Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/30/guilt-by-social-graph.html
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I’m old enough to remember when the Soviet Union and Communist China were evil because they did the 1980s version of this.
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Invasive and unenforceable. And for the hat trick: incredibly expensive if they actually want anyone to monitor all those accounts.
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The bright side is that DHS, TSA, et al. are at best inconsistent and at worst completely incompetent when doing background checks on stuff like this.
I went in for my Global Entry interview, and they wanted to know all the countries I’d visited in the last 5 years. The only one(s) they followed up on were countries with a significant Muslim population. Now, if they’d have typed literally any amount of all the information (literally, My Name) I provided for the background check prior to the interview, they’d have noticed I have a long-standing online handle which contains an Arabic word. Not word one about it though, just questions about why I visited one Muslim minority country and what I did there.
tl;dr, the people in charge of screening for terrorists can’t be bothered to google you.
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I know this isn’t Reddit, but I can’t resist pointing out how appropriate your username is.
I recently got fingerprinted when entering China on a visa. I was kinda freaked out about it, but then I remembered that the USA has been doing this to visitors for as long as I can remember…
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Everyone will just list @therealdonaldtrump as their account.
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It is difficult for officials to do the job they are supposed to do, without adding more bullshit to it.
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That just means more false positives, though, when they’re looking for something compromising. “We’re not letting you into the country because of something we misunderstood/something someone else said, and we’re not going to tell you why.”
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Every social media account? I’m sure I have dozens on services I don’t even remember. For a while, it seemed like every industry, product, website, had it’s own social media platform that no one ever used.
I’m sure they won’t monitor them, or even check them unless there is some red flag (and that will lead to lots of false positives, as @Shuck points out). But, if you ever become a resident or a citizen, and piss someone off, they will be able to point out that you lied on a Visa application…
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Well luckily they have a simple-to-remember rubric to pare it down to a minority of accounts that need to be monitored…
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Well, the Trump admin already tested this in court and Gorsuch himself tossed it out. You can’t strip citizenship for a lie on a citizenship application if the lie was immaterial to citizenship being granted. ex: lying about whether you’re a war criminal would be grounds for stripping citizenship.
Idle pondering: Is there precedent for stripping citizenship of someone native born?
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I am Spartacus!
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No, I am Spartacus!
(Sorry, reflex post).
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How about denying residency or citizenship for immaterial lies?
NOLO says it can’t happen:
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Every time I think the Spanky administration can’t do anything dumber, they prove me wrong.
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It’s interesting to follow how the information becomes incrementally incorrect when going from the Federal Register to the Bloomberg article to the Boing Boing article to the Boing Boing headline. Only Visa applicants will be required to divulge social media identities and only certain social media platforms used within the past five years. You can see the actual proposals at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/03/30/2018-06496/60-day-notice-of-proposed-information-collection-application-for-nonimmigrant-visa and https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/03/30/2018-06490/60-day-notice-of-proposed-information-collection-application-for-immigrant-visa-and-alien.
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Eh, that hasn’t been tested AFAIK. Probably they can reject you and never cop to why.
So the question is… why does Trump… or his controller(s)… want to ruin the USA tourist industry?
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That excludes Canadians since no visa is required.
Hmm. Tempting to invent a fake social media rabbit hole for them to explore, and track what they’re interested in.
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