the Justice Department will implement a new program to fingerprint and photograph more than 100,000 U.S. visa holders every year posing an "elevated national security concern."

Announcing the plan on August 21 , 2002, Justice Department officials said there would be a 20-day testing period at several unnamed ports of entry beginning on Sept. 11, and all remaining entry ports would implement the new system on Oct. 1, 2002.

Called the National Security Entry/Exit Registration System, the program is aimed at eventually tracking "virtually all" of the 35 million foreign visitors who land in the United States each year. Justice Department officials estimate the system would be fully operational by 2005.

But until that happens, approximately 100,000 visitors from five countries would initially be tracked. These include nationals from Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya — which, along with North Korea and Cuba make up the U.S. State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Civil and immigrant rights groups however have vociferously denounced the new program as a "fancy but enormous" exercise in racial profiling.

While the United States has profiled against Chinese laborers and non-European immigrants in the course of its history, experts say it was the internment of about 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II that left an indelible mark on the American psyche.

One of the victims of the internment was current Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, whose family was forced into a remote Wyoming camp in 1942.

Sixty years after the 11-year-old Mineta's baseball bat was confiscated before he was sent into a fenced-in, floodlit camp, the transportation secretary is widely perceived as being staunchly opposed to profiling people based on their race, ethnicity or religion.

While the FBI and the CIA provides the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) with intelligence and information on suspected terrorists, the FAA has a computer profiling system called CAPPS (Computer-Assisted Passenger Profiling System) that selects passengers for additional screening based on more than 20 secret factors, such as whether a passenger bought a ticket with cash.

Experts  say that when it comes to issuing U.S. visas, there exists an inherent, if subtle, system of nationality profiling. "On the face of it, there is not supposed to be any profiling, but certain systems like the green card lottery, which is only open for nationals from certain countries definitely does not treat everyone equally....