European Union\u2019s new Entry\/Exit System is causing delays of up to three hours at various airports.<\/p>\n
Since April 10th, the EES has been fully operational<\/a> in the Schengen area and replaces the manual passport stamp with a digital record of entries and exits for non-EU travellers.<\/p>\n The change includes name, document data, facial image, and fingerprints. The Commission presents it as an improvement in security and efficiency. In practice, the result has been chaos: delays, overcrowded terminals, and airports forced to scale back or pause biometric checks when the system cannot handle the volume.<\/p>\n The problem is not only operational. Paris Charles de Gaulle, Madrid-Barajas, Barcelona, M\u00e1laga, Palma, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Vienna have experienced prolonged waiting times, especially for travellers from outside the EU. Some checks have gone from a brief procedure to several minutes per passenger. Multiplied by thousands of travellers, the \u2018digital upgrade\u2019 has turned into a bureaucratic bottleneck (once again). The much-promised smart border is starting to look far more like an incompetent border<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the bottlenecks and delays are only a symptom of a larger problem. Europe is moving from stamping documents to building biometric records. Authorities no longer simply verify who enters; they record, store, cross-reference and automate sensitive information. Facial images and fingerprints stop being exceptional law enforcement tools and become an administrative routine.<\/p>\n The same European Union that has spent years imposing legislation on data protection, consent, minimisation, and privacy now requires millions of people to hand over biometric data to do something as basic as legally crossing a border. If a citizen does not accept, they do not enter. That is the actual latitude people have to consent.<\/p>\n What is most striking is that these controls apply to legal travellers. It hardly needs saying that when thousands of people arrive illegally at European borders, none of this applies.<\/p>\n While it is true that there is no evidence that the EES requires retina scans (at least for now), the gradual normalisation of biometric controls opens the door to an ecosystem in which all personal information is integrated into a single digital architecture. And that architecture is already underway. Few were willing to listen to warnings from fundamental rights experts regarding projects such as ID2020 funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n