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U.S. Requiring Social Media Information From Visa Applicants

Hello slaves. I hope you’re all having a good day so far. It looks like you’ll have to provide all details about your social media activity to the terrorist government of the USA if you want to obtain permission to travel to their plantation from now on. I bring the following information to your attention published on The New York Times: “U.S. Requiring Social Media Information From Visa Applicants” (June 2nd 2019):

Visa applicants to the United States are required to submit any information about social media accounts they have used in the past five years under a State Department policy that started on Friday.

Such account information would give the government access to photos, locations, dates of birth, dates of milestones and other personal data commonly shared on social media.

“We already request certain contact information, travel history, family member information, and previous addresses from all visa applicants,” the State Department said in a statement. “We are constantly working to find mechanisms to improve our screening processes to protect U.S. citizens, while supporting legitimate travel to the United States.”

“This seems to be part and parcel of the same effort to have an extraordinary broad surveillance of citizens and noncitizens,” Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, said on Sunday of the latest development. “Given the scope of the surveillance efforts, it is hard to find a rational basis for the broad surveillance the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security have been doing for almost two years.”

Further, the government has been unable to prove that social media can provide reliable indications that identify a security threat, she said.

“In the absence of any such indicators, what we’ve seen domestically and abroad is government officials penalizing people’s speech, religious affiliation and other conduct,” she said.

You would think that given the large scale spying and surveillance being done by the NSA, often working together with corporations such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft as Edward Snowden revealed years ago, they would already know which social media and email accounts are used by an individual and have access to all information shared there, including private information. So why exactly is the above necessary, you may wonder? More on that later.

Had to wait in line to renew a Passport allowing me to visit members of my own species across artificially conceived borders.Neil deGrasse Tyson

Even worse is the fact that slave patrol customs agents working at the borders can demand to search your personal devices, such as your phone and laptop, when you want to enter the plantation. If your devices are locked and encrypted, they can also demand that you unlock it for them and/or hand over your password(s). As another article on The New York Times points out:

American border agents have the legal authority to conduct searches at the United States border that a police officer on the street wouldn’t. Laws that allow agents to search bags without a judge’s approval, for the purposes of immigration or security compliance, have been extended to digital devices.

Can agents force you to unlock your phone or laptop?
No. But they can ask you to comply voluntarily and make the experience rather uncomfortable if you resist. Travelers must decide how much trouble they’re willing to put up with. You may end up losing your device, since agents could seize the device for weeks before it is returned. They could also copy the data. […] Travelers have reported that they’ve been detained for hours and questioned aggressively.

Can agents force you to turn over social media passwords?
No. But those who unlock their phones are most likely giving agents full access to their social media accounts, even if they don’t tell them the passwords. Since most people remain logged into their accounts on their phones, unlocking the phone would allow officers to sift through private Facebook posts, direct messages on Twitter and Instagram photos that are set to be accessible to friends only. Mr. Elsharkawi did not give agents his social media passwords. But when he allowed an officer to look through his phone, he said, she commented on his emails and apps. He doesn’t know if she looked through his social media accounts, he added.

Clearly they can force you do comply with their demands, or else make your life very difficult. You may want to read up about the experience of Sidd Bikkannavar, a US-born NASA scientist who was detained at the border when trying to enter the plantation USA; from The Verge:

The officer also presented Bikkannavar with a document titled “Inspection of Electronic Devices” and explained that CBP had authority to search his phone. Bikkannavar did not want to hand over the device, because it was given to him by JPL and is technically NASA property. He even showed the officer the JPL barcode on the back of phone. Nonetheless, CBP asked for the phone and the access PIN. “I was cautiously telling him I wasn’t allowed to give it out, because I didn’t want to seem like I was not cooperating,” says Bikkannavar. “I told him I’m not really allowed to give the passcode; I have to protect access. But he insisted they had the authority to search it.”

The document given to Bikkannavar listed a series of consequences for failure to offer information that would allow CBP to copy the contents of the device. “I didn’t really want to explore all those consequences,” he says. “It mentioned detention and seizure.” Ultimately, he agreed to hand over the phone and PIN. The officer left with the device and didn’t return for another 30 minutes.

Another similar case involved Andreas Gal, an Apple employee who formerly worked at Mozilla on privacy and encryption initiatives. From The Washington Post:

When Andreas Gal returned from a business trip in Sweden last fall, he was carrying two company-owned devices: an iPhone XS that flashed “Confidential and Proprietary” on its lock screen and a MacBook Pro bearing a sticker that read “PROPERTY OF APPLE. PROPRIETARY.”

The three U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers who stopped Gal at San Francisco International Airport ordered him to unlock the phone and hand it over, the software engineer said in a Medium post. Gal told them he couldn’t do anything without first consulting a lawyer or his employer, due to the nondisclosure agreement he had with Apple that specifically prohibited him from giving such access.

“This request seemed to aggravate the customs officers,” he wrote in the post titled, “No one should have to travel in fear,” published Tuesday. “They informed me that I had no right to speak to an attorney at the border despite being a U.S. citizen, and threatened me that failure to immediately comply with their demand is a violation of federal criminal code.”

If you’re smart, and I assume you are since you’re reading this post, then you’ll realize that it’s wise not to take your personal devices with you when you travel — especially not to plantations such as the USA.

And don’t be fooled; this is not about:

  1. preventing criminals or terrorists from entering the USA; those people aren’t likely to discuss their plans and activities on social media, and the US government full well knows this.
  2. getting access to your personal and private information. The terrorist US government already have access to most people’s personal and private information (or can easily get it) — trust me on that.

So if they already have your information, and if it’s unlikely that they can catch criminals in this way, then why require you to give your social media information?

The answer is that:

  1. this is about coercing the global slave population to keep quiet about certain topics and to make them decide to censor themselves as much as possible (on social media) for fear of possible negative consequences in the future (punishment). It’s a social engineering tactic. It’s basically the same thing China are doing to their local slave population, where they introduce all kinds of measures to “incentivize ‘good’ behavior”. They just want to make people afraid to talk about certain topics, in order to prevent that knowledge and information from spreading (too much). Unfortunately most slaves can easily be scared into self-censorship when they believe that something they say can potentially be used against them in the future (and, in this case, result in not getting a visa to visit the plantation USA).
  2. in cases such as those of the NASA and Apple employees mentioned above, where it might be more difficult to get access to their personal, private and confidential information because of the use of strong encryption combined with their technical expertise, the terrorist US government might use such opportunities at the borders to single those people out to see what they can forcibly extract from them. As explained here:

    Companies like Elcomsoft make “forensic software” that can suck down all your photos, contacts — even passwords for your email and social media accounts — in a matter of minutes. Their customers include the police forces of various countries, militaries, and private security forces. They can use these tools to permanently archive everything there is to know about you. All they need is your unlocked phone.

From now on, if you have to travel to other plantations, look for some advice online on what to do and what to expect. Hopefully you won’t let these social engineering tactics cower you into self-censorship.

Additional Notes

Pingbacks

  1. YouTube took down two of my videos — Karel Donk (06/06/2019)

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