“Excuse me sir, I see you have a Boingboing.net account…please step out of the line and come with me…”
“Oh I only use that to bait libtards and science freaks who-”
“You’re not fooling anyone snowflake, lets go review your post history now…”
And so it begins.
Most apparently useless things like this end up really being about control.
OT, but I never noticed before that he’s a Ballchinian!
Don’t think it’s coincidence that all countries with reciprocal visa agreements with the US also have fingerprinting requirements now.
Give them your MySpace accounts, if you can remember them.
The one on the plane is a customs form. You need a visa before boarding the plane.
The way things are going, the customs form will require that you disclose every non-US brand you’ve eaten over the past five years.
And… how do they know whether you’ve listed all your accounts?
The 90 minute and 155 minute figures are for processing of the entire form–not just the proposed additional question.
So they will be hiring? I could really use a better paying job right now.
About as effective as requiring every terrorist to divulge their evil doer plans.
Incredibly stupid.
Until a few years ago, there was a separate green form on the plane for people from countries in the US’s “visa waiver” program. That’s since been replaced by the online ESTA form which you have to do before you travel.
IIRC the green form asked more questions than the ESTA form does (like “are you a war criminal?”). Either way it’s silly to imagine that there’s anything important the US can’t figure out from your passport details alone, so the only reason to ask people for more information is to intimidate and generally fuck with them.
that’s the key element tho.
when you have a wide enough field of arbitrary rules that you can use to exclude someone, then you use those against whomever you dislike – and just wave everybody else through.
it’s by design a way to exclude groups of people without specifically targeting any group by name. ( people from muslim majority countries, people from mexico, etc. )
it also does wonders for corruption when you can slip money to the person in front of you so that they look the other way when you’re passing through.
all in all a pretty great development in the march away from the rule of law.
I am Spartacus and so is my wife.
Republicans from Ed Meese and Dick Cheney to Jeff “Evil Keebler” Sessions have made noises about how expressing certain opinions or making the wrong kind of statement can be taken to indicate that the speaker has implicitly renounced his or her American citizenship.
Yep. Right now they seem to be applying this to a random sampling of those in “preferred” groups - which just provides nice cover when they specifically target members of “non-preferred” groups. Like the “random” extra screening at airports, and how certain people seem to always get it… “Hey, you aren’t being targeted - it’s random! See, we did this white guy, too!”
Hey, is that a counterfeit Micky Mouse watch you’re wearing?
Task #1 for today: create a random, and to remain dormant, social media account with the name “MyBallsAreItchy” - just for personal amusement when filling in the Visa form, natch.
If they find a mention of your Instagram in tweets, but you didn’t list it on your visa application, boom! busted!
I too am re-considering visiting the US in the future. Not worth the risk, and I live a fairly clean and simple digital-social life.
I’m not on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or anything, but can’t you have multiple accounts on a specific platform or service?
Do you remember where you read this? A quick Ducking leads me to this horrible story:
But this was without twitter.
And this ridiculous story:
But this is from well before Trump.
