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Comment by kraftman | Hacker News Reader

My guess would be that the US found some dodgy software that happened to make use of cURL, add flagged him as part of it, given what he's previously said about receiving emails from people that have found his details in other software: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/

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My guess is that DHS denies entry to random people just to hit some internal quotas.

This. Without reading the article, my first assumption is that a Visa was denied on random grounds, eg coming from a country where visas are already hard to get. I can't believe anyone on the US Visa offices actually doing their research on the person.

It's hard for Swedes to get a visa to visit the US? When did that happen?

>I can't believe anyone on the US Visa offices actually doing their research on the person.

Suspect Palantir, or some other contractor having some shitty software to score applicants based on social media + web searches + magic sauce.

Countries where VISA applications have a high failure rate aren't part of the ESTA program to begin with. Having a low rejection rate is a condition for being in the program.

Except if that were so they'd just routinely stop him on arrival instead. We've had countless stories of programmers being interviewed crossing borders and offered deals. There was one on HN just last week about a programmer tweeting about being approached, but I can't find that story.. but its their MO.

Do-Not-Fly is for people they fear might blow up the plane before it arrives in the US.

I think that the US and the Swedish airlines are co-operating so that the airline doesn't have to pay for the flight back to Sweden, in case of being denied entry.

Many controls are done before leaving Sweden.

Airlines normally utilize your return flight for that. But, it could still mean that their next flight back is slightly (more) overbooked and so they are incentivised to make sure to only board people who have a high chance to get through immigration.

Not only that but airlines are frequently fined for transporting a persona non grata even if it wasn't the airline's fault; so 99.9% of the time if an airline is informed beforehand that a person will not be accepted into the country they will refuse to let them board, they don't want to be liable for a fine.

Wouldn't he not be given a visa in the first place if he was such a suspect?

Swedes can get a visa waiver automatically within a few minutes online by using an online form.

ESTA is not entirely automatic. He could have been denied it; in fact, he probably will be denied it the next time he tries to get the ESTA, if he ever does. He will then have to go through the non-waiver visa procedure.

However, you only have to renew ESTA once every two years, not every time you fly. The DHS might have "discovered" whatever they discovered only recently.

He's Swedish national, just needs to fill in the ESTA, no visa requirement.

He probably does not need a visa (that's the case if one has a biometric passport)

Probably this story https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/14/telegram_boss_backd...

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