Caution on Twitter urged as Britons barred from US
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
As I noted in my last comment on this incident, in another HN thread,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3529500
"a foreign national kidding around about a trip in which he or she will 'destroy America' shouldn't be surprised to be questioned about that by law enforcement officers." It is routine national policy in every country of the world to give border officers full discretion to deny entry to any foreign person, even if the foreign person has a visa issued by the host country's overseas diplomatic officials, and even if the foreign person comes from a country with a visa-free entry treaty with the host country (as the United Kingdom has with the United States). A general policy of visa-free entry or routine issuance of visas to visitors who meet defined criteria does not remove an immigration officer's general discretion to deny entry to any foreign visitor, without further legal recourse.
I encourage Hacker News participants to check the law of the country where they live, whatever country that is. Very likely you will find that immigration officials have exactly this kind of discretion, unreviewable discretion, in your country. A foreign visitor who kids around about engaging in any kind of illegal or bothersome activity, even the kind of activity that many loyal citizens of the host country engage in, is at risk of being denied entry in pretty much every country in the world. The way to test how often this kind of rare edge case occurs in other countries is to try the experiment--tweet about the fun you desire to have in the next country you plan to visit, in the same terms, and see what happens. Probably most British visitors to the United States who previously have tweeted similar messages have been allowed entry to the United States, without anyone taking notice of the tweets. And probably on some future occasion someone else may tweet the same kinds of statements, and not be detected. But try it yourself if you wonder what other countries might do. In general, each country of the world gives its immigration officers unreviewable discretion to deny entry to foreign persons for any reason or no reason at all.
On the broader issue of whether or not this lone incident is a sign that the United States no longer cherishes freedom of speech, no of course not. Here we all are talking about this incident, with many criticisms of the United States being openly expressed. I daily exercise my right as an American to criticize government officials at all levels in the United States. I will keep right on doing that no matter what I hear about practices by immigration officers at United States borders.
Moreover, the United States continues to enjoy substantial net immigration and a large number of asylum claims by people from other countries who expect to enjoy more freedom once they start living in the United States than they did in the countries of their birth. Here in the United States, I can disagree with you, and you can disagree with me, and we can be civil about that, and not be afraid of secret police or private militia hit squads coming after us if we express a controversial opinion. Other countries also provide the benefit of free speech, and people who are concerned about recent trends in United States law are correct to be wary about granting the government intrusive authority to monitor the private conversations of people in the United States. But the reported incident, while perhaps an excessive response based on the facts reported so far, does not suggest that the United States has lost free speech, nor indeed does it even suggest that the border response to such a tweet is a response that would not be found at other national borders.
The continued interest here on HN in founder's visas and in other efforts to loosen immigration requirements is evidence that there are still plenty of people around the world of high levels of education who would be happy to settle in the United States and pursue their careers there. There are still people who advocate that all of the tens of thousands of university students from dozens of countries who attend undergraduate or graduate classes in the United States should gain residence visas when they gain their degrees. There is plenty of demand to reside in the United States, to visit the United States for tourism or for business, and to invest in the United States. That is not going away any time soon.
Believing in free speech, I welcome your kind comments to this comment, and will read them with care to see if I can improve my thinking on this issue.
Secondly, I would argue that both (i) a "reasonable" country (as defined in my imagination) and (ii) many actual countries simply would not search for that tweet, cross-correlate it with an arriving passenger and use it as a reason to question them extra on arrival.
My only real evidence for (ii) is that only the US has passenger manifests of arriving airliners sent to them in advance so that they can be checked against watch lists. (Other countries do this if/when they make you apply for a visa, but the US does it dynamically when you get on the plane even if they don't require you to have a visa.)
I did some quick searching to see what the obverse situation is -- what countries US nationals can visit without first obtaining a visa. There's no convenient listing I could find.
And this doesn't mean I find the US APIS to be an unordained Good Thing[tm]. Some border controls are necessary, yes. However US immigration policy has more than a small amount of irrationality to it. And pretty much always has (Asian Exclusion Act, etc.).
But these days, the US runs some kind of check on everyone. So that's the equivalent of being one of those "unfriendly" countries that requires visas for all noncitizens. (I guess Australia does too, since it requires non-visa visitors to apply in advance for something called an Electronic Travel Authority.)
Furthermore, how can you be sure that the mix of people desiring to immigrate will continue to be favorable to the economic growth of the US? I think I could take your points about the founder's visa and encouraging university students to stay and spin them as a negative indicator. Are these efforts to correct an inherent imbalance in immigration policy, or a reaction to the growing trend for foreign entrepreneurs and students to return to their home countries to set up shop?
Unskilled laborers will naturally migrate to where the jobs are, and the economic excesses of the US will ensure that demand for unskilled labor remains for many decades to come. The engine of the economy, however, is driven by entrepreneurship and inventiveness. I think that the sorts of people who bring these skills to the US are more likely to be sensitive to overbearing regulations and overeager policing.
The argument that we're still a popular place to visit rings hollow. Greece is a popular place to visit, but that shouldn't server as an endorsement of their horribly broken bureaucracy.
I cannot disagree with your main argument however.
As a British born non-catholic who has lived and worked in both Ireland and the UK, I can assure you are over-stating its meaning, except perhaps to practicing loyalists in Northern Ireland. The accepted vernacular there as a matter of practical sensitivity to the majority is "Southern Ireland" or "The South" and "GB" for the part of the UK that excludes NI.
To suggest that it is generally offensive (as in "giving the finger") is, well, offensive.
Edit: To wit - "UK Border Agency | If you are travelling to or from the Republic of Ireland [...]" http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/customs-travel/Enteringthe...
More interesting is that this sort of behavior is emblematic of major government failure: a failure of policy, of implementation, and of accountability.
From a policy standpoint, we've had roughly 24 terrorists or 3 trips attempt to cause harm to US aircraft in the last decade. In that time, we've hand hundreds of millions of air travelers or millions of trips. And yet, our policy is to treat every single traveler as a potential terrorist.
We've implemented these policies poorly as well. We've spent billions of dollars on what amounts to security theater. We've deputized some of the least capable members of our society, giving them the power to screw with customers more or less without reprisal. We've made travel, which many people viewed with joy a short time ago, a massive pain in the ass. But apart from that, we've also given untold agencies untold power to surveil, apparently, the entire world.
Eventually, and this didn't take long, those in charge of the theater begin to believe they were on the righteous path. As long as your behavior can be cloaked in "security" or "doing what's best for the country", you've essentially got a free pass. And so, 80 year old women get pulled out of line to have their colostomy bags inspected. Senators must be randomly patted down. We get decisions like this.
And, that “security” cloak never gets lifted. When bad decisions are made, as I would argue was made here, we don't hear "Ya, we overreacted. Sorry." Instead, they double down. They cry Security! and spew politicized bullshit, the kind that would make Orwell cringe:
"it tried to maintain a balance between 'securing our borders while facilitating the high volume of legitimate trade and travel that crosses our borders every day.'"
The trouble is, many Americans seem to have no problem with this. Such a minor hassle is worth it, even if it increases safety an imperceptible amount. The problem, in the short term isn’t devastating either. We get a few less Mr. Van Bryan’s visiting each year. But in the long term, all societies whose citizens cede too much power to those who claim to be acting to protect those citizens fail. Usually in the most unpleasant ways.
I don't see why saying something that has a threatening meaning shouldn't attract interest by law enforcement officials.
Take the other fork of possibility: If Foreign National (FN) had joked about it, been ignored, then blew something up, there would be an unbelievable outcry. It would - in my honest opinion - have been a terrible lapse in judgment by the officer not to have followed up on such a joke, and the office would not have fared well in the ensuing hue and cry.
Even when they get it wrong, even when what they initially thought might be a threat turned out to be no threat at all, there is no incentive to admit fault. So this aggressive attitude amplifies, until at some point, it deafens.
Who believes terrorists would post their intentions on twitter? and even if they did, all they need to do to avoid this ridiculous farce is swap out a word: psst 'engage in revelry' = 'destroy'
There is no trade off between security and freedom taking place here, there is just a parody acting out that not only fails to make anybody any safer, it causes all reasonable people to blanch in shame.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/31/call-to-l...
"Based on information provided by the LAX Port Authority Infoline – a suspicious activity tipline – CBP conducted a secondary interview of two subjects presenting for entry into the United States"
So, the question comes down to... was this a random US citizen who likes to monitor Twitter for threats who decided to make the tip off, or is there something else going on here that we are not seeing? In all the news reports that I've seen I've only seen the first page of the document given to the guy; the page that mentions Twitter. I wonder if there's something else on the other pages.
* A random concerned citizen (so it wasn't them looking, they just acted on behalf of someone genuinely concerned, this makes the thing a bit more noble).
* A scorned lover/an enemy ("oh you think are going to go on a vacation? remember what you did to me, I know exactly how to get back... what is that FBI tip-off number again...?")
* A secret (or not so secret govt.) web searching and filtering program. They don't want to reveal which one it is, but it could potentially just be made to generate "tip-offs" so that it looks like a person noticed, but in fact everything is automated. High profile tip-offs can be filtered through human agents as well.
Some of us who lived repressive regimes know how this works. If the govt. is afraid of X, and sets up an anonymous tip-off line to report X. Then is known to go ahead and blindly act on that tip. It creates an awesome/terrifying tool for everyone to use. X can be anything you like: terrorism, communism, whatever the du jour "War on ..." is waged.
In the Soviet Union we had neighbors denouncing each other for anti-communist activities because they couldn't agree on the color of the fence. This stuff will happen. The crazier and irrational the govt. gets the more potential for abuse it creates. With a bit of work and ingenuity, during certain decades, you could have made your whole neighbor's family disappear into Siberia practically overnight.
Does nobody remember Carnivore? Imagine what has been developed since then.
I believe it got bought by Facebook.
In the end, it doesn't matter whether it was a tip-off or it was picked up by some Government threat-monitoring software. The greater end result is the same: a chilling effect on speech. If you aren't careful about how you consider this event, your response is "I'd better be careful what I say."
Edit: I highly recommend Bruce Schneier's "Liars and Outliers", it is a masterful work about the social costs of security.
Might wait until the book's actually available before you tease us with it.... ;-)
But what boggles my mind the most is, why did FBI have to deport them? Are they really so irrational that they could not discern genuine threats vs someone who jokingly meant it (and in this case its a brit slang!). This is where I think administration is falling apart. You read those stories about TSA horror stories and all of them indicate a lack of common sense on the administrative side.
Yes I agree with you, its almost a "collective failure" that you can expect from a system where each part doesn't have the complete picture (FBI not telling TSA all the protocols, TSA hiding things from police, etc...).
There is a chance, even though incredibly small, that the person in question really will commit some act of terrorism. What are the payoffs to the individual making this decision of all the possible options?
Not a terrorist, deport him: no cost.
Not a terrorist, let him in: no cost.
Terrorist, deport him: no cost.
Terrorist, let him in: lose your job, your career, get to testify before a hostile Congress, become a national scapegoat, etc. etc.
As far as I know, there are no consequences for deporting someone in a situation like this. Thus, even if the chances that he's a real terrorist are incredibly small, the fact that they're nonzero, and the fact that knowledge of this tweet would inevitably result in massive fingerpointing in that remote event, means that deportation is the obvious best choice. There's no benefit to letting him in, and some benefit to deporting him.
You see this sort of thing pop up in any large bureaucracy. There are rarely penalties for "better safe than sorry", even when taken to an absurd degree, but there are huge penalties for a failing to take that approach in the event that you miss something.
My wife just finished a thorough government background check, including an in-person interview about all of her international travel activity for the last X years, several calls for followup questions about relatives and their jobs and potential ties to foreign governments, etc. The job they're checking her for? Web designer at the Smithsonian. Not exactly a repository of national secrets here.
That background check makes no sense from a cost-benefit analysis, but makes tons of sense from a cover-your-ass bureaucratic analysis. Looks to me like the exact same thing happened with this tweet.
Note: I am not a USA citizen or reside in USA - just so that my perspectives are understood as an outsider.
That made me laugh. In the USA, we had people denouncing each other as communists for exactly the same frivolous reasons with dire repercussions. There's an entire era of American history dubbed the McCarthy era, where thousands of Americans were (falsely) accused of harboring communist sentiments.
This is not the first time I have drawn parallels (and there are many to be made) between McCarthyism and the current Islamophobia in the ongoing "war on terror." I feel both will be remembered with similar disgust a hundred years from now.
> Abta, which represents travel companies in the UK, said holidaymakers need to learn to be ultra-cautious when it comes to talking about forthcoming trips
no, we shouldn't 'need to learn to be ultra-cautious', we should be able to say whatever we want without living in fear.
edit: yes, whatever we want. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. It's actions that we need to stop, not speech.
The irrationality and absurdity of TSA is something that most Americans are aware of. But we have a President and Congress who think it's all just fine. The only solution to this problem is to elect lawmakers who will abolish TSA. Last time I checked, there's only one candidate for President who has included that as part of his platform.
Monitoring doesn't have to be done to catch the stereotypical "terrorist", but can also catch people with psychological issues that are disgruntled.
Now, is it worth it and does it work? I don't know, but there is precedent for people to post their intentions online.
Carnivore, now DSC1000, scrapes the web and inspects packets for keywords and flags potential threats. I'm pretty sure "destroy" and "America" would raise a flag in it's system.
Furthermore, finding out who accounts on twitter belong to is often fairly trivial since a good deal of people use their actual names and if not that use pseudonyms that are easily linked.
Absolutely nothing! But, if you got nothing to fear, you got nothing to hide ... er, ... or something to that effect.
The offending party probably shouldn't have been deported, but that's another matter.
[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/28/al-shabaab-twitter_...
It's still absurd to deny them entry. Rude white kids from England aren't exactly a threat, and a cursory glance at their background would probably confirm that.
What has most people upset is not the monitoring itself, but the use of the monitoring for such stupid things. If you set up a monitoring system that does nothing but hassle and punish a million false positives, that's no good.
-- Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, 2001-09-26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacke...
Isn't the job of these people to keep terrorists off of airplanes? Then they "catch" some and the first thing they do is put them on one...
Whoever made that call should be arrested. When they admit that the two did not actually pose a threat, they should be released then promptly re-arrested.
why not? human brain or any other body part cannot explode on its own. I am sure they were deep/strip-checked, including cavities and rear pipe. After all, there is only a limited number of places you can hide a bomb.
It's the job of the TSA (or security guards at foreign airports) to search and clear you and your possessions for flying. They are preventing short-term threats, this is the last line of defense.
This story is about US Customs and Border Patrol, who are responsible for a lot of things at airports as well as border crossings, including:
1) Making sure you are permitted to enter the country (checking or issuing visas).
2) Making sure you are not bringing anything illegal into the country.
3) Making sure you are not a "threat" to the US. You're a criminal, or associated with activist/terroris organizations which are hostile to the US, or are likely to commit a crime during your stay.
Customs wasn't worried that this guy was going to blow up the next plane he got on. They were (stupidly) worried that he would (probably) cause trouble after he entered based on something somebody (might have) told them. So they played it safe and denied him entry.
The evidence they used was dumb, but at the border there is something between "we have evidence that you're a criminal and we're arresting you" and "you seem like trouble so we're not letting you be our guest".
If they sincerely thought that these people were a threat they would have been detained. They were not worried in the slightest however, and nobody "seemed like trouble". The agents were just being assholes.
You see, the extent to which they posed a threat to the country they also posed a threat to the aircraft. (Not in the slightest, and everybody involved knew it.)
Normal guy, going to a conference, history of overstayed visas.
He can get on the plane from Paris to New York, but he's not getting in (rightly so). TSA is not CBP, nor should they be.
I'd much rather that all that money go toward (better) background checks by CBP instead of perfume-stealing by the TSA.
De-fund them all, they have proven that even they don't take themselves seriously.
I think you are underestimating the reach of the FBI and DHS.
They know EXACTLY whose IP address is posting every comment, they just never go through them unless your spouse's body turns up somewhere. Then they go through everything.
What is surprising to me is that they went through the e-communications of these two simply because they were traveling to the US. That's new info to me...I didn't think they did that.
Law and Harm: We may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect Twitter's rights or property.
1) Twitter monitors all tweets itself for any "subversive" content, and then takes the initiative to report that to the appropriate authorities.
2) Twitter gives full access to all tweets to the FBI, regardless of their content, so that the FBI can sift through the data themselves.
1 isn't such a big deal, but 2 certainly is.
Oh..sp332 beat me to it.
>I'm wondering if making your tweets protected is enough to keep the FBI from reading them.
It does alarm me that DM's are available when you search through their public profiles.
EDIT: Am I somehow mistaken? I've seen them not only on well-known people but on friends as well when I asked them about this.
If you follow me and I @-reply someone who you do not follow then that tweet will appear in my public timeline but it will not appear in your home view.
The only time I don't see these comments is in my timeline. It may be that it's not supposed to happen but, from what I've seen of these posts, they weren't meant as DMs. When I read them it seemed as something more personal and less comical that exists in a normal Twitter feed from these posters.
1) Should authorities take reasonable steps to prevent the commission of a crime, or wait until after it's occurred? What if a well-known soccer hooligan has posted that he's looking forward to running amuck? 2) Are threats against an individual allowed as part of free speech? What about against a family? Small business? A neighbourhood? A country? Where do you draw the line? 3) Do you differentiate between personal criminal behaviour and organized criminal behaviour? Or, between explosive threats vs non-explosive threats, like a small bomb vs significant vandalism to public property done for Youtube? 4) How would a third party know the tweeter is joking? (Most people who get called out for saying rude or racist remarks say "oh I was just kidding" afterwards). Do you prefer that all remarks should be ignored completely, or (somehow) checked for credibility? (And I have no idea how one would approach that, btw)
Looking for direct answers to all 4 questions, please. Would like to sample where people stand.
If you are an organization, or even just a random guard, the real priority might not to stop something bad from happening. It could just as well be to avoid blame. So it's much better to be extremely cautious.
You're in a world of hurt if someone tipped you off to a "suspicious" tweet, you let them through, and (beyond belief) they actually carried out an attack. Much better to deny them entry, even if it's obvious the "threat" is false.
Since everyone has to be at least as careful as the next guy, probably even more so, I I see this ending badly.
[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/cya_security_1...
But then again it is just security theatre. They've made people aware they monitor Twitter and (EDIT I would guess) can mine it for historic comments so people will now take more care when using Twitter thus diminishing the value of the monitoring. This was a PR stunt for a purpose we may never understand.
This could be like the guy who reportedly entered the US because he showed an iPad photo of his passport. Made news for a few days until US customs said "uh, no, we have our own methods and discretion, the ipad pic didn't matter". Big story became a non-story.
As for emacs, install http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TwitteringMode and M-x twit
That said, IRC will never be as popular as Twitter and probably doesn't make for a good business model. But it's all that kruhft said it is.
There's nothing "fragmented" about exchanges on Twitter for quite a while now. If you click on an @message, you can see the entire conversation chain in the sidebar.
Your statement of "fast" confuses me. Minimum roundtrip for a write/reply/read sequence on Twitter is something like a minute. A conversation that would take five minutes on IRC can take several hours on Twitter.
Your definition of "real" is deep and long? Okay then.
>Minimum roundtrip for a write/reply/read sequence on Twitter is something like a minute.
Not in my experience. When using software tied into the API, I've gotten maybe 5-10 seconds lag between entering an @reply and having the client be notified of it. This was while testing, curiously enough, an IRC bot and Tweetdeck.
As for the roundtrip, that's interesting. Perhaps it's just the clients (or the clients I use) that are slow.
I've had way more, and better conversations on G+ and Facebook because it doesn't artificially force you to dumb things down (or possibly worse, resort to unintelligible TwitSpeak).
The US government absolutely does monitor twitter.
Not having your real name on-line still matters greatly.
The US is willing to waste gobs of money just to make you feel bad.They came from the UK and were sent back, but if they were from the US, would they be imprisoned?
This is why people don't trust the administration's argument of: "we'll only use it on real terrorists, we promise". Not only is that still a terrible affront to liberty, but our country's track record of identifying "real" terrorists has been laughable. The very concept of any practical "trust" in their ability to operate in this space is made laughable by situations like the deportations in question.
[this.humor := true]
The original tweet(s) were immature as well as culturally insensitive. If you are going to use language that's cliquey in a public broadcast medium, and words that in their plain well-understood meaning convey threats or danger, then you have no grounds to complain if persons of authority take measures against such perceived threats.
Granted, these people probably didn't realise the repercussions of their locale-specific slang, but ignorance is no excuse. They should at least be aware of the environment they are travelling to.
It's the golden rule of international travel: Don't be an idiot. International travel is a privilege, not a right. Foreign countries don't have to let you in, even if you are British.
Being British myself, I'm actually unaccustomed to the use of the word destroy in that context, and never heard this digging up Marylin Monroe quip. I found both tweets tasteless and needlessly incendiary.
"You're free to say what we tell you to say.."
Edit: Based on the down votes this comment is receiving, I assume some people disagree. I'd be curious if the source of that disagreement is a feeling that this incident will not have any impact on the likelihood of other foreigners visiting?