Proposal to add optional social media account fields to US Customs arrival forms
federalregister.gov
federalregister.gov
I wonder if anyone has done any research on whether/how much this is measurably affecting the US economy.
It's just not worth the effort at that point.
Over time, my views have gradually relaxed, and usually once or twice a year I consider returning to the US. Stuff like this puts me right off, but sadly I know the UK will no doubt follow suit.
Also if you think this is ok because it doesn't apply to US citizens, it doesn't apply right now. When it's declared a roaring success, there will no doubt be an attempt to extend it to US citizens.
As far as the UK, their processes are just as stringent but less public. It is interesting that the UK allows in some radical Islamic clerics but banned an American talk show host who talked about radical Islamic clerics.
The U.K. Has some of the strictest immigration in Europe for non Europeans. I am not defending the US or DHS, I am only providing some perspective that the US isn't particularly unique, just more public about it.
I agree. I strongly dislike the US proposals discussed here, but the fact is travelling abroad means you've already given up much of your privacy.
Those of us in Europe and the US have a somewhat contradictory attitude toward privacy - opposing certain rules or regulations, while happily ignoring others. Take the UK, where the British government has intrusive surveillance laws. A self-serving and apathetic media discourages discussion or opposition to such laws. On the other hand, there was strong opposition against mandatory ID cards when the idea was proposed a few years ago, possibly more to do with the cost of the scheme and little trust in the competency of the government to carry out such a proposal.
So, yes we do have a somewhat inconsistent attitude to privacy. Even in Continental Europe (if the country is part of the Schengen area), biometric passports are common. Applying for a passport often means providing your fingerprints - something a lot of people might be uncomfortable doing.
Yes and thanks for correcting me otherwise I probably would've gone around saying that.
I agree about the UK. It wasn't always this way and I know lots of people who have headaches coming over. I deal with some of these headaches each year working on 44CON - in fact we had one speaker have their visa declined, which has never happened before.
Unfortunately the way the UK is going at the moment it seems isolationism is preferable, and I suspect things will only get worse.
Even though the social media question is optional, it raises a flag that you didn't fill it in and you run a higher risk of getting questioned/interrogated at the airport.
It saves time for the agents that they don't have to search for someone on social media, but it also makes everyone aware that this is being done. (potentially hurting security because before sending the form a terrorist will now clean up his facebook if he has a dirty profile) This is part of mass surveillance, and at what point will the form say that you have to add agent X to your friends list on social media, so they can snoop around more??
-Where does it stop? For me it stopped a long time ago, I just won't go there. Instead I enjoyed holidays elsewhere around the world. edit- some spelling mistakes.
We were thinking of a family holiday and ruled out the US because of how complicated he visa process is. I'm sure we're not alone.
For people like you and me, we are aware of this before we get overexcited and commit to the holiday, giving us the freedom to easily choose another destination.
It will have measurable impact on the millions of people who have to give up privacy to enter the US, some proportion of which is likely to be further negatively affected by having something "suspicious" in their profile. Like being idiots who once liked something offensive as a joke, or being friends with some idiot who is connected to ISIS on some social network.
However, this policy is entirely dumb because social media profiles will be created specifically for travelers to be 'clean.'
I imagine that in future we will hear about travelers being denied entry because they- "fraudulently stated wrong social media accounts"... or something like that.
Consider that this is someone's first experience on US soil and it sets the tone for the whole trip. Nothing like this has happened in any of the other countries I've been to, including India, Vietnam, Cambodia etc.
> Form: Estimated Annual Cost to Public: $26,325,300.
> Website: Estimated Annual Cost to the Public: $265,020,000.
What a waste.
All legislation, regulations and bureaucratic procedures have negative externalities just by virtue of existing. Each little piece makes it just that much harder for someone to find what they're looking for, or makes a process take a little bit more time, or makes it take a little bit more effort to learn the entire thing.
Individually, the marginal cost of each little piece is small, and they're generally introduced for good reasons, but the end result of bloated legal codes, regulatory frameworks and "red tape" is undeniable. For example, "ignorance of the law is no defence", but how many people know the entire legal code? (Answer: nobody)
But what they're doing here is attempting to quantify the externalities, and crucially: taking into account that a tiny cost spread among a large number of people can produce a substantial cost in absolute terms. People are bad at doing this intuitively due to scope insensitivity, and the only real solution is to estimate actual numbers for the number of people affected, the amount of time it costs, and the value of their time, and then multiply them together to come up with a hard number.
And that's exactly what's been done here. You could perhaps quibble about the exact figures, and there are probably other more intangible and difficult to quantify externalities that haven't been taken into consideration, but other than that it's essentially a flawless application of utilitarian ethics.
Frankly, I find that utterly astonishing.
I am guessing that doing this sort of analysis is required by some sort of rules or regulation, and I would love to know when this was introduced, by whom it was introduced, and at what scope this requirement exists. Is this now a requirement for all changes to rules affecting the public by US Federal agencies?
While the fact that the paperwork Reduction Act created this new bureaucratic step is amusing, it served to rectify the earlier situation where a lot of federal paperwork was unreasonably complicated just because it was nobody's job to make it otherwise.
Form:
- The forms will have to be redesigned and reprinted. Not cheap. Don't forget, the 94W is in a variety of languages.
- Flight crew will have to be trained to answer this question. For 94W form.
- Agent console will have to be updated.
- Which means agents will have to be trained to handle this data.
- Embassies will have to be trained as well.
Website:
- Updates to the website. Don't forget different languages.
- Help documentation will have to be created for the web.
Other:
- Data will have to be aggregated from social site. Development costs.
- New console will have to be created to look at a user's streams.
- Staff will have to pull and review the data.
- New infrastructure (servers, software, upkeep) will have to be put in place to handle this.
Just thinking for a few minutes, it seems expensive. It is not just a field on a form or website, it is a whole staff, backend, ball of wax.
They are referring to the estimated burden in terms of the time spent by the people filling in the forms.
I think supoort for other languages cannot ever justify significant price in US governmental affairs.
It looks like 18 different languages are provided. I don't travel internationally often (and usually to English speaking countries), but I thought I'd heard that other languages were available on request.
This is not for citizens, only aliens.
Edit: actually, yes it does affect US citizen. Do you know who is likely to have connections on social networks with US citizens? Non-US citizens coming or leaving the US. Kind of shocking to think about huh.
This reduces public backlash while you can still start implementing it.
Devil's advocate - are they already checking everyone and this just actually saves them the time?
>optional
My question is: How is this at the #1 spot with 8 votes?
When something is "optional" but it's there so that if provided the DHS can get visibility to "possible nefarious activity and connections", how likely is it that they will start seeing failure to provide it as a sign that you need to be investigated more closely?
> My question is: How is this at the #1 spot with 8 votes?
Because Asia is going to bed and it's early Sunday morning in Europe, and it was submitted a short while ago, and hence it has little competition that hasn't started "aging out".
The rationale that I've gathered from this is that they're going to investigate you anyways by trying to find your social media profiles, etc. This is a long process, so to make the process quicker you can opt-in your social media handles.
In other words, it's already happening, but has a lot of inconveniences.
Not saying this is right or wrong, but it's just from what I've gathered.
In certain cases with regard to the government, inconvenience is a feature, not a bug.
So I think the real issue is that there is almost no control or transparency regarding what agencies like FBI or DHS do with the data. This should change. Once there is actual oversight (and no rubber-stamp court) I'll give them the permitted data as efficiently as possible.
Going the other way - allowing them full and uncontrolled access provided they just jump through a few arbitrary hoops to get the data - seems to me would only muddy the waters and increase costs without providing any actual advantage to the citizens.
I didn't say that inefficiency should be the goal for the government. However, for certain scenarios, that's the trade off we have to make.
> Going the other way - allowing them full and uncontrolled access provided they just jump through a few arbitrary hoops to get the data
Fortunately, most of the time those "hoops" involves a human in it, hopefully being able to stop bad things from happening. Again, there is no silver bullet, and shitty paper stamping process won't be helping either.
In some cases, it might make misuse actually easier if the inconveniences affect both agencies and their control instances.
A nice example of a process that's apparently deliberately kept inefficient by lobby power is the US weapons "registry": http://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-man...
My wife's grandfather was asked to volunteer for a construction project in siberia. He declined. They drafted him, then sent him anyway - and still called him a volunteer.
That was optional too.
The title is misleading.
Interestingly, if you're a Nazi death camp survivor, you have to answer 'yes' to that question: "Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?"
Awesome, really. Either force those poor souls to lie, or force them to be questioned on that horror from their past...
Making something like this optional only makes sense as a way of getting it through without too much controversy.
No, wait, that's what they already have.
Which makes me think that it'll end up leading to a lot of hassle for a lot of asocial people. E.g. my Facebook account only gets logged into 1-2 times a year. Would they believe it's my real one, or suspect I was doing what you're suggesting.
But telling the immigration official still is optional, since we already know who you are, what you buy and what por- uhm, websites, you like. (discretely fist-bumps Goomazbook) Welcome to this great nation!
I can't quite understand what it mean to "extend the expiration date ...". Shouldn't it be "extend the collection process" or something similar ?
[0] https://www.wired.com/2016/05/hack-brief-old-myspace-account...
https://www.regulations.gov/docketBrowser?rpp=25&so=DESC&sb=...
Which was originally submitted by quickben
Can someone summarize what this says?
Will people who don't use social media have to go to the back room for a full cavity search?
DHS proposes to add the following question to ESTA and to Form I-94W: “Please enter information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier.” It will be an optional data field to request social media identifiers to be used for vetting purposes, as well as applicant contact information. Collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide DHS greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.
The only way they could deal with that much data would be some sort of agreement between the US & Facebook for information sharing.
Time to create another social media network.
We should be working to make it clear to people that--just because you have a cat photo for an avatar--doesn't mean you are off the hook for acting like a decent human being.
We print out home address on official forums, why not online addresses? Make that presence "real".