The British/Irish agreement is different from Schengen though, in that it’s an informal agreement rather than a Treaty. Which means that both countries are free to ignore it. In practice, there are generally no checks on the land border on the island of Ireland, but there are checks at Irish airports (not British airports, though, yet) and on both sides of the Dublin-Holyhead ferry route.
For EU citizens, though, the checks usually involve just glancing at your passport rather than swiping it through anything, so no actual records are kept. The same is true for EU citizens entering a Schengen country from outside the Schengen area.
Ok, a yottabyte is a trillion terabytes. There isn’t that much storage on the whole Earth. But that’s ok. The NSA is perfectly capable of recording every email and phone call without yottabytes.
I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that pan1 was a member of the armed forces travelling on official orders.
Furthermore, once based in a European country, it used to be possible for US military personnel to travel to some other European countries as tourists, using military ID rather than passports to secure passage through border controls.
The rules on such travel arrangements will have changed for most border crossings since 2001.
Border crossings are recorded to some extent. A few years ago, I took my kids across from Ontario to Michigan for a weekend at a friend’s place. On the return trip, the Canadian agent had the details of my U.S. arrival the previous Friday. The Canada Border Agent didn’t even bother to take the passports from my hand (probably satisfied that my story matched my license plate).
On the other hand, contrary to mcott’s experience, I travelled 22 times to Japan between 2001 and 2008, in addition to several US and UK trips, and was never subjected to a search. I wonder if it’s because I did actually once declare something that I’d brought back, and always had my receipts in my hand when answering questions about having anything to declare.
Thailand does. They’re more efficient about it now, too, since even the podunkiest border crossing has computers. Plus I have to report to Immigration every 90 days, and one piece of information required is when I entered Thailand. This has helped them track people in several missing-person cases involving foreigners.
I recall back in the day, though, hitching through Europe. A truck driver from Britain picked me up outside of Brussels, and we passed through France with nary a check on me. At the Swiss border, since I was going to stay in Switzerland for a while, I insisted on handing my passport to a bemused guard, who glanced at it briefly, handed it back and said “Welcome to Switzerland.”
In this day and age of homeland security and anti-terrorism, what makes anyone believe that most countries would not enter your passport information when entering the country? There may be exceptions but certainly if you’re entering through US customs and immigration from an international flight, Uncle Sugar records your details. Pretty sure that there is a camera as well that snaps your photo. The US records all people entering by air. If you’re an alien, then you have a fingerprint taken as well.
Every asian country I have ever been to does (Japan, china, Nam, thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, etc). In China, be it domestic or international travel, all Chinese nationals and aliens have their details entered into the computer and photo taken.