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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Play the devil's advocate with me for a bit.

Say you let someone in who suicide bombs himself and takes out several Americans. Then a reporter asks the DHS spokesperson how they let someone in the country that had "Death to America" posts all over their social media out in the open for everyone to see but they didn't. Nobody would forgive the government for such a grave oversight.

At the airport you already let them check your luggage and pockets to make sure you're not a threat to the crew and passengers. How's it different to be checking your social media before entering to make sure you're not a threat to the citizens?

Which do you think is more important to the electorate, the safety of the citizens, or the privacy inconveniences of immigrants, which doesn't exist anyway?

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If the authorities weren't already aware of the identity of the person who posted that, what's stopping somebody with terrorist intentions from simply omitting that account while applying for a visa?

To me, this seems like a grave transgression of privacy with little to no actual safety benefits.

It's a little dumb to just ignore it.

People on Visas are guests, it makes sense to ask questions like this that wouldn't ask ordinary citizens. We have been way too relaxed with it and it's nice to see some changes.

If this is how you treat your guests, I don't want to be your guest.

The point isn't that they'll provide it. The point is that a bunch of useless people buried in the bureaucracy can say "well, he wasn't on our radar and his social media came back clean" and act like that constitutes doing their jobs.

It's no different than your local government that's probably happy to permit all sorts of absurd invasive development as long as some engineer puts a stamp on it but if a homeowner wants to build a retaining wall he gets told to f-off and come back with $20k of engineered plans that make the project not worth it.

It's not about the end result. It's about dodging accountability.

How many of those are there really? How much are you willing to sacrifice to prevent this hypothetical? Because there is no end to this sort of argument. Why should it stop with foreigners, wouldn't a suicide bomb by a local cause just as much damage? "We have to monitor every web page and every email, text, and word spoken of every person at all times to 'prevent a tragedy'" You want to prevent a tragedy don't you? You don't have anything to hide right? The fact that these kinds of powers have always been abused by those who have them is not something you should be concerned about. It won't happen to you. They will only go after the bad guys, and you're good, right? Now show us your papers.

>How much are you willing to sacrifice to prevent this hypothetical?

Citizens don't sacrifice anything. The rules applies to those who request visas.

Everything else you wrote after that is so much more delulu, it's not even worth addressing.

> Say you let someone in who suicide bombs himself and takes out several Americans. Then a reporter asks the DHS spokesperson how they let someone in the country that had "Death to America" posts all over their social media out in the open for everyone to see but they didn't. Nobody would forgive the government for such a grave oversight.

Everything is partisan now.

If something bad happens, every media outlet will blame the party they don't like for it somehow. It doesn't matter what that party actually did, therefore there is no value in doing harmful stuff for CYA purposes because deploying the CYA tactics will not stop you from being blamed for it by the outlets that don't like you, and also will not stop the outlets that do you like you from blaming the other party instead of you.

>Everything is partisan now.

You're making it partisan, I wasn't.

>If something bad happens, every media outlet will blame the party they don't like for it somehow

Ignore the media. If a loved one of yours would be killed by a visa holder who wasn't vetted properly even though his social media profile had all the red flags, who would YOU blame ?

> You're making it partisan, I wasn't.

It isn't you or I who decides that, it's media outlets. And they've decided to be partisan.

> If a loved one of yours would be killed by a visa holder who wasn't vetted properly even though his social media profile had all the red flags, who would YOU blame?

The visa holder.

Also, those kinds of social media posts are public, so what does it have to do with immigration? If you want to blame law enforcement for not investigating the nutters who post on the internet then maybe they should start with the ones posting crazy stuff and investigate who they are, instead of starting with random innocent people and unmasking them with no justification.

But the terrorist isn’t going to provide that particular username, nor will he check the “I am intending to harm people” box in the visa process.

So this only provides the government means to oppress and intimidate regular people while having no effect on crime and terror.

"takes out several Americans" is a Tuesday in the US right now [1]. The main people attacking Americans on American soil are...other Americans. The US has decided to do almost nothing to address the issue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

Motive matters.

It's materially different in my opinion.

I will submit to inspection of the things I bring into a country, but I will not submit to a review of everything I've written that I haven't made public.

It's like asking me to bring decades of letters and personal journals to be judged by. It's unreasonable. If this required of me I won't go.

>If this required of me I won't go.

Do you think the US will see you not going there as a huge loss?

>How's it different to be checking your social media before entering to make sure you're not a threat to the citizens

Since the leading sentence with the devil's advocate, it's hard to presume the post is mostly sarcastic. If not - the inability to see the difference is rather staggering.

Why would a suicide bomber provide the government links to their death to America posts?

Why do thieves post pics of themselves on Facebook with the stuff they stole? Because some criminals will always be stupid.

"Anything to declare?"

"Yes, 40kg of trinitrotoluene"

“Trinitro-something. That’s this heart attack drug, right? And what are those units? 40 … grain? You must have a serious heart condition then. Well, all fine, you’re good to go, Sir.”

This is just intellectually dishonest. Its like you have never heard of US surveillance programs.

US Intelligence agencies collect a lot of data about people. Especially the ones who write about "Death to America" on their social media. If we follow your logic and it doesn't happen today then there are bigger problems than the made up issues DHS will have in your imagined future.

Building a profile on someone doesn't require their social media profiles. This is just a bogeyman. As some has pointed out, this is purely to build a case if and when people protest against the government.

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