State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers
By Jennifer Lee for the NY Times.

Law enforcement officials across the country will soon have access to a database of 50 million overseas applications for United States visas, including the photographs of 20 million applicants.
The database, which will become one of the largest offering images to local law enforcement, is maintained by the State Department and typically provides personal information like the applicant’s home address, date of birth and passport number, and the names of relatives…
For all the ambitious technological proposals being debated in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, the new unified system was cobbled from existing networks and has required little new spending. “These are the networks that people are already using,” said Roseanne Hynes, a member of the Defense Department’s domestic security task force. “It doesn’t change jobs or add overhead.”
A primary feature of the system is the State Department’s enormous visa database, whose seven terabytes give it a capacity equivalent to that of five million floppy disks. Until now, that database has been shared only with immigration officials.
“There is a potential source of information that isn’t available elsewhere,” said M. Miles Matthew, a senior Justice Department official who works with an interagency drug intelligence group. “It’s not just useful for terrorism. It’s drug trafficking, money laundering, a variety of frauds, not to mention domestic crimes.”

Here’s the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/national/31COMP.html?ex=1044680400&en=902d8048ef3daabf&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
The New York Times The New York Times National January 31, 2003
State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30