If they were collecting private info or browsing data, sure.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/09/18/2017-19...
See 22 U.S. Code § 6010: 'As used in this chapter, the term “United States person” means any United States citizen or alien admitted for permanent residence in the United States, and any corporation, partnership, or other organization organized under the laws of the United States.' Title 22 is the foreign relations chapter
Ask a person in Argentina, Chile, Spain, and lots of other places besides.
>I'd expect the government to be collecting all public information for its citizens and those visiting the country - why not?
Because their social media lives are not its business -- citizens or not.
I'm not saying they should have unfettered access to everything (far from it!), but gathering and analyzing this type of information is the very definition of their business.
The real question is what levels of information gathering are going to allow without a warrant, and who do those laws apply to?
If someone is plotting a crime while having sex with their partner in their bedroom, how is that not the government's business?
See how it gets problematic?
Bad actors like that can communicate in 200000 ways. If governments want to target "known terrorist organizations" let them target them, and follow those people, monitor their houses, etc -- not monitor the general population in the off chance they see something.
>I'm not saying they should have unfettered access to everything (far from it!), but gathering and analyzing this type of information is the very definition of their business.
So, in 1980, before Facebook, they wouldn't be able to catch anyone?
How about they monitor actual suspects with good old police work and leave the BS?
That escalated quickly. So to you monitoring information posted to a third party is the same as listening in on you and your spouse while you're bumping uglies?
> See how it gets problematic?
No I don't as I reject your example outright. What goes on within the four walls of a person's bedroom has already been established as protected. In contrast, what gets sent out to a third party has been established as not protected.
> Bad actors like that can communicate in 200000 ways. If governments want to target "known terrorist organizations" let them target them, and follow those people, monitor their houses, etc -- not monitor the general population in the off chance they see something.
Sure and this is one of the many ways they can do it. Just because there are other options available doesn't mean they can't use this as an avenue.
> So, in 1980, before Facebook, they wouldn't be able to catch anyone?
I never said that nor implied it. I'm saying that social media posts are fair game and likely a valuable source of information for identified terrorists and potential terrorists.
> How about they monitor actual suspects with good old police work and leave the BS?
That's a false dichotomy. There's no reason you can't have modern data analysis of social media posts in addition to traditional police work. Technology is a force multiplier. Back in the day people would manually examine finger prints to find a match based on a categorization system. Now a computer does it nearly instantly.
This is a bit absurd. First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees your right to publish papers. But now you also want the right to prevent your publications from being read? The government has had a program collecting a vast majority of publications for a very long time i.e. the Library of Congress, so one might say the precedent has already been set.
and this can also easily lead to uncovering less public information about you. More data you have about a person easier it is to triangulate anonymized data about them.
1) the people visiting the US and
2) the US public (via tax support for enforcement which is driven by this policy)
Wolfram Alpha says that 322 people visit the US in a year.
Let's assume the technologists in charge of this (who are really no different than any other corporate engineer - capable, but fairly disinterested in their work and apathetic/unaffected by the results) manage to make the process 99.9999% effective in screening out the innocent, and 100% effective in screening terrorists who enter the US.
Well, that world-class accuracy gives you 99.9999 * 322 million => 322 people a year who are caught in the dragnet (and in all likelihood, it will be multiples of this number; likely thousands of individuals).
So now we are interrogating, investigating, and suspecting 322 innocent people in order to catch the... oh, wait; there really haven't been any terrorist attacks like 9/11 since... 9/11.
The Boston Bombers were home-grown. Anti-abortion extremists, religious fundamentalists, bullied schoolchildren, and paranoid schizophrenics have all tried or been accused of trying to wage terrorism on the US, but there's not a single event[1] that it looks like this policy could have prevented. But we're investigating 322 individuals (and their families, friends, and close contacts) in order to do it.
And at what cost? We will never know, because those numbers are classified due to their sensitive nature.
In the end, none of this matters: the government was never interested in terror prevention in the first place. They just needed a new bogey man to replace drugs, the Russians, whatever as a reason to ignore the constitution.
The war on terrorism is a farce.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
* edit: added the parenthetical note on numbers, multiples of estimate
These were Americans killing Americans, and similar to the pattern we've seen throughout the 1900s and into the 2000s, it is most likely that future terrorists will also be home grown.
As to this system, was there anything to be gained by keeping these out of the USA, for a tweet?: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16810312
{Off-topic: Because the KKK were (mainly) killing black people and their supporters in Southern states, 'we' don't really think of them as terrorists, nor the people that still push their agenda today as terrorist sympathisers.}
Not to take away from the terror of the KKK, but 9/11 was more deadly - "The attacks caused the deaths of 2,996 people and the injuries of more than 6,000 others" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks).
9,000+ killed or wounded on a single day, massive economic impact, and a Global War on Terror that is still going on today.
I'm not sure why they don't just apply it across the board to all travelers because it seems like adding conditions just increases complexity with no benefit.