The current ESTA Visa Waiver form [0] (for non-residents visiting the country) asks for social media usernames, although they're currently marked as "Optional".
> Enter information associated with your online presence, including the types of online platforms, applications and websites that you use to collaborate, share information, and interact with others, as well as the username(s) associated with those accounts. (OPTIONAL)
With the length of time and the amount of sites I use I'd be here hours filling this in. I love NYC and have family in the states but I really can't imagine willingly going there now. Though the UK is hardly going the way of anything better.
Cool. Well since us non-Americans have zero rights when travelling to the US, and government/corporations can't be trusted to keep secrets safe, I guess I won't travel to the US anymore.
Sucks, because they've got some nice nature, but I can go somewhere I'm not hauled over a barrel for every detail of my life upon entry.
Watch one of the many documentaries on a good television. It's mostly just a big hole in the ground with nice colors that don't last very long because the light is constantly changing.
On top of that, depending on where you go, it's either full of tourists or has no facilities. Tourists are the worst part about the Grand Canyon and, while strictly an opinion, there are more interesting things to see.
If you do decide to go to the bottom, bring a lot of water with you. The climb back out can be labor intensive and hot. You're fine, so long as you remember to bring water. You might as well bring extra water, because there's almost always a tourist sitting there on the edge of the trail and slowly dying of thirst. So, you'll feel obligated to share your water. You might as well just bring a few extra bottles.
You'll get far better, and more comprehensive, imagery from a good documentary. It's hard to get a permit to raft the whole thing, for example. But, you can live vicariously through others and not have to deal with the tourists.
If you can't guess, I've been a half-dozen times. It hasn't once been my preferred destination. I've gone because I was in the area and at the behest of others. My first visit was on a family vacation. It's nice, but there are many other options that I personally enjoyed more. I'd just watch a documentary and make the trip a little longer so that I could go to Taos instead, but that's just me.
Actually, the answer is no. (1) Some rights explicitly apply only to citizens. (2) It is a common mistake to assume that rights like right to free speech are applicable to all - citizens, visitors on visa, etc. However, a person's visa can be revoked even if his actions are not illegal. Something about visa being a privilege not a right... So in effect even those rights do not apply. (3) In many cases, courts and governments have agreed that foreign nationals have reduced rights.
From your link(I can only read the abstract) “Court has insisted for more than a century that foreign nationals living among us are "persons" within the meaning of the Constitution, and are protected by those rights that the Constitution does not expressly reserve to citizens. Because the Constitution expressly limits to citizens only the rights to vote and to run for federal elective office, equality between non-nationals and citizens would appear to be the constitutional rule.“
Yes, those are explicit laws but there are more examples in the report. For example,
"It makes no sense to say that a foreign national has a First Amend- ment right to criticize government officials or to join political groups without fear of criminal prosecution, but that he may be deported for the same activities."
"The decision marks the first time outside of a war setting that the Court has upheld preventive detention of anyone without an in- dividualized assessment of the necessity of such detention. And the majority expressly rested its decision on a double standard, noting that Congress can make rules in the immigration setting that would be unacceptable for citizens."
Didn't organisations like TSA already have rights to look through your phone/laptop at the US customs? I read quite a few articles urging foreigners to wipe their personal devices before coming to US if they care about their privacy.
Those articles are stupid though. You are just marking yourself for even more trouble with wiping your devices prior to entering the US, essentially making sure they got a reason to inspect you more.
There's a huge difference between someone who comes to live permanently in the country and someone who is looking at trees for a week. Do you think the US has the infrastructure available to screen the facebooks of all 75 million tourists who come to the US every year? IMHO this is not an overstep and current US citizens should have at least cursory understanding of who someone is when they are coming to live permanently in our country.
Considering illegal immigrants don't go through the immigration process, there being millions of illegal immigrants roaming and the US having the ability to monitor all legal immigrants are correlay r. IT ability is not related to how well the US can secure its border physically at this point.
They're 'roaming the streets' because despite the rhetoric, without them, the economy would take a huge hit. Also, there's a different level of effort required to monitor someone you don't necessarily know about versus someone who handed you all their info at the border.
Yeah, that was my point. Illegal immigrants are often exploited in similar ways, absolutely true, that is why officials don't use all the resources available to go after them, despite the rhetoric. It says nothing about their reasoning being just or altruistic, (which it isn't).
The similarity is that the oppression is now done by the state, so its much harder to fight. The difference is that the illegal immigrant does have a choice and prefers to be an illegal immigrant than a legal resident of their home.
That's just over a two a second - doesn't seem that challenging to do some kind of analysis given that Facebook has already done the hard work of collecting and structuring the data for you.
Lol this is not an overstep? What the hell? A bunch of these people who live long term in the US are going to become permanent residents and/or citizens of the country. Now they can no longer freely express their opinions on social media without fear of offending the authorities.
Yup, actually I do think they have the resources to do that. I don't doubt anything, anymore. Wonder why NASA is so defunded? Not to be a conspiracy guy, but realistically thinking if you aren't collecting information that's low fruit such as social media data - what are you going after, then?
* Do you think the US has the infrastructure available to screen the facebooks of all 75 million tourists who come to the US every year?*
That's exactly the problem: A queue of charlatans ready to sell Homeland Security bogus analysis of social media posts, with the predictable pernicious results.
That's why many are saying that travel to the US is down 3-5% this year. Come to canada. Our headline story today (on bbc) is about a groom saving a boy from drowning. Ill take that over whatever twitterwar he starts today.
Many social media sites are headquartered in the US, so private accounts there are completely open to an NSL (or the DHS' equivalent). Information-gathering doesn't have to comprehensively cover every site to yield results.
This is the slippery slope argument, but if this is done for security reasons, once the infrastructure is in place for immigrants, I don't know why it should not be applied to visitors.
To play devils advocate, it's highly likely multiple countries are already looking at this information, this is just a formal way of asking for it to add non-compliance to justifications. It's almost akin to the US state of Tennessee having a marijuana tax despite not allowing legal sale of the substance. It becomes another thing to use on charges / justifications.
I hope at least Western Europe reciprocates quickly (targeting American visitors). Comparably annoying American citizens may be the best method to stop this madness.
As US citizens you (collectively) knowingly voted for government that implemented such laws and it is up to you to vote for government that doesn't pass such insane laws. So sorry, you are not a bystander here; I'd say equally demeaning and annoying border controls for US citizens in other countries would be logical consequences one could expect.
This is not a law, it's a regulation, developed by a governmental body whose head is appointed. There is no Senator a small fish like me can call to stop this madness
I'm not much into US politics, but as far as I understand, Trump was personally involved in many recent bans/regulations. Furthermore, isn't that "head" appointed by president, senate or other elected governmental body?
The increase in weird border controls actually started under Obama. There's really no winning in American politics when it comes to sensible regulation or immigration policies. Trump is mainly just responsible for the recent "travel bans" and also the decrease of legal immigration
Yeah, let's completely ignore the 193 million people that disapprove of our current government. To put this in perspective if the number of people that disapprove of Trump were a country it would be 7th largest in the world.
Obama started this policy, Trump just continued it.
It is very easy to point fingers at one figure or political party, in this case though the waters have been slowly rising since 9/11 through Bush Jr, Obama, and now Trump.
Until American citizens are impacted (either through loss of tourism money or more directly) I don't see much happening.
> As German citizens you German Jews (collectively) knowingly voted for government that implemented such anti-semitic laws and it is up to you to vote for government that doesn't pass such insane laws.
Yes, I went there. What kind of insane guilt-attribution system makes the parent commenter (and all others who dissent) responsible for the actions of the US government?
As another US citizen I also agree that this new rule is garbage.
The way to stop it is to apply pressure to the rule makers. They still work for us (although most of the time it does not feel this way), so the constituents must tell rule makers to change stupid rules. Otherwise they are not innocent bystanders anymore. And nowadays the constituents will not care unless they feel the pain.
We all are "too busy" (at least I know that I am) unless our own relatives have to give out logins while going abroad. I wish it was not this way, but this is the way it is today :(
I was just grilled in Munich trying to leave the EU, because when I entered in Athens the person stamping passports didn't care enough to put any ink on the stamp.
My point is that the EU is a big place with differing levels of care about what happens at the borders. I doubt all of the EU would/could reciprocate even if they wanted to.
The EU is convincing the USA for years that they should allow visa-free entry to five of its members (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland, Romania). Without concrete actions against the USA, they got nowhere.
I'm pretty sure there is a very small intersection between the group of Americans who would travel internationally and be annoyed by this and the Americans who support policies like this.
Yes, but I suspect that the part of the population who supports this policy is small. A much larger part either does not care or dislikes this in general, but not enough to voice their opinion. Reciprocation could help make this majority speak up.
Plus, I would not overestimate degrees of separation -- if a friend's granddaughter traveling internationally for a high school trip supplies social account credentials, and those get leaked it is a powerful demonstration of stupid law in action. Having her get a load of humiliating / X-rated junk as a result would I suspect make even a strong supporter rethink his support.
That would simply adjust the definition of "normal", since everybody's doing it. For example, it's now "normal" that liquids are banned in airports (except, of course, for those sold at a premium once past "security"; and except for pesto https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/23/genoa-airport-... ).
I think, in general, that it's better to do the opposite: if someone wants to do a stupid thing, make them look as strange as possible; try do the exact opposite thing, so that their rationale (e.g. "otherwise terrorism") is undermined. Plus, of course, that opposite thing might be a good idea on its own.
It'd only be "normal" if they did it to everybody. If they specifically targeted American tourists and left everyone else alone I don't think we'd see that problem.
There's a story about this that in some airport, they only ask americans to take their shoes off. If airports around the world required that for all domestic flights on americans, I think that you say would happen quickly.
We've talked about this before many times, but as a person who used to live in Europe I never quite understood why Americans don't have a national ID. Maybe something with a chip, anything better than a social security number basically. Make it free so anyone can get it.
I've heard all kinds of reasons to not have IDs they don't make sense - IDs are racist apparently, or some kind of a right wing conspiracy about government controlling people. Many other countries seems to manage with national IDs, some are more poor, some just as technologically advanced.
Lots of Americans don't understand it, either. Any national ID system get shot down because of some variation on 'left-wing government overreach', so we get the current crappy system where each individual state has its own identification card.
India and developing countries managed to have national IDs and here it's some kind of major issue.
Is the argument that minorities are incompetent or just poor and can't get IDs if they want to vote? I think if they are free to get there should be no issue denying voting to anyone?
Make IDs subsidized if person makes less than $X/year or just subsidize for everyone. Whether ID is required for voting can be orthogonal to having IDs for other government services just not have a flimsy piece of paper with a 9 digit number on that is now know to everyone probably after the Equifax hack.
But let's say it is required for voting as well and it is subsidized. How exactly does it deny minorities the right to vote? Not sure what minorities we are thinking about but wonder if there is an implication that some would not be able to figure out how to get an ID, which I think is a bit insulting to those minorities. For example let's look at India:
Aadhaar is the world's largest biometric ID system, with over 1.171 billion enrolled members as of 15 Aug 2017.[3] As of this date, over 99% of Indians aged 18 and above had been enrolled in Aadhaar.[4]
---
So this is a country with a lot more poor people, with issues such as open defecation, and worse poverty, and arguable not as advanced as US, and they managed but here in US it's somehow a minority issue? I just don't see it.
I am sorry but you're not getting my point if IDs are available in a properly controlled manner from the federal government, which has members that are independent of the white house (like the FBI head) I'm all for subsidized id's. What I don't want is it to go to the state level.
I remember when Brazil did that with respect to fingerprinting. They started scanning fingerprints because US starting doing it to the Brazilian citizens when they arrived in US. Didn't follow the story after but annoying citizens of the other country by reciprocating in-like is a common strategy. Onerous visa requirements or moving from requiring to not requiring visas is also done.
Brazil does tit-for-tat and practices complete reciprocity :)
Shortly after 9/11, the USA required Brazilian tourists to use a fingerprint scanner. A Brazilian judge made a rule for American tourists to do the same:
It was a huge mess at first because Brazil hadn't required any other countries to do it in the past. I suspect that customs threw away the fingerprints at first (it was done with ink originally), but it's done digitally nowadays.
Brazil does this for all countries. American tourists, for example, have to pay $100 for a visa because Brazilians need to do the same in the U.S.
To this day, it's considerably easier for Europeans to enter Brazil than Americans. While the U.S. hasn't rescinded the fingerprint law (that I know of), it's possible this policy prevented escalation...
If you were the US government defining what "Social media" means, then there's no real difference between Hacker News or any other similar site and Twitter.
I would define social media as having "friends" or "followers" - something that could be used to construct a "social network" or "social graph". IMO HN is just a "message board" (for those who actually post - I suspect the majority just visit the front page for some interesting articles and move on)
So I'm guessing foreign social media won't be tracked, or will there be bridges between each country's intelligence agencies where they track their own country's apps? There's already intelligence sharing among those countries anyway, right? :) What about countries that don't have such intelligence sharing agreements with the US but still make big apps? I imagine it's possible that those apps would have bigger treasure troves anyway. Bleh.
They don't really need any cooperation with the apps or the countries where the apps are hosted, they'll just ask the immigrant to give full access or be automatically denied.
USCIS has considerably more information about me than any other single agency. I've used my regular college email and other alias and emails on my college network. Part of me feels like I have nothing to hide so this is okay. Part of me suddenly feels naked and being looked at.
Oh well, i'm all for terrorizing people as long as it stop terrorists.
(I wrote this comment and deleted it twice because i've used HN on campus and this can be linked back to me now. lol, maybe I am just paranoid.)
That is pretty racist. US Homeland Security should just collect people on other continents, and bring them to US without any checks whatsoever... It works great in EU.
Every human has a fundamental inalienable right to visit every single part of the earth unhindered if they wish - not a right to make it their home - but to see and appreciate the planet they live on without constraints. This is basic humanism.
People are happy to point fingers at Russia, China and feel smug and superior and look the other way while totalitarian ideas like searching people's personal effects that attack the core of human dignity and dehumanize individuals are legitimized with little to no pushback.
>> Every human has a fundamental inalienable right to visit every single part of the earth unhindered if they wish - not a right to make it their home - but visit without undue constraints.
I like the idea but is this actually written somewhere (a treaty perhaps) or just an opinion? If an opinion I don't see why you would draw a line between visit and live.
What I understand from the rule change is that it would allow the DHS to search for you on Google and look at your Facebook and Instagram profile before granting you a greencard. Frankly, every potential employer will most likely do the same. I'm not at all anti-immigration, but this seems to be reasonable "vetting" even in my book. Or am I missing something here?
Or for the permanent citizens. Isn't the so-called "vetting" supposed to happen before they arrive to the U.S.?
If they do post-arrival vetting, for how long will they be allowed to do it? 1 year? 5? 20?
It's just another BS excuse to use mass surveillance against as many people as they can. They start with immigrants, then they invent some other reason for some other category of Americans, and so on.
This is the "problem" with surveillance technology getting ever cheaper. It gives them an irresistible desire to apply it more and more, even where it's not absolutely necessary, as the cost is no longer an impediment, so "might as well."
I have the same opinion on killer drones or killer robots for that matter. The cheaper they will become to use, the more they will be used. Eventually they'll run out of "real targets" and start sending them after less important targets, too. Killer drones are not "the same as an airstrike", as I've seen many say on various forums, for this very reason, just like mass surveillance done today is not the same as the targeted surveillance done decades ago against real targets, as some were implying immediately after Snowden released his documents.
You don't see a problem with the results of a search in something trivially manipulated like Google and Facebook potentially limiting an individual's mobility and freedom?
You assume it's trivial. What's the threshold? If they post things that say they are glad when Americans die, is non-trivial enough for you? Or are you concerned facebook and google would post things 'for' them that make them look bad?
Imagine someone is attempting to immigrate to escape a hostile family intolerant of their ideals. Like an atheist attempting to leave a Muslim environment. If the contents of their "social network" may prevent their entering another country what's to prevent their family from filling their social network with terroristic nonsense to try prevent their escape?
This is just a simple example... Social media is not an official record and is trivially influenced and manipulated by the general public without recourse. Any information empowered to substantially restrict individual freedoms should correspondingly be protected from inaccuracies, e.g. court documents and police records.
It's not just ""vetting"", which is deeply suspect in the first place ("let's go through this person's facebook and apply our arbitary prejudices to it"), but it can also be retroactive.
It's entirely concievable that someone could be in the US for years, have a family, make a political facebook post (maybe "take a knee") and then be deported.
The actual data collected is not likely to be very valuable, but these things definitely make people think twice before they post "wrong opinions" to social media.
The fact that it applies to naturalized citizens is quite scary. This is essentially creating 2 classes of Americans. Up until now, the only difference I know of between "born Americans" and "naturalized Americans" was the right to run for President. I never understood the restriction, but it's not like it impacted a lot of lives.
The application to naturalized citizens but not born Americans won't stand up to the barest Constitutional challenge. Specifically, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment:
"""
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
"""
The Supreme Court held in Bolling v. Sharpe that the due process clause of the 5th Amendment imposes the equal protection responsibility on the federal government as well as the individual states.
This is really the strongest argument I've seen of any of this being a problem. Coming to any country as an immigrant is a privilege, and it the immigrants prerogative whether or not they feel the terms are acceptable. It is, however, completely unacceptable to put a special burden on their citizenship like this. Once they're a citizen, they should be a citizen, period. If there's not confidence that they're acceptable, they shouldn't become a citizen in the first place, otherwise they should be treated with full rights.
I'm not clear on how dual-citizenship works when you naturalize to the US, but are there not situations where they have to give up citizenship to their country of origin? Does that mean these people are permanently left in a degraded legal state with no home country, where they would have full legal rights, to return to should the DHS decide they've over stepped their bounds on Facebook?
As far as I know (and I'm not an authority), the US never requires that you give up your first citizenship. Some countries (like Japan) do however. So a Japanese citizen wishing to become American would have to give up his birth citizenship.
However, the US do not recognize the concept of dual citizenship. Meaning that an Italian-American is always seen as just an American by the US government. Once you become American you are American, you are not a XXX-American.
> there not situations where they have to give up citizenship to their country of origin?
One such a case is China. If a Chinese citizen gets the passport of another country they lose their original Chinese citizenship (if China knows about the new passport.)
I wonder what happens if they are born in countries like the USA that give citizenship at birth. Do they have to forfeit one of the two citizenships? And when, at birth by decision of the parents or later on by their choice?
I do not think you need to be a US citizen just because you were born there. There are countries that allow a child born in the US to acquire the citizenship of its parents.
It doesn't mention they'll be requesting passwords, only "handles, aliases, [...] search results [and] publicly available information". I mean, everything is already accessible on the internet (to the extent I want it to be), and accessible by merely a Google search of my name (which is written on my passport), so anyone (not just Homeland Security) could easily collect this info anyways (even without me being anywhere _near_ the US).
> It doesn't mention they'll be requesting passwords, only "handles, aliases
> I mean, everything is already accessible on the internet (to the extent I want it to be), and accessible by merely a Google search of my name (which is written on my passport), so anyone (not just Homeland Security) could easily collect this info anyways
The notion that only the info you want accessible under your name is actually accessible under your name seems a bit naive, also you may need to disclose 'aliases' as well, which means account on which you on purpose don't use your real name, probably because you want to express your opinions a bit more freely.
> I think this is a bit overblown.
DHS agents cherry-picking people's social media posts to deny them entry does not seem overblown to me.
I think the only effective solution to this is for the EU to impose similarly annoying travel restrictions on American citizens and for companies to stop going to conferences etc. in the U.S.since they'll notice once big business complains.
Define "immigrant"? Honestly, that can mean any class of things in loose definition of the term. I bet some Senator on the Intelligence Oversight committee, says legally speaking if your definition is everyone that is not Native American - you are an immigrant - just to fudge the law, until someone says you can't do that. The perverse intelligence community can only become perverse, if both the public holds the government accountable, but then the body of oversight - Congress, our elective official body of representation (noting the President doesn't really count anymore) - makes it so. It's gonna eventually happen, if it hasn't already started as of a decade ago (or more).
Exactly what I was thinking. I have used communication tools such as Discord and Trello, but never Facebook or Twitter. So are they going to believe me when I say I don't use social media? Do I need to start up fake social media accounts just so I can have something to make authorities happy?
It's not exactly uncommon to tell people who are going through the immigration process to start curating their public image which would naturally involve some forms of social media.
Does it include forums? Closed forums? Anything with a chat capability? A website that uses a third party chat widget and another third party address book?
What is social media according to the US government?
"Social Media means the sphere of websites, applications, and web-based
tools that connect users to engage in dialogue, share information and media,
collaborate, and interact. Social media take many different forms, including but
not limited to web-based communities and hosted services, social networking
sites, video and photo sharing sites, blogs, virtual worlds, social bookmarking,
and other emerging technologies."
What does "collect" mean? Ask me to supply links? Force me to provide my phone? Force me to export all of my personal data from the platform? Or just ask Facebook to do it for them?
I'd love to visit the US again but everything I've heard about the TSA and invasions of privacy really put me off.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] thread[0] https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/
edit: Actually Dec 2016 / Jan 2017 https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/22/14066082/us-customs-bord...
> Enter information associated with your online presence, including the types of online platforms, applications and websites that you use to collaborate, share information, and interact with others, as well as the username(s) associated with those accounts. (OPTIONAL)
With the length of time and the amount of sites I use I'd be here hours filling this in. I love NYC and have family in the states but I really can't imagine willingly going there now. Though the UK is hardly going the way of anything better.
Sucks, because they've got some nice nature, but I can go somewhere I'm not hauled over a barrel for every detail of my life upon entry.
On top of that, depending on where you go, it's either full of tourists or has no facilities. Tourists are the worst part about the Grand Canyon and, while strictly an opinion, there are more interesting things to see.
If you do decide to go to the bottom, bring a lot of water with you. The climb back out can be labor intensive and hot. You're fine, so long as you remember to bring water. You might as well bring extra water, because there's almost always a tourist sitting there on the edge of the trail and slowly dying of thirst. So, you'll feel obligated to share your water. You might as well just bring a few extra bottles.
You'll get far better, and more comprehensive, imagery from a good documentary. It's hard to get a permit to raft the whole thing, for example. But, you can live vicariously through others and not have to deal with the tourists.
If you can't guess, I've been a half-dozen times. It hasn't once been my preferred destination. I've gone because I was in the area and at the behest of others. My first visit was on a family vacation. It's nice, but there are many other options that I personally enjoyed more. I'd just watch a documentary and make the trip a little longer so that I could go to Taos instead, but that's just me.
On the other hand, as you go to Taos, coming up out of Santa Fe, you can see stuff like this:
https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g47224-d...
It doesn't even attract, comparatively, a whole lot of tourists.
Reference: Are Foreign Nationals Entitled to the Same Constitutional Rights As Citizens? http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/297/
"It makes no sense to say that a foreign national has a First Amend- ment right to criticize government officials or to join political groups without fear of criminal prosecution, but that he may be deported for the same activities."
"The decision marks the first time outside of a war setting that the Court has upheld preventive detention of anyone without an in- dividualized assessment of the necessity of such detention. And the majority expressly rested its decision on a double standard, noting that Congress can make rules in the immigration setting that would be unacceptable for citizens."
https://medium.com/@thegrugq/stop-fabricating-travel-securit...
I think its important to note that this was Democrats justification of slavery during the civil war as well.
That's exactly the problem: A queue of charlatans ready to sell Homeland Security bogus analysis of social media posts, with the predictable pernicious results.
What's good for the goose is good for the panopticon.
[1]https://globalnews.ca/news/3268531/cellphone-search-at-the-b...
It is very easy to point fingers at one figure or political party, in this case though the waters have been slowly rising since 9/11 through Bush Jr, Obama, and now Trump.
Until American citizens are impacted (either through loss of tourism money or more directly) I don't see much happening.
Yes, I went there. What kind of insane guilt-attribution system makes the parent commenter (and all others who dissent) responsible for the actions of the US government?
The way to stop it is to apply pressure to the rule makers. They still work for us (although most of the time it does not feel this way), so the constituents must tell rule makers to change stupid rules. Otherwise they are not innocent bystanders anymore. And nowadays the constituents will not care unless they feel the pain.
We all are "too busy" (at least I know that I am) unless our own relatives have to give out logins while going abroad. I wish it was not this way, but this is the way it is today :(
And this new rule wouldn't be garbage if it wasn't a US citizen?
My point is that the EU is a big place with differing levels of care about what happens at the borders. I doubt all of the EU would/could reciprocate even if they wanted to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/world/europe/eu-visas-uni...
Plus, I would not overestimate degrees of separation -- if a friend's granddaughter traveling internationally for a high school trip supplies social account credentials, and those get leaked it is a powerful demonstration of stupid law in action. Having her get a load of humiliating / X-rated junk as a result would I suspect make even a strong supporter rethink his support.
I think, in general, that it's better to do the opposite: if someone wants to do a stupid thing, make them look as strange as possible; try do the exact opposite thing, so that their rationale (e.g. "otherwise terrorism") is undermined. Plus, of course, that opposite thing might be a good idea on its own.
I've heard all kinds of reasons to not have IDs they don't make sense - IDs are racist apparently, or some kind of a right wing conspiracy about government controlling people. Many other countries seems to manage with national IDs, some are more poor, some just as technologically advanced.
Is the argument that minorities are incompetent or just poor and can't get IDs if they want to vote? I think if they are free to get there should be no issue denying voting to anyone?
But let's say it is required for voting as well and it is subsidized. How exactly does it deny minorities the right to vote? Not sure what minorities we are thinking about but wonder if there is an implication that some would not be able to figure out how to get an ID, which I think is a bit insulting to those minorities. For example let's look at India:
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadhaar
Aadhaar is the world's largest biometric ID system, with over 1.171 billion enrolled members as of 15 Aug 2017.[3] As of this date, over 99% of Indians aged 18 and above had been enrolled in Aadhaar.[4]
---
So this is a country with a lot more poor people, with issues such as open defecation, and worse poverty, and arguable not as advanced as US, and they managed but here in US it's somehow a minority issue? I just don't see it.
Shortly after 9/11, the USA required Brazilian tourists to use a fingerprint scanner. A Brazilian judge made a rule for American tourists to do the same:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/world/us-and-brazil-finger...
It was a huge mess at first because Brazil hadn't required any other countries to do it in the past. I suspect that customs threw away the fingerprints at first (it was done with ink originally), but it's done digitally nowadays.
Brazil does this for all countries. American tourists, for example, have to pay $100 for a visa because Brazilians need to do the same in the U.S.
To this day, it's considerably easier for Europeans to enter Brazil than Americans. While the U.S. hasn't rescinded the fingerprint law (that I know of), it's possible this policy prevented escalation...
Some VCs, tech people, etc. who make money from immigrants are going into panic mode.
It's mad that you could be denied entry for not having a Facebook account.
Oh well, i'm all for terrorizing people as long as it stop terrorists.
(I wrote this comment and deleted it twice because i've used HN on campus and this can be linked back to me now. lol, maybe I am just paranoid.)
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
People are happy to point fingers at Russia, China and feel smug and superior and look the other way while totalitarian ideas like searching people's personal effects that attack the core of human dignity and dehumanize individuals are legitimized with little to no pushback.
I like the idea but is this actually written somewhere (a treaty perhaps) or just an opinion? If an opinion I don't see why you would draw a line between visit and live.
What I understand from the rule change is that it would allow the DHS to search for you on Google and look at your Facebook and Instagram profile before granting you a greencard. Frankly, every potential employer will most likely do the same. I'm not at all anti-immigration, but this seems to be reasonable "vetting" even in my book. Or am I missing something here?
If they do post-arrival vetting, for how long will they be allowed to do it? 1 year? 5? 20?
It's just another BS excuse to use mass surveillance against as many people as they can. They start with immigrants, then they invent some other reason for some other category of Americans, and so on.
This is the "problem" with surveillance technology getting ever cheaper. It gives them an irresistible desire to apply it more and more, even where it's not absolutely necessary, as the cost is no longer an impediment, so "might as well."
I have the same opinion on killer drones or killer robots for that matter. The cheaper they will become to use, the more they will be used. Eventually they'll run out of "real targets" and start sending them after less important targets, too. Killer drones are not "the same as an airstrike", as I've seen many say on various forums, for this very reason, just like mass surveillance done today is not the same as the targeted surveillance done decades ago against real targets, as some were implying immediately after Snowden released his documents.
This is just a simple example... Social media is not an official record and is trivially influenced and manipulated by the general public without recourse. Any information empowered to substantially restrict individual freedoms should correspondingly be protected from inaccuracies, e.g. court documents and police records.
It's entirely concievable that someone could be in the US for years, have a family, make a political facebook post (maybe "take a knee") and then be deported.
""" All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. """
The Supreme Court held in Bolling v. Sharpe that the due process clause of the 5th Amendment imposes the equal protection responsibility on the federal government as well as the individual states.
I'm not clear on how dual-citizenship works when you naturalize to the US, but are there not situations where they have to give up citizenship to their country of origin? Does that mean these people are permanently left in a degraded legal state with no home country, where they would have full legal rights, to return to should the DHS decide they've over stepped their bounds on Facebook?
However, the US do not recognize the concept of dual citizenship. Meaning that an Italian-American is always seen as just an American by the US government. Once you become American you are American, you are not a XXX-American.
One such a case is China. If a Chinese citizen gets the passport of another country they lose their original Chinese citizenship (if China knows about the new passport.)
I wonder what happens if they are born in countries like the USA that give citizenship at birth. Do they have to forfeit one of the two citizenships? And when, at birth by decision of the parents or later on by their choice?
It doesn't mention they'll be requesting passwords, only "handles, aliases, [...] search results [and] publicly available information". I mean, everything is already accessible on the internet (to the extent I want it to be), and accessible by merely a Google search of my name (which is written on my passport), so anyone (not just Homeland Security) could easily collect this info anyways (even without me being anywhere _near_ the US).
I can't believe people think this way. Google is at least as dangerous as the DHS.
> I mean, everything is already accessible on the internet (to the extent I want it to be), and accessible by merely a Google search of my name (which is written on my passport), so anyone (not just Homeland Security) could easily collect this info anyways
The notion that only the info you want accessible under your name is actually accessible under your name seems a bit naive, also you may need to disclose 'aliases' as well, which means account on which you on purpose don't use your real name, probably because you want to express your opinions a bit more freely.
> I think this is a bit overblown.
DHS agents cherry-picking people's social media posts to deny them entry does not seem overblown to me.
I think the only effective solution to this is for the EU to impose similarly annoying travel restrictions on American citizens and for companies to stop going to conferences etc. in the U.S.since they'll notice once big business complains.
Does it include forums? Closed forums? Anything with a chat capability? A website that uses a third party chat widget and another third party address book?
What is social media according to the US government?
How far back does that go?
Looking at the Tinder story also on the front page, do we have to declare our fake FB profiles just for Tinder, etc?
How big is that text field, and how long do they want this story?!
depends on whether or not the security person likes you ;)
https://www.dhs.gov/publication/privacy-policy-operational-u...
"Social Media means the sphere of websites, applications, and web-based tools that connect users to engage in dialogue, share information and media, collaborate, and interact. Social media take many different forms, including but not limited to web-based communities and hosted services, social networking sites, video and photo sharing sites, blogs, virtual worlds, social bookmarking, and other emerging technologies."
By that definition I've forgotten far more social media profiles than I have today. No idea of the usernames, emails, sites, apps, anything.
I'd love to visit the US again but everything I've heard about the TSA and invasions of privacy really put me off.