Clarification to downvoters: "Freedom" implies corruption of language, as in the concept of freedom has a specific meaning and suggests an overall trend. Fear implies that you can not trust others, instead the striving for absolute control and transparency, resulting in the violation of rights. The question is honest, what merits these extreme measures? The downvoting without comment is dishonest. You did not understand or did not care enough to parse it and respond properly.
An extreme waste of resources from an anti terrorism perspective. But, occasionally useful when looking for people lying about their reasons to enter the US.
Which will come at the cost of billions of tourist dollars when people stop coming in because the entry lines are so long dealing with all of this nonsense.
Tourism in the US is heavily concentrated in blue zones. So a double "win" for the Trumpists. Subject the foreigners to indignity and hit the liberals in the wallet. SMFH
This I can understand. I have a friend who travels to the US semi regularly on a tourist reason (has family there) but then works informally, selling handicrafts / jewellery at markets and posts all over his facebook about what he is selling and when he will be selling it and where.
We've not been the home of the brave for a while now and I think we're pretty far from the land of the free to the outside world. This is the next level of "papers please" and I bet if this remains and is enforced will be used against citzens as well. May or may not be as bad as China's social credit system.
I want to say this feels "un-American" but I'm not sure we'll ever come back from over-reaching moves like this and TSA.
“Home of the brave” comes from a line in the American national anthem [0]. You will find similar patriotic statements in all countries’ national anthems.
Sure, but that doesn't mean any of what's in the anthem is in the citizens' national conscience. Not many other countries have the equivalent of the American Civil religion...
So... this is a bad policy, but let's not hyperbolize.
The fourth amendment is still a thing, and it protects non-citizens and citizens alike.
The demand here isn't for your social media history, it's for your account IDs. If they want your (non-public) posts, they still have to get a warrant from a judge and show cause, just like they do now.
The feature they're demanding is to know who you are, so they know where to target that warrant request. And that's arguably bad, and a slippery slope.
BUT IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT LIKE THE PRC'S SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM. Stop it.
Hyperbole is politically useful when you are sliding down a slippery slope. It anticipates a worse future, which is a useful brake for myopic people in the present who can't see what we are sliding into.
Maybe so, but traditionally HN has been not very accomodating of shameless spin like that. If you want to make the case for that slope and how policy will evolve, then make it. But spinning "who are you on facebook" into "we'll track everything you do online" is just wrong.
Facebook's datacenters aren't on the border though, so I don't see how that's relevant. That's a bad policy, but it hinges on the fact that people entering the country are right at the edge of the "jurisdiction" requirement of the equal protection clause.
Look, I get that people are angry about everything in the civil liberties space, but not every policy is the end of the world. Argue about specifics, not good guys & bad guys.
>it was held that the Border Patrol's routine stopping of a vehicle at a permanent checkpoint located on a major highway away from the Mexican border for brief questioning of the vehicle's occupants is consistent with the Fourth Amendment
>However, searches of automobiles without a warrant by roving patrols have been deemed unconstitutional
Yes, the 100mile exception exists. No, you don't lose all 4th amendment rights.
>What practical protection does it provide if the requirement for a warrant/probable cause are deemed null and void?
I'm not defending the 100 mile exception. I'm only clarifying that the extent of the infringement (as far as courts have ruled) is limited to permanent checkpoints.
In the context of the parent comments however, I don't think the 4th amendment is relevant. The demand is for your account identifiers. Unless you have it written down on a piece of paper or an unecrypted device, it's the 5th amendment protecting you. Should you give them your account identifiers, it's going to be a stretch for them to use the border search exception to compel facebook (or any other service) to give up their records on you.
This is an important distinction. By conflating the two systems, it makes the severe case (PRC) closer to a normalized method (US Policy; same as corporate HR). It's all a slippery slope.
>> The demand here isn't for your social media history, it's for your account IDs. If they want your (non-public) posts, they still have to get a warrant from a judge and show cause, just like they do now.
So what does this mean for people who want to publish their thoughts under a pseudonym? Or people who (like me) don’t have any meaningful social media presence (no Facebook, for example). Does that make them suspect, liable for more elaborate screening, easier to deny them access, etc? How far back do you have to supply your details? What if I forget to mention some account I used 10 years ago, can that be seen as failure to comply, and can it be held against me? I can see many other ways something like this could be abused to harass innocent people. In that sense, I can see where the comparison with the social credit system is coming from.
> The fourth amendment is still a thing, and it protects non-citizens and citizens alike.
That's not entirely correct, despite your emphatic all caps assertions.
Under under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008[1], they can wait for a non-US person to depart the US, then use the full powers of the NSA to access the harvested communications under the username(s) collected at the border.
The level of "cause" needed for FISA warrant is very thin, and only 0.3% of FISA warrants are rejected[3].
So first, FISA warrants aren't remotely relevant to the policy at hand of wanting routine social media identifiers.
Second: FISA is one court, the government can't commit mass surveillance along the lines of a social credit system using FISA warrants even if it wanted to. You literally think those three (I think it's three) judges are going to pen hundreds of millions of signatures on physical pieces of paper?
Once again, you and the other aggrieved posters in this subthread want to turn this particular issue into a proxy for warrantless surveillance, or border searches, or immigration abuses.
And it's not. It's a requirement to get your facebook ID. Not every policy is the end of the world, and if you want the uninformed masses to take your (and my!) civil liberties worries seriously, you need to present arguments that make sense and aren't irrelevant digressions.
You can say for sure that their process exists as one sheet per person/username? These documents are not available for public audit, so I find the faith you demonstrate to be questionable.
You know for a fact that there is no concentrated effort to slurp up as much information as possible to provide a political/intelligence bargaining chip with other state's intelligence services?
You are right about one thing
; it isn't as bad as the PRC's social credit system: yet. However, it is there as a foundation for one, and even what we have was considered unprecedented and the stuff of crackpots before evidence of the existence of these types of systems was made bare before all by Snowden.
Also, the 4th Amendment you insist provides so much protection? It doesn't apply under current case law. As soon as you share your information with a third party, 4th Amendment stops applying as there is no expectation of privacy; except in the few and far between carveouts of medical records or legal communique with an attorney. I don't personally buy that reasoning (Third Party Doctrine) but the courts do; act accordingly.
>FISA warrants aren't remotely relevant to the policy at hand of wanting routine social media identifiers.
Uh, how so? It provides a known good selector for future surveillance. It’s probably the reason it’s on the form and the privacy implications are definitely relevant to the discussion.
>You literally think those three (I think it's three) judges are going to pen hundreds of millions of signatures on physical pieces of paper?
> The fourth amendment is still a thing, and it protects non-citizens and citizens alike.
This sounds like someone who has never lived in the US as a visa holder. If you are living in the US on a visa or even on a green card, CBP agents have a shocking amount of discretion to detain.
There are many other areas of the immigration system where the standard of due process is significantly different from what many Americans think their country stands for, but regarding the Fourth Amendment specifically: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
> If you are living in the US on a visa or even on a green card, CBP agents have a shocking amount of discretion to detain.
My comment you replied to wasn't about ability to detain or the definitions of "probable cause" in immigration law, it was about the specific policy at issue which is demanding social media IDs so they can issue a warrant to facebook or whoever. And specifically that it was being likened to a surveillance program, when it clearly is not.
All I'm saying is that if you want people to take your anger seriously (and I do! I'm on your side here!) you need to argue specifics and not just mash vote buttons based on your tribal affiliation.
This policy is not just like China's social credit system. There are other policies that are bad. Those aren't arguments against that point.
> BUT IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT LIKE THE PRC'S SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM. Stop it.
Agree. But it is worth comparing because, while we do not live in a country that has extreme government over-reach, we are
(and have been) headed down that path. You said "know who you are, so they know where to target that warrant request" which is, to me, in-line with the ideas of the social credit system. The idea that some group, some where, is collecting this information to use against someone or someones. To think they aren't / won't is naive.
If it doesn't turn toward citizens then I'm happy to be wrong and admit it. We'll see...
It's like a version of systematic desensitization where we continue to normalize giving up vast amounts of personal information on our own (to sites like Facebook) and asking tourists to point government agencies to that trove of information.
I did not intend to hyperbolize nor conflate as another person said. I said this "may or may not be as bad" and it will depend entirely on what is done with the information and how much it's use "expands" (or doesn't).
When I asked in school in the late 90's "how do we know the CIA doesn't just spy on us" the answer was "there are laws that prevent it". Now we know how that really works (or at least some of it) so I believe I'm entitled to my skepticism (and you're entitled to disagree).
Hey, I was against all of it from Day 1. I was not cowed by 9/11 like most of you seem to have been. You let this happen by being too afraid and letting .gov be your mommy and daddy. I told you it was a terrible idea. I've been on message now for well over 20 years. Nobody listens, though. And nobody listens when I say corporations need to be reined in or we've had it.
Most of you are in favor of strict gun control. As soon as that can be enacted on a broader scale, your rights are going to disappear even faster. With zero ability to fight back, do you think anyone is going to listen to you anymore? Haha, no!
Oh yes, and lest I forget, you want to be kind to "immigrants" but you have allowed the media to confuse and blur the concept between the legal kind and the illegal kind. One kind can help strengthen our nation and its citizens (although big-tech is abusing the ever-loving shit out of the H1B system in order to kill your earning power, a super-negative downside). The other kind is being used as a sort of bio-weapon to flood localities, especially conservative ones, and destroy infrastructure and overwhelm the legal system until it, too, collapses.
Your voting patterns and your apathy bring America closer and closer to a 3rd World nation each year.
I did an ESTA application a few weeks ago and was wondering why anyone in their right mind would fill in the section where you can optionally provide social media details. Guess this answers that question.
That question has been there for a while. I opted out of answering it (it is optional, and I read it still is), and didn’t have problems in January. Will test this again in a couple of weeks...
Maybe this is overly cynical, but I think they can. Otherwise everyone could just claim they don’t have an account. But this kind of policy deters people from wanting to visit or immigrate to the US, which is this administrations real goal.
NSA and by extension CIA already have this data as its unencrypted and flowing through the telecom taps they do.
I think it implies that certain tech solutions by a certain founder are not performing as gov was led to expect.
So basically visitors basically being told legally hey out yourself as far as public social messages because we the US gov have some tech problems with tracking dow3n that social message keyword stuff.
How can US citizens fight this? It's not unconstitutional, since non-citizens aren't covered by the Bill of Rights. Do we just hope & pray that the next administration is gracious enough to revert a policy decision that has no negative impact on themselves or their constituents?
The border search exception means that certain searches are assumed to be "reasonable" that wouldn't be otherwise. Exactly what searches are reasonable and when has always been a bit in flux.
Quite a few I should think, people do change their visa status, renew visas, swap between different types of visas depending on their work/student/marital status.
Visas and statuses are different things. Visa is essentially an approval of an application for a status. You get it from a US consulate. There are no US consulates on the US soil.
Your status is granted (or denied) by a border agent, based on your visa, when you cross into the country. Changing one can be done on the US soil and the process does not require a visa. But if you want a visa stamp for a new status then you have to visit a US consulate and that requires leaving the US.
> since non-citizens aren't covered by the Bill of Rights
That is a common misperception. Most of the Bill of Rights applies to "persons", which includes non-citizens and even undocumented aliens. However, it doesn't apply to people not under the jurisdiction of the US, such as foreign nationals overseas. When someone applies for a visa from overseas they don't have these rights. Likewise those still outside US territory who are presenting themselves at a border seeking entrance.
Once on US soil, Constitutional protections generally apply.
I've always found it odd that if we were invaded, the current 'interpretation' (because I find it really hard to believe this was the intention when it was written) would have rights extended to them.
It seems incredibly obvious to me that the law, at the very least, should have a clause for being here legally.
It applies to all people "subject to the jurisdiction" of the US. Members of an invading army obviously don't qualify, even if they were on US soil. when the US captured Japanese soldier occupy the Alutian islands, they were kept as POWs, not charged with "illegal invasion" or whatever.
Under international law, they have to be treated this way and not charged with crimes. As long as a soldier is acting under the laws of war, they can't be tried for violations of ordinary criminal law. They can only be held for the duration of hostilities and then must be returned to their home country.
So they really aren't subject to domestic law at all.
So which articles of the bill of rights do you think shouldn't apply to illegal aliens? Note that the one concerning fair trials and so on explicitly states that it doesn't apply in times of war.
> non-citizens aren't covered by the Bill of Rights.
That's not correct, and two centuries of case law agrees with the plain language of the constitution: no State shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws".
>"As we've seen around the world in recent years, social media can be a major forum for terrorist sentiment and activity. This will be a vital tool to screen out terrorists, public safety threats, and other dangerous individuals from gaining immigration benefits and setting foot on US soil."
Now, we do some very simple replacement:
>"As we've seen around the world in recent years, social media can be a major forum for communist sentiment and activity. This will be a vital tool to screen out communists, public safety threats, and other dangerous individuals from gaining immigration benefits and setting foot on US soil."
If it's good enough for McCarthy, it's good enough for me.
China is a communist country and has increasingly been committing human rights' violations in their attempt to become the supreme world superpower. This is publicly known
This article is short on details. What does "social media details" mean? Is that username and password, or just username? The former is much worse than the latter.
I'm very wary of what I share publicly, so if you only see my public posts then I'm not too worried. But I sure as hell wouldn't be compromising my security and privacy and giving out my passwords. I would sooner choose a new random password, write it down, and then travel, and simply not use (or even be able to log in to, or disclose the passwords of) my social media accounts while traveling. What would they do then?
It's public handles only. They specifically say they do not want your passwords. They also will not circumvent any security, so if you have a twitter account locked, or fb posts to friends-only, they are not included. This is explicitly about public postings and public information.
Everybody traveling to the US needs a VISA, unless they have a waiver, which requires an ESTA, which requires some personal contact information. I don't know if the social media info will be added to the ESTA application, but it wouldn't surprise me. The visa waiver program also only applies to about 35-40 nations (there are 190 or so in the UN).
Obviously, being granted a visa to visit a country as a foreign person is a privilege under law; this is totally different from restrictions placed on citizens (or persons legally present in the country). This would be terrible if applied to citizens in a LE/IC context.
For visas, there are some serious potential negatives to this (it might be used to target those critical of the US Government or specific Presidents, it might be used as a proxy for religion or sexual orientation or some other protected status).
It also has positives: aside from catching incredibly stupid terrorists or other undesirable aliens who post a lot of clearly indicative content and then report, it also allows an easy rejection for a person who fails to report a known bad account already connected to him. It's a mistake to assume all terrorists or undesirable aliens have perfect OPSEC.
The one corner case where it's probably exceptionally useful is if there's someone like circa-2015 Anjem Choudary who hasn't yet been convicted of a crime, but is recruiting for IS using various social media handles. He's a known individual and more effective as a recruiter due to his public status. He then has to choose either to not report (and thus be banned), to report (and thus be banned), or to delegate US recruiting to someone else (who will be less effective).
I'd prefer we collect all this data and then ALSO have a more transparent process for processing visas. It should be clear why one is being rejected, and an opportunity to appeal. There should be reporting of aggregate statistics. The thing I'm most worried about would be a covert policy, of, say, "no redheaded people" which was actually enforced by marking every redhead as an IRA member and rejecting as a terrorist, but that is something which could be addressed. There are probably also explicit policies which people find objectionable and could be addressed through public pressure/voting/etc. (right now I think the ESTA bars for people who visit specific countries might be bad, although I don't know how much worse non-ESTA visa process is if you're from an ESTA country.)
USG (and commercial sources) already have increasingly-complete name/passport/etc. to social media identifier and activity databases, so the main point here is to go from xx% to a higher level, and then to set up a "you lied on the form" opportunity for rejection or deportation.
I think because it's now going to be a required question? It's one thing if you're putting information about yourself for the public to see and having the government research it independently, but it's another for it to be expected that you hand over your account handles to social media accounts that might not even be publicly visible in the first place. Even worse that the government would be essentially using multinational corporations as de facto identity vetting.
How can they possibly require people who don't have social media profiles to hand such details over? Where's the proof that someone has or hasn't a social media profile? If they can verify that someone who claimed not to have a Facebook account indeed does, then why ask the question at all?
And if the US government is going to rely on Facebook and Google for identify vetting, then we've really entered an overtly "CorpGov" era, to steal a term from Yippies. Even if this is only a problem for visa applicants at the moment, who's to say what the next step will be?
Cory Doctorow wrote a short story on this (google search information and online postings being searched at airport customs) back in the early 2000s called, "Scroogled": http://superkuh.com/scroogled.html
For now, it likely serves a few purposes: to cross-reference information in the database, as a legitimate reason to deny someone who may have lied to the officer, to uncover new information about the individual [1] & to decrease the need of a court order.
The best course of action a civilian can do is to put pressure on their govs to create a system that protects their perceived interests.
[1] Since the person can't tell what kind of information the immigration office has, they are more likely to over-present
Considering the workload on visa reviewers, I highly doubt they are perusing through people’s social media and making a judgement.
I’m assuming DHS already has a list of flagged handles and just comparing the two against each other. I also assume handles are stored so if flagged at a later date, a visa could be revoked.
93 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadSo I’m not sure it’s much of a win.
Which to be fair they put themselves on quite a while ago with other shit.
https://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2017-I-001/documents/US%20Vi...
So, while their is likely some backlash, people seem to just accept with things.
We've not been the home of the brave for a while now and I think we're pretty far from the land of the free to the outside world. This is the next level of "papers please" and I bet if this remains and is enforced will be used against citzens as well. May or may not be as bad as China's social credit system.
I want to say this feels "un-American" but I'm not sure we'll ever come back from over-reaching moves like this and TSA.
No more nor no less than any other country, who all have their own cultural stories why they are brave as well
Like who? None of the countries I've lived in is anywhere near to calling themselves the "home of the brave" or something similar.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Spangled_Banner
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion
The fourth amendment is still a thing, and it protects non-citizens and citizens alike.
The demand here isn't for your social media history, it's for your account IDs. If they want your (non-public) posts, they still have to get a warrant from a judge and show cause, just like they do now.
The feature they're demanding is to know who you are, so they know where to target that warrant request. And that's arguably bad, and a slippery slope.
BUT IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT LIKE THE PRC'S SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM. Stop it.
Even in airports?
> BUT IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT LIKE THE PRC'S SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM. Stop it.
Agreed, not yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Look, I get that people are angry about everything in the civil liberties space, but not every policy is the end of the world. Argue about specifics, not good guys & bad guys.
>it was held that the Border Patrol's routine stopping of a vehicle at a permanent checkpoint located on a major highway away from the Mexican border for brief questioning of the vehicle's occupants is consistent with the Fourth Amendment
>However, searches of automobiles without a warrant by roving patrols have been deemed unconstitutional
Yes, the 100mile exception exists. No, you don't lose all 4th amendment rights.
Claiming that is "consistent with the Fourth Amendment" is just mental gymnastics, like saying a corporation is a literal person.
I'm not defending the 100 mile exception. I'm only clarifying that the extent of the infringement (as far as courts have ruled) is limited to permanent checkpoints.
In the context of the parent comments however, I don't think the 4th amendment is relevant. The demand is for your account identifiers. Unless you have it written down on a piece of paper or an unecrypted device, it's the 5th amendment protecting you. Should you give them your account identifiers, it's going to be a stretch for them to use the border search exception to compel facebook (or any other service) to give up their records on you.
So what does this mean for people who want to publish their thoughts under a pseudonym? Or people who (like me) don’t have any meaningful social media presence (no Facebook, for example). Does that make them suspect, liable for more elaborate screening, easier to deny them access, etc? How far back do you have to supply your details? What if I forget to mention some account I used 10 years ago, can that be seen as failure to comply, and can it be held against me? I can see many other ways something like this could be abused to harass innocent people. In that sense, I can see where the comparison with the social credit system is coming from.
That's not entirely correct, despite your emphatic all caps assertions.
Under under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008[1], they can wait for a non-US person to depart the US, then use the full powers of the NSA to access the harvested communications under the username(s) collected at the border.
The level of "cause" needed for FISA warrant is very thin, and only 0.3% of FISA warrants are rejected[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FISA_Amendments_Act_of_2008
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
[3] https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2013/06/fisa-court...
Second: FISA is one court, the government can't commit mass surveillance along the lines of a social credit system using FISA warrants even if it wanted to. You literally think those three (I think it's three) judges are going to pen hundreds of millions of signatures on physical pieces of paper?
Once again, you and the other aggrieved posters in this subthread want to turn this particular issue into a proxy for warrantless surveillance, or border searches, or immigration abuses.
And it's not. It's a requirement to get your facebook ID. Not every policy is the end of the world, and if you want the uninformed masses to take your (and my!) civil liberties worries seriously, you need to present arguments that make sense and aren't irrelevant digressions.
You can say for sure that their process exists as one sheet per person/username? These documents are not available for public audit, so I find the faith you demonstrate to be questionable.
You know for a fact that there is no concentrated effort to slurp up as much information as possible to provide a political/intelligence bargaining chip with other state's intelligence services?
You are right about one thing ; it isn't as bad as the PRC's social credit system: yet. However, it is there as a foundation for one, and even what we have was considered unprecedented and the stuff of crackpots before evidence of the existence of these types of systems was made bare before all by Snowden.
Also, the 4th Amendment you insist provides so much protection? It doesn't apply under current case law. As soon as you share your information with a third party, 4th Amendment stops applying as there is no expectation of privacy; except in the few and far between carveouts of medical records or legal communique with an attorney. I don't personally buy that reasoning (Third Party Doctrine) but the courts do; act accordingly.
Uh, how so? It provides a known good selector for future surveillance. It’s probably the reason it’s on the form and the privacy implications are definitely relevant to the discussion.
>You literally think those three (I think it's three) judges are going to pen hundreds of millions of signatures on physical pieces of paper?
They do bulk orders.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/ve...
This sounds like someone who has never lived in the US as a visa holder. If you are living in the US on a visa or even on a green card, CBP agents have a shocking amount of discretion to detain.
There are many other areas of the immigration system where the standard of due process is significantly different from what many Americans think their country stands for, but regarding the Fourth Amendment specifically: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
My comment you replied to wasn't about ability to detain or the definitions of "probable cause" in immigration law, it was about the specific policy at issue which is demanding social media IDs so they can issue a warrant to facebook or whoever. And specifically that it was being likened to a surveillance program, when it clearly is not.
All I'm saying is that if you want people to take your anger seriously (and I do! I'm on your side here!) you need to argue specifics and not just mash vote buttons based on your tribal affiliation.
This policy is not just like China's social credit system. There are other policies that are bad. Those aren't arguments against that point.
Agree. But it is worth comparing because, while we do not live in a country that has extreme government over-reach, we are (and have been) headed down that path. You said "know who you are, so they know where to target that warrant request" which is, to me, in-line with the ideas of the social credit system. The idea that some group, some where, is collecting this information to use against someone or someones. To think they aren't / won't is naive.
If it doesn't turn toward citizens then I'm happy to be wrong and admit it. We'll see...
It's like a version of systematic desensitization where we continue to normalize giving up vast amounts of personal information on our own (to sites like Facebook) and asking tourists to point government agencies to that trove of information.
I did not intend to hyperbolize nor conflate as another person said. I said this "may or may not be as bad" and it will depend entirely on what is done with the information and how much it's use "expands" (or doesn't).
When I asked in school in the late 90's "how do we know the CIA doesn't just spy on us" the answer was "there are laws that prevent it". Now we know how that really works (or at least some of it) so I believe I'm entitled to my skepticism (and you're entitled to disagree).
Most of you are in favor of strict gun control. As soon as that can be enacted on a broader scale, your rights are going to disappear even faster. With zero ability to fight back, do you think anyone is going to listen to you anymore? Haha, no!
Oh yes, and lest I forget, you want to be kind to "immigrants" but you have allowed the media to confuse and blur the concept between the legal kind and the illegal kind. One kind can help strengthen our nation and its citizens (although big-tech is abusing the ever-loving shit out of the H1B system in order to kill your earning power, a super-negative downside). The other kind is being used as a sort of bio-weapon to flood localities, especially conservative ones, and destroy infrastructure and overwhelm the legal system until it, too, collapses.
Your voting patterns and your apathy bring America closer and closer to a 3rd World nation each year.
I thought ESTA was the basically almost-not-a-visa they use for EU et al that basically just checks you're not a felon or a terrorist
NSA and by extension CIA already have this data as its unencrypted and flowing through the telecom taps they do.
I think it implies that certain tech solutions by a certain founder are not performing as gov was led to expect.
So basically visitors basically being told legally hey out yourself as far as public social messages because we the US gov have some tech problems with tracking dow3n that social message keyword stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Brief stops for questioning at a fixed post on a highway are legal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Martinez-Fuer...
But it seems you can't actually physically search vehicles, unless something has since modified this precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Ortiz
Your status is granted (or denied) by a border agent, based on your visa, when you cross into the country. Changing one can be done on the US soil and the process does not require a visa. But if you want a visa stamp for a new status then you have to visit a US consulate and that requires leaving the US.
That is a common misperception. Most of the Bill of Rights applies to "persons", which includes non-citizens and even undocumented aliens. However, it doesn't apply to people not under the jurisdiction of the US, such as foreign nationals overseas. When someone applies for a visa from overseas they don't have these rights. Likewise those still outside US territory who are presenting themselves at a border seeking entrance.
Once on US soil, Constitutional protections generally apply.
It seems incredibly obvious to me that the law, at the very least, should have a clause for being here legally.
So they really aren't subject to domestic law at all.
That's not correct, and two centuries of case law agrees with the plain language of the constitution: no State shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws".
>"As we've seen around the world in recent years, social media can be a major forum for terrorist sentiment and activity. This will be a vital tool to screen out terrorists, public safety threats, and other dangerous individuals from gaining immigration benefits and setting foot on US soil."
Now, we do some very simple replacement:
>"As we've seen around the world in recent years, social media can be a major forum for communist sentiment and activity. This will be a vital tool to screen out communists, public safety threats, and other dangerous individuals from gaining immigration benefits and setting foot on US soil."
If it's good enough for McCarthy, it's good enough for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm very wary of what I share publicly, so if you only see my public posts then I'm not too worried. But I sure as hell wouldn't be compromising my security and privacy and giving out my passwords. I would sooner choose a new random password, write it down, and then travel, and simply not use (or even be able to log in to, or disclose the passwords of) my social media accounts while traveling. What would they do then?
https://www.apnews.com/c96a215355b242e58107c2125c18fc4a
For visas, there are some serious potential negatives to this (it might be used to target those critical of the US Government or specific Presidents, it might be used as a proxy for religion or sexual orientation or some other protected status).
It also has positives: aside from catching incredibly stupid terrorists or other undesirable aliens who post a lot of clearly indicative content and then report, it also allows an easy rejection for a person who fails to report a known bad account already connected to him. It's a mistake to assume all terrorists or undesirable aliens have perfect OPSEC.
The one corner case where it's probably exceptionally useful is if there's someone like circa-2015 Anjem Choudary who hasn't yet been convicted of a crime, but is recruiting for IS using various social media handles. He's a known individual and more effective as a recruiter due to his public status. He then has to choose either to not report (and thus be banned), to report (and thus be banned), or to delegate US recruiting to someone else (who will be less effective).
I'd prefer we collect all this data and then ALSO have a more transparent process for processing visas. It should be clear why one is being rejected, and an opportunity to appeal. There should be reporting of aggregate statistics. The thing I'm most worried about would be a covert policy, of, say, "no redheaded people" which was actually enforced by marking every redhead as an IRA member and rejecting as a terrorist, but that is something which could be addressed. There are probably also explicit policies which people find objectionable and could be addressed through public pressure/voting/etc. (right now I think the ESTA bars for people who visit specific countries might be bad, although I don't know how much worse non-ESTA visa process is if you're from an ESTA country.)
USG (and commercial sources) already have increasingly-complete name/passport/etc. to social media identifier and activity databases, so the main point here is to go from xx% to a higher level, and then to set up a "you lied on the form" opportunity for rejection or deportation.
On balance, I think this is a good policy change.
And if the US government is going to rely on Facebook and Google for identify vetting, then we've really entered an overtly "CorpGov" era, to steal a term from Yippies. Even if this is only a problem for visa applicants at the moment, who's to say what the next step will be?
The best course of action a civilian can do is to put pressure on their govs to create a system that protects their perceived interests.
[1] Since the person can't tell what kind of information the immigration office has, they are more likely to over-present
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20065142
Considering the workload on visa reviewers, I highly doubt they are perusing through people’s social media and making a judgement.
I’m assuming DHS already has a list of flagged handles and just comparing the two against each other. I also assume handles are stored so if flagged at a later date, a visa could be revoked.
What business is it of anyone's? What do they think they are going to find?