Should USCIS have an official badge on social sites and be required to use an account bearing the badge when linking up with petitioners/beneficiaries?
> They shouldn't use it at all. There should be some proper non-discrimination laws, and you should be able to sue them, if they disrespect them.
Why not? What is discriminatory about looking you up on facebook? Is the issue the pretext used to get the information, or getting that information at all, or how the information will be used? Your vehement desire for "proper" laws and the ability to sue "them" lacks detail — do you know what you really want, and if so, what is it?
How many degrees of separation are they allowed?
Your face book page links to the eff = rejected?
A friend of yours links to eff, a friend of a friend ^ 6 links to eff?
Also AFAIK you don't put a social security number on facebook. Do they just look up John Doe, assume thats you and base their decision on that person?
Why do they have to get those information from facebook at all? Why not reform the process of getting citizenship to something much simpler and saner? Just auction off all the slots for new citizenships each year. (Or get rid of those limits completely, and just let anybody in whose richer or better educated than the average, plus some room for political asylum.)
Those are questions of policy rather than law. What you propose seems very sensible to me from an economic and diplomatic point of view. But as you must have noticed, there are a lot of people who are loudly against more immigration; primarily illegal immigration, but once you get past that the main lobbying groups (CIS, FAIR) would like less of all immigration. Also, such reforms are never popular during periods of high unemployment; and finally, a very small number of people who come to the US are actual crooks fleeing from justice, or involved in the flesh trade, etc..
There you raise an excellent point which enables us to relate Facebook back to the real world where I think our intuitions and laws are better.
Suppose a plain-clothes USCIS agent comes to find you in a place you are likely to be and chats to you - say in a bar, or your place of work. Is anything they discover during that chat admissible, even if they don't admit to being a USCIS agent? Because if that is okay, then why should a social network be any different?
On the other hand, if that would be inadmissible, or require some evidence beforehand for them to mount such an undercover operation, then viewing your private online data under the pretext of friendship should be out too.
Is anything they discover during that chat admissible
Yes. Once a person has stated or otherwise shown that they are not a US citizen, the burden of proof for eligibility to be present in the US switches to them. A false claim to US citizenship is a felony, though of course exceptions exist.
This is quite different from the legal situation of a US person.
In a way, when you are applying for citizenship or even just permanent residency you pretty much know they are going to look up everything they can about you. The questionnaires are really personal on many things. You should have already suspected that Facebook/twitter was used too.
When starting the process of getting a green card for my wife, I read on a number of web sites that USCIS agents are allowed to lie to you during the interview-- for example, separating the husband and wife, then coming in to one of them and falsely stating, "Your spouse just admitted this is a fraudulent marriage."
I don't know if it's true, but that, anyway, is conventional wisdom.
Compared to that, "friending" somebody in order to view their social network site seems like small potatoes.
My general sense is that the USCIS mission in these proceedings is to take a skeptical stance from the start. That is, merely applying for a green card (or, by extension, citizenship through marriage) puts you under enough of what EFF calls "suspicion" to warrant an investigation.
Oddly I had exactly the opposite experience. My wife and I were interviewed together, the agent asked very straight forward questions about our past with me present. There was nothing tricky in the slightest. I guess it depends upon the situation, but if you've got nothing to hide then the above article is a non-starter.
You would think after so many cases of abuse - some large, some small, some invoking Godwin's Law... that people would stop touting the bullshit that is "if you have nothing to hide..."
lol, ok thanks for ganging up on half my comment and the down votes. My wording choice was poor and I agree that "nothing to hide" does not make it right for the abuse that we are seeing lately. But I still stick to my response to the previous commenter, our interview was very straight forward.
For my wife's interview, we packed a whole briefcase full of documentation. A couple of minutes in, the interviewer asked us for a couple of our lease (with both names on it). We couldn't find it in the stack, and started arguing about who had put what where. After a bit of argument, the interviewer said "OK, you two are obviously married".
(Unfortunately, this was by far the most pleasant part of the whole process. Take, for example, the rejection of her application because the NJ State Police aren't certified by the INS for taking fingerprints. Instead, we had to go to a camera shop in Edison, NJ.)
> but if you've got nothing to hide then the above article is a non-starter.
Wow! You snuck that one in there.
Here is an article by Bruce Schneier you might find interesting, it dissects the lazy assertion that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"
Yes, for the benefit of those applying, I would also echo that currently immigration interviews usually are fairly straightforward.
But it is still very important to consider the issue for society and individuals when an agency has "wide latitude" when it does decide it's time to investigate.
I'm not sure why what you wrote matters. My comment was that the assertion "but if you've got nothing to hide then the above article is a non-starter." is completely false.
I'm glad you had a positive experience. Personally, I would prefer that my government did not infiltrate my social institutions, online or off, because it corrodes the trust people have for one another.
In 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, Daniel Solove writes:
The problems caused by breaches of confidentiality do not merely consist of individual emotional distress; they involve a violation of trust within a relationship. There is a strong social value in ensuring that promises are kept and that trust is maintained in relationships. . .
In that quote Solove is referring to a business giving info to government despite its privacy policy. I think it is germane here because one doesn't expect something labeled "friend" to be an information gathering conduit for a 3rd party (such as governmental one or even a commercial one). The essay a good read for understanding some of the dimensions of privacy in contradiction to the "I've got nothing to hide" concept, which can be a convincing argument when you think you don't have anything to hide:
Don't lose too much sleep over it. The conventional wisdom in this area is not very reliable, for a variety of reasons. IANAL but am studying to that end, and being a Euro I was already interested in immigration law.
I would say the USCIS website itself is a good source of general information for the immigrant/family. After long being criticized as overly bureaucratic and unhelpful they've made a lot of 'customer service' type changes - for example, there's a tool to look up the status of petitions online which is quite new. The latest thing is provide more assistance to people being naturalized, eg via http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/citizenship which got a big makeover just in the last few weeks. Previously the would-be citizen's contact with the agency leading up to naturalization consisted of submitting forms, getting fingerprinted, and having to take the US civics quiz.
Anyhow, separating a couple during the interview typically only happens at a second interview when the USCIS officer (not agent) has specific reasons to doubt the veracity of the relationship - the couple hardly seems to know each other, or their filings are contradictory etc. If they have doubts after the first interview they usually issue a Request For Evidence inviting more documentation/clarification. Policy is to adhere to a neutral rather than skeptical stance by default, and proceed using an evidence-based methodology - challenging or accusing people at random is just going to result in complaints and slows everything down.
Merely applying doesn't put you under 'suspicion,' it's just a process of verification. The FBI does a fingerprint match and checks against the person's name in national and international law enforcement databases - this takes a while just because there's a lot of applications to work through. Most people are legit of course, so then it's just a process of going through the form evaluating the credibility and general stability of the applicant, verifying the authenticity of their marriage certificate/professional qualifications, medical reports etc. etc.
Now when they do suspect fraud, sure they might lie to see if they can catch a person out - as is true of any police interview. But it's not the default position. ICE agents (who go out looking for workplace violations etc.) are a different kettle of fish. There was a fuss at the end of last year about agents Utah in dressing up as Mormon missionaries.
My wife and I had a very smooth, easy interview. We had 30-40 photos (with family and just us), lots of joint accounts/bills, and all the paperwork they require. The couple in the cubicle next to us was however being grilled like it was the Spanish Inquisition. They didn't have any of the paperwork right, barely had any pictures, and had no joint accounts/bills. Makes it hard to prove you live together in a legitimate marriage, regardless of your circumstances.
My advice would be to get all the paperwork filled out exactly right and take extra copies of every single original document. If they want to keep a copy of your electric bill, you can just hand one over.
Well, do consult a professional if you're not sure about anything. As Chime says, not having the paperwork straight is going to upset them, and it's a lot of paperwork. Forgetting a form or failing to mention something can be expensive later.
For background, there are almost 2m applications annually for green card/citizenship, and roughly 2000 prosecutions for immigration fraud.
[extract quoted from memo]
In other words, USCIS is specifically instructing its agents to attempt to “friend” citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud...
Well, if your job is to investigate suspected fraud...
First, the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target.
Right...because determinations about whether an application is suspicious will be made before the case file is sent to FDNS. You can browse (almost) all of the Adjudicator's field manual to find out what criteria are used to make that determination; the current version is accessible via http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b...
Nor does the memo address whether or not DHS agents must reveal their government affiliation or even their real name during the friend request (...)
True, but then they're not obliged to wear uniforms or travel in marked cars either.
Second, and perhaps more disturbing, the memo assumes a user’s online profile always accurately reflects her offline life.
No, it says that this is '[g]enerally' the case. It's an outdated 2 page 'did you know?' bulletin, not the guiding legal authority of immigration investigation.
Unfortunately, this memo suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation.
Doubtless there will be a few false positives, but that's why appeal procedures exist. Again, this division's job is to investigate applications that look dubious to begin with; it's not as if the rest of the agency rubber stamps everything sent in to them and FDNS just picks out cases at random, any more than the EFF makes FOIA requests for random document numbers and hopes for the occasional interesting find.
26 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 53.5 ms ] threadWhy not? What is discriminatory about looking you up on facebook? Is the issue the pretext used to get the information, or getting that information at all, or how the information will be used? Your vehement desire for "proper" laws and the ability to sue "them" lacks detail — do you know what you really want, and if so, what is it?
Also AFAIK you don't put a social security number on facebook. Do they just look up John Doe, assume thats you and base their decision on that person?
Crooks and other nasty people should be dealt with. Whether they are new or old Americans. But we shouldn't make more things criminal than necessary.
Suppose a plain-clothes USCIS agent comes to find you in a place you are likely to be and chats to you - say in a bar, or your place of work. Is anything they discover during that chat admissible, even if they don't admit to being a USCIS agent? Because if that is okay, then why should a social network be any different?
On the other hand, if that would be inadmissible, or require some evidence beforehand for them to mount such an undercover operation, then viewing your private online data under the pretext of friendship should be out too.
Yes. Once a person has stated or otherwise shown that they are not a US citizen, the burden of proof for eligibility to be present in the US switches to them. A false claim to US citizenship is a felony, though of course exceptions exist.
This is quite different from the legal situation of a US person.
I don't know if it's true, but that, anyway, is conventional wisdom.
Compared to that, "friending" somebody in order to view their social network site seems like small potatoes.
My general sense is that the USCIS mission in these proceedings is to take a skeptical stance from the start. That is, merely applying for a green card (or, by extension, citizenship through marriage) puts you under enough of what EFF calls "suspicion" to warrant an investigation.
You would think after so many cases of abuse - some large, some small, some invoking Godwin's Law... that people would stop touting the bullshit that is "if you have nothing to hide..."
(Unfortunately, this was by far the most pleasant part of the whole process. Take, for example, the rejection of her application because the NJ State Police aren't certified by the INS for taking fingerprints. Instead, we had to go to a camera shop in Edison, NJ.)
Wow! You snuck that one in there.
Here is an article by Bruce Schneier you might find interesting, it dissects the lazy assertion that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securityma...
But it is still very important to consider the issue for society and individuals when an agency has "wide latitude" when it does decide it's time to investigate.
In 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, Daniel Solove writes:
The problems caused by breaches of confidentiality do not merely consist of individual emotional distress; they involve a violation of trust within a relationship. There is a strong social value in ensuring that promises are kept and that trust is maintained in relationships. . .
In that quote Solove is referring to a business giving info to government despite its privacy policy. I think it is germane here because one doesn't expect something labeled "friend" to be an information gathering conduit for a 3rd party (such as governmental one or even a commercial one). The essay a good read for understanding some of the dimensions of privacy in contradiction to the "I've got nothing to hide" concept, which can be a convincing argument when you think you don't have anything to hide:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
I would say the USCIS website itself is a good source of general information for the immigrant/family. After long being criticized as overly bureaucratic and unhelpful they've made a lot of 'customer service' type changes - for example, there's a tool to look up the status of petitions online which is quite new. The latest thing is provide more assistance to people being naturalized, eg via http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/citizenship which got a big makeover just in the last few weeks. Previously the would-be citizen's contact with the agency leading up to naturalization consisted of submitting forms, getting fingerprinted, and having to take the US civics quiz.
Anyhow, separating a couple during the interview typically only happens at a second interview when the USCIS officer (not agent) has specific reasons to doubt the veracity of the relationship - the couple hardly seems to know each other, or their filings are contradictory etc. If they have doubts after the first interview they usually issue a Request For Evidence inviting more documentation/clarification. Policy is to adhere to a neutral rather than skeptical stance by default, and proceed using an evidence-based methodology - challenging or accusing people at random is just going to result in complaints and slows everything down.
Merely applying doesn't put you under 'suspicion,' it's just a process of verification. The FBI does a fingerprint match and checks against the person's name in national and international law enforcement databases - this takes a while just because there's a lot of applications to work through. Most people are legit of course, so then it's just a process of going through the form evaluating the credibility and general stability of the applicant, verifying the authenticity of their marriage certificate/professional qualifications, medical reports etc. etc.
Now when they do suspect fraud, sure they might lie to see if they can catch a person out - as is true of any police interview. But it's not the default position. ICE agents (who go out looking for workplace violations etc.) are a different kettle of fish. There was a fuss at the end of last year about agents Utah in dressing up as Mormon missionaries.
We are not terribly worried, but it's nice to know we won't be put under the bright lights :-)
My advice would be to get all the paperwork filled out exactly right and take extra copies of every single original document. If they want to keep a copy of your electric bill, you can just hand one over.
For background, there are almost 2m applications annually for green card/citizenship, and roughly 2000 prosecutions for immigration fraud.
[extract quoted from memo] In other words, USCIS is specifically instructing its agents to attempt to “friend” citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud...
Well, if your job is to investigate suspected fraud...
First, the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target.
Right...because determinations about whether an application is suspicious will be made before the case file is sent to FDNS. You can browse (almost) all of the Adjudicator's field manual to find out what criteria are used to make that determination; the current version is accessible via http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b...
Nor does the memo address whether or not DHS agents must reveal their government affiliation or even their real name during the friend request (...)
True, but then they're not obliged to wear uniforms or travel in marked cars either.
Second, and perhaps more disturbing, the memo assumes a user’s online profile always accurately reflects her offline life.
No, it says that this is '[g]enerally' the case. It's an outdated 2 page 'did you know?' bulletin, not the guiding legal authority of immigration investigation.
Unfortunately, this memo suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation.
Doubtless there will be a few false positives, but that's why appeal procedures exist. Again, this division's job is to investigate applications that look dubious to begin with; it's not as if the rest of the agency rubber stamps everything sent in to them and FDNS just picks out cases at random, any more than the EFF makes FOIA requests for random document numbers and hopes for the occasional interesting find.