German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages | Hacker News Reader

German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

translate.google.com

642 pointsNavarr246 comments

Just a note of caution, a friend of mine wanted to send their daughter over to visit the US during the summer before she headed off to college. We were of course happy to let her stay at our place which is a good west coast starting point for things California.

Somewhere in correspondence where she was trying to ask nicely if she could stay at our place she said "I could watch the kids or something" and later in that same correspondence we had said, "no worries, its no trouble for you to stay here." Based on that one statement she was refused entry at SFO and sent back on a plane to Paris and subsequently refused entry into the US for the next 5 years. It was insanely stupid.

So ridiculous! Why are they cracking down on this? Are young French and German girls really posing such a risk to US employment rates? I have offered the same thing while asking if I could stay with relatives in other US cities (I'm American). Next, are they going to go around accusing 16 year old American girls of tax evasion since their bank accounts "fit the profile" for someone who's done babysitting?

Sorry, but the living standards are high enough and tuition costs low enough in France and Germany that I'm not really sure why any French/German college-aged kids would be sneaking into this country for real jobs.

It's reasonably straightforward au-pairing legally in the US. You just need to be represented by one of the officially sanctioned au pair agencies, and you get a J1 visa.

So I guess they're miffed that girls are trying to cheat the official (rather inflexible IMO) system.

There are huge numbers of American girls in Europe doing a similar thing -- legally and illegally -- and in some countries you'd get the same hard-assed attitude.

In Germany, au pairs don't need a visa at all.

France, being France, they require a work permit (unless you're from CN, NZ or AU).

Spain is easy (just apply to the nearest consulate and it's rubber-stamped) and you can work there for up to two years.

In the UK, it's super-complicated. The UK authorities simply don't want non-EU workers under any circumstances (but what's the point in au-pairing in another English-speaking country?).

However, French and German girls are awesome, so please keep it up and with any luck, more will come here to Spain.

;-)

The irony is that anybody who's likely to go over to illegally work as an au pair is likely to know this, unless they're very naive. So the USCIS is probably not catching the actual au pairs - only the girls coming to visit legally!

What sort of "correspondence" was this?

It was an email thread. In part of it we had given her our address and directions to our house and phone numbers on how to reach us when she got here. She had printed it out and was carrying it with her in her carry on. She allegedly fit the 'profile' and every woman travelling alone on her flight had their bags searched apparently.

Your failure to mention the printout in your original post is deceptive considering we are discussing internet "wiretapping." Of course possessions are searched upon entry, it happens every day in every country. If you're a Malaysian with a visitor visa and show up at customs in Australia with a bag full of resumes, you'll be turned away too.

It's not deceptive - he never indicated that the correspondence was seized, illegally or surreptitiously snooped on, or even that it was electronic until the message where he clarified it was a printed email. Until then, it could have been postcards for all we knew. His point wasn't about the wiretapping or even the search of her luggage - it was on the trivial reason they sent her back. She didn't have anything like a "bag full of resumes".

Your response seems very hostile - apologies if it's not, though in that case you may want to work on your phrasing. Nobody here discloses everything perfectly all the time, and there's no indication the parent was intentionally deceiving anyone.

I think "deceptive" is a poor word choice, but it was certainly confusing.

Considering the subject of this post, the resulting discussion, and the larger discussion that's been going on across HN and much of the media and the internet for the past week, exactly how the authorities learned about what she said is critical in understanding how his point fits into the broader context. That his point was about the reason they sent her back, and not how they learned it, was not clear to me until he responded.

Yes, this is well said and what I was trying to express. "Deceptive" was a poor choice of words and I think "confusing" says it better.

You are absolutely correct, I was not thinking about that aspect of it, rather the fact that the merest implication in anything that you might be coming to the US under false pretenses (even when the authorities have all the information which clearly shows both the intent and motivation for the trip) is that they will deny you entry.

Yeah, this is something everyone needs to understand. Intent is very important when entering countries on visas. If you enter the US with a non-immigrant visa such as a visitor visa with every intent to remain in the country indefinitely, a finding of visa fraud may be made against you and you could receive a long (multi-year) bar from readmission into the US.

And even if you have no such intent. Hence the cautionary tale.

The fact that the details were on hardcopy with her at the border sort of changes the context of your comment -- in a pretty important way.

Let's not conflate standard (even if objectionable) border entry policies with digital surveillance policies.

What is the logic or basic reason for this level of extreme prejudice against people doing basic work in another country? It seems to me that someone working in a country is going to be contributing.

Someone working in another country is doing work someone in the country could also be doing, depriving them of a potential job. That's why you need a visa.

Or rather, enough members of the public believe in the lumb-of-labour fallacy to make these kinds of policies fly.

... and the someone in the country is more valuable than the someone outside the country, because xenophobia.

What? No. Because it's the whole point of a government to take care of its citizens. American gov takes care of Americans, Brazillian gov takes care of Brazillians.

and the Iraqi government... no, forget it.

And here goes the popular "I did nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide" sentiment :)

Was it messages through Facebook?

This story seems highly unlikely to be true given the following 4 assumptions:

1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program.

2) Giving the data to a large number of border guards would have increased the chance of its dissemination.

3) It would be unnecessary to show her the data to refuse her admission to the US and showing her would violate #2.

4) She would not be a valuable enough target to expose the fact that the US had the data.

Additionally:

It is much more likely that if the border guards were using the NSA data, they would simply receive lists of those that could not enter. She would have probably been a target for that since she was trying to obtain work in the US illegally.

Alternatively, and even more likely, boarder patrol could have searched public websites for her name and seen her occupation and the rest could have been an exaggeration.

The publicly viewable Facebook message theory sounds more plausible given that (i) plenty of people seem to have little concept of what is and isn't private in Facebook and (ii) the US does have a track record of denying people entry based on public social media posts: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-...

Chances are they got a tipoff or she got caught by profiling or a random check as I doubt anyone bothers to check the Facebook profile pages of every foreigner entering the US.

An 18 year old entering the country with the intent of staying longer than a few weeks alone will raise eyebrows at the border. Next question will be regarding available funds. How can she afford to travel that long? Staying "with friends" is also suspicious, especially when she hasn't met them in person before.

yep, I remembered that same story.

Is it still far grasped to assume US agencies have a file on "everybody" digital present which gets automagically filled/flagged with US-related facts?

> 1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program.

Well, more precisely it wanted to avoid drawing attention to the program, which wasn't really a secret at this point. But I'll also add a fifth reason: the fewer than 2000 FISA orders a year http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/05/fisaca... , combined with the fact that David Drummond appears confident the average number of people covered per order isn't very high. If FISA orders were being used routinely, or even often, to investigate simple immigration cases then there would be a lot more of them; as things are, if you were busted for run-of-the-mill illegal immgration by a FISA order then you'd have to have been very unlucky. It's possible you could be identified by chance as part of a search for terrorists, but again not statistically likely, and as you say the government would want to be very careful about tipping its hand in that situation. There are also NSLs, but Google's NSL tally suggests that there aren't huge numbers of those per month either.

You are inventing (and then attempting to disprove) links that are no where other than in your mind. Nothing in this article or HN title mention NSA, PRISM or any thing like it.

Companies provide information to numerous law enforcement agencies all the time. Via agreement, court order, subpoena, etc. No secret NSA databases required.

He can probably be forgiven for assuming this was supposed to be about the NSA, given that it's a top story on HN, and with the context that 8 of the 10 top stories on HN right now are about NSAgatewater.

plus, they can refuse entry to any non-citizens for any reason or no reason

Yes, I expect if I were to commit a murder, the NSA would sit on evidence rather than deal with figuring out how to admit it into court and deal with revealing the program.

Oddly, now that the program has been exposed, the "cost of revealing the program" has already been spent.

It's unclear to me who provided the print-out of Jana's private messages. Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not Homeland Security.

I hired a Canadian once under a TN NAFTA "visa" and he had to bring some correspondence from me to the border. We had to be very careful to word things correctly and not to use specific words that could prevent him from coming to the US. It seems that this is similar to what this young woman experienced.

> Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not Homeland Security.

No, according to the article the printouts were provided by the US immigration officials. In fact, the article draws the inference that the US authorities may have been reading her private Facebook messages for weeks.

I'm a native speaker of German; there really isn't any ambiguity here.

No, according to the article the printouts were provided by the US immigration officials.

I think the point is that the facts provided by the article don't seem very likely.

Never has there been any dispute that the NSA can freely read what non Americans are doing without any sort of legal authorization. One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too. Some of the NSA leakers think this is wrong, but I have not heard any elected government official state otherwise.

Too some extent, this NSA story should be of equal or greater disturbance to non-Americans.

Using Facebook's private messaging, with or without NSA spying, is very stupid because we know Facebook stores all of this forever, including after you "delete" your account. That could make it accessible even in a non-criminal civil dispute.

> Never has there been any dispute that the NSA can freely read what non Americans are doing without any sort of legal authorization. One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

Even if PRISM allowed at-will searches across the FB accounts of would-be au-pairs, there is frankly no way the NSA would be sharing this with low level customs officials. At most there would be a simple flag on her record, at which point she would be shipped back without explanation.

Frankly, the fact that a significant number of commenters in this thread are taking this non-story at face value is bewildering. BS alarms should be going off left right and center, here.

So let me get this straight... you know that at least two agencies (FBI & NSA) have total access to your Facebook data. We don't know what their exact method is or who they may pass the data along to, but we know they do this with no warrant.

Now you're questioning whether Homeland Security, an agency originally created to pool information from all intelligence agencies to screen for terrorists, has access to the same information?

It makes sense to read private communications to find out if she's a threat to the homeland. What doesn't make sense is your disbelief in the face of clear evidence that this kind of thing has been going on for years - just with a different agency name.

> you know that at least two agencies (FBI & NSA) have total access to your Facebook data.

OK maybe I missed something, but do you have a citation for this?

I didn't know this discussion would be added to Wikipedia.

> So let me get this straight... you know that at least two agencies (FBI & NSA) have total access to your Facebook data. We don't know what their exact method is or who they may pass the data along to, but we know they do this with no warrant.

No, I don't know this. Do you?

Have you been living under a rock? Look up PRISM. It's been in the news a little.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%2...

"They [NSA] could get most of it, but they couldn't get it all. So in order to get all the data, they had to go to the service providers to fill in the blanks. That's what the PRISM program is for—to fill in the blanks. It also gives the FBI basis for introducing evidence into court."

"PRISM was first publicly revealed on June 6, 2013 [...] The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including (date of joining PRISM in parentheses) Microsoft (2007), Yahoo! (2008), Google (2009), Facebook (2009), Paltalk (2009), YouTube (2010), AOL (2011), Skype (2011), and Apple (2012)."

>> you know that at least two agencies (FBI & NSA) have total access to your Facebook data.

This statement is not supported by anything in the wikipedia article you cited. You're spinning conjecture.

Oh jesus christ. Fine, i'll do the reading for you. I'll just skip to sections with the word "Facebook" to make it easier.

Facebook provides data:

"Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."[23]"

Facebook has met with a US General on how to make data collection and reporting more efficient:

"The other companies held discussions with national security personnel on how to make available data more efficiently and securely.[29] In some cases, these companies made modifications to their systems in support of the intelligence collection effort.[29] The dialogues have continued in recent months, as General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has met with executives including those at Facebook"

Facebook custom built a system for delivering data to the government:

"the companies were effectively asked to construct a locked mailbox and provide the key to the government, people briefed on the negotiations said.[29] Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information.[29]"

The Director of National Intelligence says they have been using Facebook to collect information on foreigners for six years. I THINK THIS IS KIND OF A SMOKING GUN, BUT I COULD BE WRONG.

" Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on June 7 released a statement confirming that for nearly six years the government of the United States had been using large internet services companies such as Google and Facebook to collect information on foreigners outside the United States as a defense against national security threats."

In the future, please just read the page instead of trolling me to do the research for you.

I think you're the one who's trolling, and are also frankly acting like an ass. More to the point, none of the passages you cited even support your original claim. You're making unsubstantiated claims about the scope of the surveillance, and obfuscating away the barriers between the federal agencies and the data being collected.

Specifically, you have made and defended the claim that the NSA & FBI have total access to joe anybody's Facebook account. You then went on to cite passages from Wikipedia detailing the PRISM mailbox put in place by [FB / Google]. What you did not mention is how the mailbox is actually populated.

> The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. [1]

> FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before. [1]

This is from the NYT article cited in the Wikipedia page, which you indirectly cited twice. These requests are routed through a FISA court and limited in number, which is a far cry from "total" access. Your claim is incorrect.

Either way, this is a pretty unproductive discussion and I doubt we'll see eye to eye on this. You're also being belligerent and rude. Have a nice day.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

Just because the NSA didn't share the data doesn't mean another government agency couldn't also request it from Facebook.

Are you suggesting that the TSA agent interviewing this woman called up some TSA hotline who called up someone at Facebook who just gave it to them, sans warrant, all within the span of a couple hours? Words fail me for an adjective to describe how unlikely that sounds.

The far, far, far simpler explanation would that she had a printout of the conversations because it had an address or directions or that she voluntarily handed over a device (or, possibly, was bullied into doing so, which is in the rights of border control to do).

> Are you suggesting that the TSA agent interviewing this woman called up some TSA hotline who called up someone at Facebook who just gave it to them, sans warrant, all within the span of a couple hours?

Pretty much, only "filled in a form on a web page" not "called up someone", "made a request to the api" not "called up someone at Facebook" and "the software ran" not "just gave it to them". Get with the times.

> Words fail me for an adjective to describe how unlikely that sounds.

You have not been paying attention.

Indeed. A friend of mine was sent home after customs searched her luggage, read her diary and noticed she was planning on working in the US under the table, in a bar.

They probably had these papers already prepared. It's not like people get their visas one day before departing to the US.

I think Germany is part of the Visa Waiver Program, so she would have had to apply via ESTA before she flew out.

It wouldn't surprise me now if there was a system in place that used the ESTA information to query the NSA/CIA/etc for anything that might be an issue for immigration control.

If she's been talking about working in the USA and hasn't got a visa (ESTA is only for personal visits, not business IIRC), that's enough for the TSA to refuse her entrance for lying to them.

"(ESTA is only for personal visits, not business IIRC)"

It's for both both business and pleasure - says right there on the ESTA home page:

https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/

"You plan to travel to the United States for business or pleasure."

NB I've travelled a few times the US over the last few years on business using ESTA so you had me slightly worried there!

As far as I'm aware, there is a big difference between travelling to the US (and many other countries) to conduct business, and seeking employment. I think it's the first one that is covered by ESTA...

Exactly. Border agents have a list of people arriving in advance of their arrival. Flight manifests, if nothing else.

One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too. Some of the NSA leakers think this is wrong, but I have not heard any elected government official state otherwise.

Someone leaks information about PRISM, and the primary response is TREASON! TREASON! ARREST THE TRAITOR AND DEAL WITH HIM!

Given that, do you really expect that A) random border agents are in on it, and B) feel free to just randomly disclose that sort of surveillance to someone who has no need to know about it?

Snowden had proof and plenty of it. A random border agent that finds some documents on his desk in the morning, to be used that day, does not have much proof.

Secondly, a lot of people knew, but kept quiet. I see no reason to expect a random border agent from talking, given it took years and someone like Snowden to finally talk.

One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too.

Maybe, but even so, from giving access to the department, to allowing border officers to prove to foreign citizens that they can read their PMs goes a long way.

She lives in Germany, which has a widely different fact gathering process, being much more restrictive and protective of the defendant's privacy.

Moreover, she's 18 and from a country which is probably much less lawsuit-happy than the US. It doesn't seem stupid to me at all that she didn't consider being sued when sending PMs to her host.

Even if that were true, she was exchanging messages with the father of the American family she was planning to stay with. I doubt they only read the messages sent by the German girl.

One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too. Some of the NSA leakers think this is wrong

Do you have a link to a source on this? What other leakers are you referring to?

How do you infer someone's citizenship from their FB profile?

Well, only 15% of profiles are by Americans, so if you have an FB profile there is an 85% chance you are not an American. That's a bit above the 51% confidence the NSA requires ;-)

They don't need to infer citizenship from an FB profile. They already know who the FB profile belongs to and what the nationality of that person is.

Not at all unlikely, but routine. TechCrunch previously wrote about what these Facebook comprehensive account reports to these "lawful" requests look like: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/heres-what-a-facebook-respo...

Why don't they seem likely? We already know that the NSA had access to private messages from Facebook and other popular sites.

The unlikely part is not that the US government agencies could get the private messages, it's that they'd jeopardize the whole system by letting regular border officers use it directly (instead of, for example, data-mining and send out no-entry-lists) and show proof of its existence to (foreign!) citizens.

I mean, I don't know why Snowden bothered to leak the info, if they're just telling any 18-year-old German girl about it.

To be fair, the NSA outcry was largely over the scale of the monitoring and the lack of warrants. However that doesn't mean that (other) government organisations couldn't approach Facebook with a warrant and request specific data, such as private messages from a suspect.

Assuming for the moment that this story did happen exactly as we're lead to believe (and I'm only making that assumption for the sake of playing devils advocate - I'm firmly on the fence with this story due to how sketchy the details are), then it would be very easy for the NSA to cover up how they had such data: "We'd been investigating her for a few weeks - here's a warrant"

I doubt they would even need a warrant, I expect facebook will roll over for even an administrative subpoena (which are signed by clerks of the court rather than judges and are essentially pro forma).

Well, maybe they assume most people will just roll their eyes, disbelieve, ignore and forget about it. Which is a silly assumption of cour-- hey wait.

The real reason it seems unlikely is not about whether they were able to access Facebook messages (though the scope of PRISM is still unclear). It is more that it seems unlikely the NSA or other groups who may be able to get access to private messages care about German teenagers attempting to work in America. Alternative explanations (they got it from the host family, it was actually public, etc.) + vague reporting is just much more probable.

> It is more that it seems unlikely the NSA or other groups who may be able to get access to private messages care about German teenagers attempting to work in America.

Playing devils advocate here; there maybe more to this teenager than we're aware of. She might be an active protester or have left vocal remarks on other locations online that triggered closer inspection.

I'm not trying to say that your explanations are wrong or less plausible though, just that assumptions are being made on both sides of the argument.

Certainly a possibility. But the assumption that she was a person of interest to intelligence agencies is much greater than the assumption that the newspaper report is either misleading or being misinterpreted.

I expect we will learn that the NSA turned their eye of sauron on occupy protestors, if not within the US then certainly on protestors outside of the US. If this young woman had any involvement with the protests she could well have ended up on a list of those that are regularly monitored.

I'm not saying that is what happened, there are other plausible explanations too. I am just saying that such a scenario is entirely plausible.

We already know that the NSA has access to information specifically requested by an individual either by showing probable cause if they are a U.S. citizen or using some other specific request if they aren't.

It doesn't seem likely a low level border agent would have access to this. If this is standard operating procedure, don't you think we would have heard about it from other people who were presented with printouts of their facebook messages when arriving at the border?

Or more likely, this is FUD that leaves out specific facts (border agents don't have broad access to facebook messages) to give the impression it is linked to a big trending news story.

they didn't have access to all private messages from Facebook and I doubt the turnaround time would have been fast enough to retrieve messages at customs.

> I think the point is that the facts provided by the article don't seem very likely.

Exactly! How would the US gov't have access to someone's private correspondences on Facebook? They'd having to be spying on FB's users for that to be the case...

That's not the part that I find unlikely.

And have real time access to the Facebook database for each border agent? to check every single foreign teenager that are attempting to land in USA? To read at the moment of landing every single message of their facebook story?

Right now very unlikely.

Or for DHS to have a process of checks run on every person scheduled to arrive. I could even be part of a batch process for each flight, or for each day. Border agents know who is arriving through flight manifests.

It's common for US immigration and border control agents (and Canadian agents) to do Google and other internet searches. This has been disclosed and acknowledged in the US media several times. While the messages were not likely Facebook "chat" messages, they could have been "friends only" posts (or even public posts that the woman considered "private" from a foreign government). My understanding is that US law enforcement has access to Facebook "God view" where they can see all your Facebook posts. They don't need a warrant because Facebook owns the data and is the one giving them permission to view it. It's a different class of data than a "chat/email" in that it's posted, not directly communicated, so there's no reasonable legal expectation of "privacy".

As for personal experience with this, I had a musician friend that posted on his website that he was going to be performing a series of shows in Canada. He was asked at the border if he planned to work while in Canada. He said no and did not have a visa that allows it. The border agent showed him his website, which was found with google, showing that he was planning to work. He was denied entry and banned from Canada for 1 year for lying to a border agent.

My understanding is that US law enforcement has access to Facebook "God view" where they can see all your Facebook posts.

Where do you get this understanding from?

So because you think its unlikely that US immigration officials has access to private communications on FB, that speculation is enough to dismiss the whole article about how two young girls, traveling to the US with hopes and dreams to study the language and experience the world, and then at the border was interrogated and immediately sent back.

Is it just me who feels that is a bit heartless?

Heartless, yes, but not outrageous.

If a young Mexican woman showed up at the border with papers describing how she intends to work as an illegal nanny, would we react the same way?

Is she getting paid an actual wage, or is she getting a room and a trivial amount of spending money?

The first is a job, the second shouldn't be considered one.

Many countries consider whether something is a job based on what it should be paid (accounting for typical pay, minimum wage, etc), rather than what someone is paid.

This is to prevent abuses such as shipping in workers from a poorer country, giving them food, board and $10 a week for them to stack shelves, and claiming "It's not a job", so the not-workers don't require a working visa.

Similar judgements are also often made in relation to tax law, working conditions, etc.

I'm not sure it's actually a bad thing to let people work for free if there's a reason they honestly want to. As long as they're not trapped in some manner.

Plus it's tricky when it comes to something like 'watching children part of the day'. It wouldn't be considered labor if it was a family member doing it, whereas stacking shelves certainly would be. If I'm letting someone live in my house, why should it matter if they're family when it comes to having them do chores?

There are over 11 million illegals in this country. The typical reaction is to give them extensive welfare, and in certain cases, job and tuition preferences over citizens.

Myth status: BUSTED

Illegal immigrants pay more into social security than they take out. I don't even live in your country and I know this, come on - read a book.

That's only social security, there are many, many other programs. Illegal immigrants qualify for some of them, it depends on the state.

Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeituni_Onyango

She ignored deportation orders and managed to receive subsidized housing and a disability pension. She's not unique.

>" I don't even live in your country and I know this, come on - read a book."

I think that comment was uncalled. If you wanted to point out OP disinformation you could just provided the source and it would be as much effective and also would be better appreciated.

Sorry but I'm not willing to be tolerant of intolerance. The chance of actually turning around a wilfully ignorant racist on the internet is very low; broadcasting the message "these attitudes are not socially acceptable" is easier (I suppose you could consider that prevention rather than cure?)

Do you think that's the expressed intended reaction or an unintended result?

My guess is it would be difficult to find any piece of document where it states something along the lines of "The goal of this program is to make this country more appealing for illegal immigrants, by offering them extensive welfare and preferential job and tuition situations, especially over those of our citizens."

I think what's more likely is that you are citing unfortunate byproducts of an imperfect solution to a complicated problem. Not a "typical reaction."

I'm not an expert on these things, though.

> the US authorities may have been reading her private Facebook messages for weeks.

That's ridiculous and puts the whole article under doubt. Nobody would waste that much time on her.

"reading" doesn't necessarily have to be done by a human. As PRISM has shown, the government has capabilities we weren't aware (or at least sure) of. Would it be that ridiculous that they would have algorithmic scrapers running through all the FB data they have available? They say they aren't, but they've already proven we can't trust them farther than we can throw them. Even if they aren't, she's a foreign national, who they have almost no restrictions on investigating, so they may have been "reading" her messages, even if those of US citizens were left intact (which I personally doubt).

Long story short, it wouldn't necessarily waste much time to go through her records, and it would probably be completely legal.

The part that seems unlikely to me is that they would show their hand by using PRISM for such a small thing, unless there is some bigger reason they want her out of the country. It's hardly a sure argument, though.

Even if there is a bigger reason for wanting her out, there is no reason for them to expose PRISM that way. Immigration officers already have rights to deny anyone without explanation.

I just don't find anything about that article logical.

USA Inmigration officers have a good record of not being logical at all.

But they are very consistent in not giving any reason or support to their decisions.

This particular case, if true, may have nothing to do with PRISM. A simple search of communications between the person and only her US contacts would probably result in a small amount of data to search, which could probably be obtained by DHS or CBP via the providers directly.

Good point, and one I missed. Thanks for helping clear things up.

I disagree, It's already well documented how the US government follows social networks and decline people entry over comments made[1].

Where this case differs is that the comments were over private messages - which means that the intel would have been collated covertly. So the real question is whether this is another piece of the PRISM jigsaw or just a sensationalist article cashing in on the hysteria that the NSA leaks have generated.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/30/leigh-van-bryan-a... (though in that case - I actually blame the visitors for posting dumb comments rather than the US government)

Thank goodness the gov't protects us from crass tourists. Totally worth the billions spent and the invasion of everyone's privacy.

> private Facebook messages

What makes you think this is a thing that exists, aside from the rest of this conversation?

She sent a bunch of data to Facebook, with instructions to give that data to someone else. Why does she or anyone have an expectation of privacy when you hand an unsealed (read: unencrypted) piece of paper to a courrier?

If something's important, you protect it by putting it in an envelope.

Data acquisition methods in order of highest probability:

1. ^ This.

2. Was actually public information; story details lost in transmission or translation.

3. Her phone was still logged into Facebook.

4. They gained access to Facebook via links in e-mail.

[...]

10. Normal federal law enforcement powers.

11. Special federal law enforcement powers, e.g. Patriot Act.

[...]

100. NSA data that requires TS/SAP + full-scope poly to access.

They probably have a semi-automatic data collection system where you can type in a name, and it collects all sorts of public data in real time. To a non-technical person, this can look like they have a file on you, when in reality this crawler just compiled all the data in a few minutes.

I use one of those tools at work. It's called Google :)

Right... It's probably more sophisticated like that. Similar to what many HR departments use to screen future employees.

HR departments just use Google...

There are subscription services that do all the dirty work for you. Like beenverified.com (However that explicitly "forbids" its users to use it for employment verification. Pinky promise!)

Why would they? That's incredibly risky from a legal point of view.

So they like to say...

I'm no friend of FB or the US.

But the idea that somehow all FB messages are thoroughly searched seems .. unlikely.

The German article says the girl 'found a nice family' and had 'a regular contact with her guest dad'. How unlikely is it, that the guest dad - or someone with access to his account .. - notified the border control?

I refuse to believe in the Orwellian surveillance theory here and put my money on a jealous spouse.

They do sometimes ask to see your phone.

Do you recall any specific story where they ask you to unlock it?

All electronic devices are subject to search at the U.S. border.

http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/crcl-bor...

No. (Thank the stars for Alex Kozinski).

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130308/13380622263/9th-ci...

Let me be more specific. All that is required is "reasonable suspicion" in order to require access to all the files on your computer, unencrypted. "Reasonable suspicion" is a very weak requirement, as you can see from the document linked to in the techdirt article, and is exactly the same as what is needed for an extended physical search or an extended search of non-electronic property. In other words, there are no special considerations that apply to property just because it is electronic.

Israel regularly makes people log into email and social media accounts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/04/israel-airport-emai...

Oh, don't get me started..

I still cringe about multiple 'turn on the computer' scenes in Tel Aviv, where 'turn it on' obviously (..) wasn't satisfied by pressing the button, nor by logging in: I had to 'open a file, just any file' (the clueless guys would be impatient by now, being annoyed by my failure to understand this useless requirement). Usually I chose a default windows wallpaper -> Done.

Braindead, waste of time.

It's fairly easy to rig a laptop display to a micro controller just clever enough to run a login screen simulator, gut out the actual computer electronics and battery, and replace them with contraband or a bomb. Tel Aviv security, which I've been through several times, want to be sure the computer is of the kind it's supposed to be.

Login screen simulators are old tech. Friends of mine used to run them on the terminals at the college I studied at in the 80s to harvest other student's account details. Nowadays they're a lot more sophisticated. If you think you know more about security than the Israelis you're sadly mistaken.

Yeah. Right. I've been through that stuff a number of times myself. More than a dozen times.

You do realize that the process I'm talking about happens after they (always.. always.. sigh) x-rayed your belongings like everywhere else and (this is special, I get that treatment every time) polished all my electronic equipment with their 'sniffer' pads for traces of whatever explosives I might've built into my laptop?

That totally ignores that both times that I had to do this weird 'proof it works' dance by .. clicking myself, doing what came to my mind (and what I considered nonsense). If your world allows for a cramped micro controller that kind of simulates an OS booting, plus the login screen: Hey, let me raise you a Raspberry Pi in a laptop case, that __actually_ runs a full operating system.

It's bullshit, there's no way to make it better.

Disclaimer: I like the country, love Tel Aviv and certainly don't claim to be an expert on terrorism. But I can recognize IT related crap when I see it.

I mean, if you were willing to invest that sort of effort, it might even be easier just to put the innards from a modern slim "ultrabook" laptop into the case of a 2000 era thinkpad monster. Throw on a "third party extended battery" for good measure... Actually, don't bother with that. There is plenty of air-space in many older laptops that you could pack with explosives if you don't worry about being able to run the computer for more than several minutes without it overheating...

The entire "turn on the computer" check is idiotic security theater. Either they can tell if there is a bomb in the computer anyway through other means (in which case why are they bothering to do that check?) or they cannot (in which case, how can they possibly hope to catch anything?). My money is obviously on the first.

Which is why the security agent is spending a lot more attention on you while you're powering stuff up and entering passwords than they are on what's happening on the screen. In TSA checks the chefs themselves, imperfect as they may be, are the point. At Tel Aviv its the responses and behaviour of the people being checked that's the real focus. Not that the checks are totally pointless, they are perfectly capable of catching amateurs or the incompetent, but don't imagine for a second that Israeli border guards are just as clueless as the average TSA agent.

Depends how smart the "average terrorist" would be. Because you would catch the ones stupid enough to just gut out the laptop, rendering it inoperative (unless of course for that last one blaze of glory… hem).

Presumably these terrorists would also be caught by the system that catches the slightly smarter terrorists that only gutted the battery, or swapped out the CD drive, or just shoved a bunch of explosives under the palm rest. I mean, those things would be picked up, right?

Asking people to turn on their computers is like a doctor taking your temperature with the back of his hand on your forehead.. right before actually using the digital thermometer anyway.

Once I was looking for the number of the person I was going to stay with in the USA and they asked to have my phone. I said it's okay, I'll find it for you.

> 100. NSA data that requires TS/SAP + full-scope poly to access.

You may be over-estimating the classification level here. The government classification isn't about protecting the secrets of private citizens, only government secrets. I have some experience in this field - handling fingerprints of non-criminals which were classified at the bare minimum for the agency. It would not surprise me if any non-specific NSA drag-net data itself was not classified any higher than CUI - controlled unclassified information.

> The government classification isn't about protecting the secrets of private citizens, only government secrets.

Using that logic, Facebook private messages supplied courtesy of the NSA would be highly classified, considering their collection mechanism would be PRISM or similar closely-held programs.

> I have some experience in this field - handling fingerprints of non-criminals which were classified at the bare minimum for the agency.

Fingerprint data is available to nearly every local law enforcement organization in the country. There's no mystery about the collection method. It's a foregone conclusion that it's aggregated up the chain.

As other comments have said, if immigration officials were using NSA-supplied data, it would likely be in vague, aggregate form that did not hint at the underlying collection mechanism.

That only flies if there is no other possible way for another agency to have acquired the information. An administrative subpoena would be one way to do it -- I expect there is a term for that sort of thing, although the obvious "warrant laundering" does not seem to pull up any meaningful hits in google.

BTW, unless something has changed since I was last in west virginia, fingerprint info is not widely available in the general case. You take prints from an arrestee or latents from an object, you send them to IAFIS for matching and they return hits which may not even include a copy of the matched prints depending on the circumstances.

It shouldn't fly. That's why in my original post NSA was listed dead last as a probable data source, far below normal federal law enforcement means (such as administrative subpoenas). Even those were far less likely than simpler explanations.

As far as fingerprints, I agree the interface available to IAFIS database end-users may be restrictive. However, due to the highly aggregated nature of the data, and the fact it's maintained for law enforcement by law enforcement (namely the FBI), people expect it to be available to a myriad of government agencies (which it is).

With Facebook private messages, you expect only Facebook employees (or partners) to have access, or in special cases government via warrant or subpoena. Major tech companies took a fairly large PR hit following the news of NSA having wholesale access to their systems, precisely because of these expectations.

If the headline was instead "FBI grants NSA full unrestricted IAFIS access." nobody would bat an eye, because it's expected. The FBI is heavily involved in national security affairs themselves.

My point was, the sensitivity of the collection method is a major factor in determining the classification level of the data. The PRISM leak is a prime example of this.

Do you really believe they're getting administrative subpoenas to Facebook for every 18-year-old tourist who might do some side work?

No.

What I believe is that if the NSA are already monitoring someone for whatever reason and see evidence of law-breaking that they would call up an appropriately cleared contact in the relevant agency and say, hey you should look into this person. The agency is free to run with it from there, using whatever tools with minimal oversight are available to them and no need to even mention the NSA after that point.

In fact, I believe that the number of actual terrorists is so small that such (ab)uses of the system are inevitable. In the same way that all the federal money for SWAT training of police departments has resulted in SWAT teams being deployed for all manner of low-risk situations, there just ain't enough real work for them to do so the mission creeps.

A friend of a friend (I know, I know) was stopped on the border between Canada and the US, and had her possessions searched. Inside they found her diary, which detailed her life and job in New York- which she shouldn't have had, because she was repeatedly entering the country on a tourist visa. She was rejected at the border.

This may well be the same- even if the girl did not intend to show those messages to the border control agents, they can search her suitcase for evidence to then later present to her. So, to the extent that the word "provided" does not also imply "voluntarily", I suspect you're right.

How was she even attempting to do this when Canadians are limited to 6 months per year in the US?

AFAIK, it wasn't an arrangement she'd been in for a long time. I doubt she'd hit the six month point, and had been hoping to secure a visa to stay in the country legitimately.

Ack.. that's just incredibly poor judgement. If you have to lie to the officials when entering the country, you really shouldn't expect that a closer look later on is going to get you a visa - as soon as they discover you lied about it you're done for.

It's pretty common to lie to border agents. Both US and Canadian agents themselves have advised me to do so in the past. Ticking the "Have you been on a farm?" check box triggers a compulsory search for seeds (both smuggled and inadvertently stuck to your shoes). It is time consuming, and they know it to be a fruitless waste of time.

Canadians don't need a visa for tourist visits to the US, and passports aren't stamped on exit. It's an incredibly BAD idea in my books, but it's still probably relatively easy for a Canadian to spend a whole lot of time in the US without getting flagged.

Having been here (legally) for 17+ years, I would concur that there is absolutely nothing that would prevent a Canadian from living/working here, other than their integrity and respect for the law (which, admittedly, Canadian have in abundance) - Well, that and a desire to return home for free medicare, more generous welfare system, ... :-)

The only evidence I have submitted to a half dozen employers of my right to work in the United States (because it's all I've ever been given) - is a cardboard I-94, filled out by me, no less, with a faint, blue stamp and date, and a (once again handwritten, this time by ICE agent) "Class: TN, Until: 07 Oct 2015". No Serial Number, no tracking number - just a stamp and visa class.

You do realize that your TN status is only for a single employer, right? You must obtain independent TN status for each employer you work for. Showing an old TN has no bearing on your eligibility to work for someone else - you must reapply.

Not trying to scare you, just noting that I have had at least one friend on TN's who tried to bridge their status without filing a proper change in status ( ie. to B-2 as soon as you quit/are let go from your old employer, to be eligible to stay without packing up your apartment) and were banned from re-entry for 2 years.

I have had several TN's over the past 16 years and the only trouble I have had was primary border guard overreach once or twice (they felt I had been in the USA long enough, arbitrarily. Secondary review fixed that.)

Yup - intimately familiar with the "Must obtain independent status with each employer". Every time I change an employer, new trip to the border to get a new TN.

I did not realize I could file a change in status if my old job concluded before I got a new one. In 2003, I finished up with a company, and my last, "Paid Day" as an employee was September 26th, but I wasn't required to come into the office for the last two weeks - so my last day in the office was around September 12th, a friday. By Sunday, September 14th, I had emptied my apartment, packed up all my possessions, and had returned to Canada.

Depends how much you travel. And if you have proof of employment in Canada.

Returning to Canada after an extended stay and then returning to the US, you will almost always be questioned.

Stamps are old school, they log your passport or NEXUS on each entry/exit in their system.

On exit? They don't even look at my passport on exit.

How did she work in the US without a work visa? Every company that I have worked for (large and small) do the I-9 verification process at the start of employment. I can't see any company being so desperate for employees that they would skip that and hire someone without work authorization.

Of course, if you were working for yourself (freelance), there are no employment verification checks.

I'd say it's far more likely that the border official noticed that this girl only had a return ticket a year from entry, searched her name on Facebook, and found she was lying. They're really picky about employment vs. tourism visa status, and a lie can get you barred. This girl was pretty naive about how immigration works.

Occam's razor clearly makes this story less interesting than face value. I think we can assume that the NSA is legitimately looking for real problems, not ones that involve the illegal hiring of an au pair.

My translation would be "Officials baffled Jana with a printout of her complete Facebook correspondence with her future host. Their allegation: the young woman intended to work illegally in the US. The authorities had apparently been reading Jana's private messages on Facebook for weeks".

The key word being "apparently", i.e. bad journalism, jumping to conclusions for a more sensationalist story.

It's an automatic translation, so wording may be haphazard. I note that "offenbar" (from the original article) can also mean "obvious", as in "It was apparent that the authorities had read her correspondence."

Edit: just noticed you had written "my translation", not "the translation". My German is nowhere good enough to translate the article, I'm just working off Google's.

"offenbar" can indeed mean "obviously", but in the context of a news article it's a weasel word more close to "apparently". To a native speaker, this word sounds as though they are presenting facts, but reading closely they are only assuming, just like smartician said.

Slightly off-topic, but "obvious" would be "offensichtlich" in German. "Offenbar" implies a higher degree of uncertainty. "Scheinbar" or "anscheinend" is even more uncertain, to the point of doubt. And finally, "angeblich" is very questionable, almost an accusation of lying.

Yeah the TN wording is picky, but I can't imagine a situation where one would even think of using Facebook communications as evidence for your visa/status application. In the case of the TN, the only evidence you need to provide (beyond the letter you mentioned) are your degree, letters from previous employers (if relevant), marriage certificate (if relevant), passport (obviously), and your school grades.

Indeed. The only thing scarier than the US monitoring 95% of internet traffic is the US deciding the best use of its super-secret super-powerful internet surveillance is to keep illegal au pairs out of the country. But I doubt they're actually that foolish.

Facebook provided it. Doh.

Perhaps she posted her intent to work illegally in a public facebook post and not only via PM? Or perhaps her host family was under the impression she was official and triggered some sort of alert when they were arranging things (if she for example, listed them as a contact when she got to customs). The typical au pair process from Germany is quite strict and time consuming to get a visa for a 1 year stay, I've had a few friends come to the US to do it. You most definitely need a work visa to be an au pair and she was attempting to violate her tourist visa in two ways, by overstaying the 90 days allowed, and by working. A lot of things could be going on here.

My thought as well. My guess is she or he had posted something on her publicly visible wall and they just printed that off.

Hardly takes a genius. A couple pages of FB wall would take you back a few weeks as well, the agent probably just hit Print.

Is this the only news outlet with this story? How credible is this publication? Before I get worked up about this story, I'd like to know it's not bullshit.

Der Westen/WAZ is usually pretty credible.

However I think it's likely that they misconstructed the story (not on purpose but because they made some bad assumptions). Pretty likely that this is yet another "routine check sniffing through social media etc. after the person acted suspicious in some way" ... which in itself is noteworthy but pretty different.

Not unlikely that the sources reported the story a tad wrong.

I don't agree on the credibility part. In my opinion they quite often write sensational judgemental stories, at least on local topics.

Also they rarely indicate their sources. Same with this article. No source, nothing.

If a viral story (though there's no direct mention of Prism, the NSA etc, the 'related articles' are all about this and it's clear that it's the same topic) was their aim: Mission accomplished. Not only the massive traffic from HN, but also more than 3 times as many Facebook shares for this article as the next-most-shared-one.

There are some critical comments on the site, which are blocked and removed quickly by the moderators (have seen this a couple of times now).

WAZ is a mainstream newspaper with wide circulation in western Germany. It has better reputation than a tabloid, worse than a top tier newspaper like NYT or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

I agree. It sounds utterly implausible on just about every conceivable level.

What's the "utterly implausible" part?

In the past we've had verified incidents of people being refused entry because of things posted on for instance public Twitter feeds.

So we know that the monitoring of social media, collating that with the identity of incoming travelers and passing that on to officials at the border is an existing practice. We also know that once monitoring starts for one purpose, it rapidly expands to other use case. This pattern repeats itself around the world.

The only part open to debate is the suggestion of monitoring private Facebook communication.

So you're suggesting that everything published about the nature of US surveillance until this very day, including the recent PRISM-related publications, is all "utterly implausible"?

Because everything else I read in that article is perfectly consistent with what we already know as fact, and therefor completely plausible, albeit suspiciously thin on concrete facts.

> Because everything else I read in that article is perfectly consistent with what we already know as fact, and therefor completely plausible

It's completely in-consistent with logic.

We're making a couple assumptions here :

1. The NSA, via PRISM, can search FB private messages at will (this is a stretch)

2. They are sharing this ability with customs & border patrol (highly implausible)

3. Customs is using this ability in routine border checks, and/or monitoring 18 year old german girls for weeks (highly implausible. seriously.)

4. Customs officials are in turn sharing this with their suspects when they have no reason to. (highly implausible)

Yes, this is utterly implausible. I expect more common sense out of HN.

The only part open to debate is the suggestion of monitoring private Facebook communication.

No, part open to debate is whether they'd risk getting the project discovered by giving a bunch of border officers (probably without any clearance) the tools for accessing, printing out and showing to travelers their private Facebook messages, when they could have:

1. Not use it for visa clearance.

2. Use data-mining to create no-entry-lists without exposing the source.

3. Have secure facilities (rooms in some building, not necessarily Top-Secret hideouts) where the PM investigation would happen, to avoid leaks like officers showing evidence to regular civilians.

officers showing evidence to regular civilians

Not even American citizens, at that.

So we know that the monitoring of social media, collating that with the identity of incoming travelers and passing that on to officials at the border is an existing practice.

By the NSA, for national security reasons. Not for visa fraud.

Don't get me wrong, it's possible. But if NSA data was being used to monitor au pair activity and provided to border control agents it would be a step beyond what we currently know.

It is certainly not one of the big newspapers, but still the largest regional one.

Where's the fun in that?

Yes. When asked the reason for her visit she said it was to visit family, friends, and do an English course. Her Facebook "private messages" showed that she was there to be an au pair, which means to do housework and child-minding in return for money.

In short, she was lying and got caught. And after all the recent brouhaha, are you surprised that the authorities had access to her "private" Facebook messages?

Added in edit, since most of the replies to this comment are saying the same thing, so I may as well reply to you all at once by adding my reply here: I put the word "private" in quotation marks. What's the odds that at least of what she posted was, in fact, public? Just how careful was she about privacy settings? Just how careful was she not to post anything at all that was publicly viewable? I'm not at all surprised that she was stopped, and given a second interview, nor that they checked social media.

I guess next time I put something in "scare quotes" I should spell out explicitly that it's a term that just might not be literally true.

The point is that she was caught only because the authorities had access to her Facebook messages. That's obviously why this story was submitted here.

The only justification the executive branch has given for all these spying powers is anti-terror efforts. If the US border agents indeed obtained her private messages from Facebook (and not from her prospective employer), then this would show that the government's access to such data is being abused.

If they obtained it from NSA spying on facebook, yeah, that's bad...

But that seems really really unlikely. Much more likely is it was a piece of public information on facebook and she got busted.

Right, this girl was clearly a terrorist and part of the threat to the USA that these NSA dragnets were built for... </sarcasm>

I'm surprised that the authorities are using their access to her facebook messages for something so trivial and this openly (if they actually did). Additionally, she was not even an american citizen or resident.

> Additionally, she was not even an american citizen or resident.

In all probability, it's /because/ she's not an american citizen or resident. The fourth amendment doesn't apply for non-persons.

Actually, the Constitution does apply to people that are not US citizens. However, it's the "law of the land" and the border (and other countries) is not part of that land.

The USCIS reviews Facebook for those applying for long term visas, to prevent fraud. It doesn't have anything to do with the NSA.

Source?

Memo from DHS on checking social network sites:

http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/DHS_CustomsImmigration_...

http://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/does-uscis-check-the-faceb...

The real question (assuming this story is true in the particulars) is why were they accessing her private messages in the first place? Was there any kind of flag, or do the border police just do random spot-checks into people's private correspondence?

her actions are extremely harmless in the grand-scheme of things, and it's ridiculous and unsettling that her private conversation was used against her like this.

Surely you're not seriously suggesting that this was in any shape or form acceptable behavior by the state.

I think the idea was that people should feel outrage because they found out about this kiddy, small-time, mockery of a fraud by reading some random civilian's chat logs.

Yes, I am. Or I would be, if I thought this story was remotely true.

And here's the flip side of Google Translate. German doesn't react well to n-gram statistics; too many long-distance dependencies. Also translating the city of "Essen" as "Food" is hilarious.

I prefer the transpation of "Würzburg" as "peppering castle" that babelfish did when the web was still young...

Actually it's naming a city "Essen" in the first place that I find hilarious. Just like the name for that city next to it, "Theremouth" (Dortmund).

true :)

When my partner (who is from the EU) got to the US this most recent time (she visits here for 90 days at a time, as allowed under VWP rules), immigration pulled her aside with a printout of (public-facing) facebook pages on their desk. Interesting only in that her face book is not under her official name. They had pages and pages of printouts that they thought proved she wasn't simple a tourist, and that she was working here, etc. Note, it was all public (or semi-public with a lot of crawling around under alternate emails, leading to other names, etc etc) so nothing "intercepted". But still a bit worrying when you get pulled aside and someone has a folder ready full of pictures of you, your business website (freelancer), your facebook posts, your tweets, etc

Interesting. Any theories on how they linked that FB profile to her real name? Maybe through the WHOIS record of her website, that got linked from that Facebook page often enough to imply a relationship?

Probably not even anything that difficult. If you search for her last name and city, her freelance site comes up. If you go through the freelance site you get an email. Under a search for that email, I think there is a livejournal. In livejournal info there is a link to the facebook page. Etc etc. Something like that. Just google search a few things and play "follow that link"

Worthwhile not because of super spy tactics, nothing any of us couldn't do in 10 minutes of looking for a person, but because its a reminder of how much info people leave out in the open even if they are semi privacy conscious, and also whether you think it is valid or not (I don't obv) immigration is going to get anything they can to figure out why you are here if you are a "frequent tourist" and seemingly from all of our interactions with them, the thing they are most concerned about, to the point of being fanatical, is whether or not you are making any money while you are in the US.

In the age of telecommuting, multinational clients, etc this makes no sense. (My partner can of course hire American clients when in Europe, but can't even work for European clients when in the US) but not exactly the first time bureaucracy is dragging behind the way we are actually living.

If someone has had their real name on their profile at any time, and later changed it, it's pretty easy to still find using the real name. Trivially so if they chose a username that contained their real name.

email address?

"Finally, the officials baffled Jana submitted a printout of the entire Facebook correspondence with their host-father. "

Maybe something is lost in translation, but could the officials just have received the correspondence from the family she was coming to visit??

Native German speaker here. The article alleges that "apparently" authorities had been monitoring their private correspondence for weeks. I highly doubt that this was the case. Usually it works like this: Once you're deemed suspicious at the passport control, you're sent for "secondary inspection" to an office in the back. There, you're being questioned further, and officials will search publicly available information for anything suspicious. This includes your Amazon wishlist [1] and in some cases searches of personal items like laptop data [2]. The most common case is when future au-pairs bring physical letters from their hosts with them, and CBO agents find them. There have been thousands of stories like this going back for decades, that's nothing new. What's new is the ubiquity of social media.

In this case, I assume the girl was stupid enough to post publicly on the wall of her future employer, and the CBO agents could easily find it and print it out. I seriously doubt that their private conversations have been monitored. That just wouldn't make any sense.

[1] http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/16/16039/1.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

Exactly as I read it. The translation is better as "Jana was baffled when the officials showed her a print out of all of her facebook correspondence." The article makes it clear they asked her a lot of questions before they presented the facebook messages, so they clearly had suspicion.

Given that the article claims that it happened to another girl, too, this is unlikely.

Obviously, the problem is not that they were denied entry (as far as I can tell, they did violate US immigration law), but how the US authorities learned about it, namely by accessing private Facebook correspondence.

Does anyone have a link to a human translated version of story?

Essen. Anyone interested in traveling the US to experience everyday life there as an intern or an au pair should be careful with their correspondence. The staff of the immigration authorities appear to be happy to read along on social networks like Facebook. Two young women were put onto the next plane back to Germany right after landing.

After completing high school, Jana H. wanted to go abroad to the land of unlimited opportunity – the United States of America. She organized her own au pair exchange. Found a nice family she wanted to work for and live with for a year. For agreed-upon daily spending money, Jana would take care of the children. At the same time, she wanted to take a language course to improve her English. She had regular contact with her host father through Facebook.

When the high school graduate finally landed in the US, she was taken to the side and questioned at the passport control in the airport. The officials at the American immigration agency wanted to know the reasons for her travel and how long she wanted to stay.

Wrong answers

Jana was ready for this kind of question. She wanted to visit friends of her parents and take an English course. Was she sure of that? was the next question. Yes, she was sure. Really, really sure?

Finally, the officials presented the astounded Jana with a print-out of the entire Facebook correspondence she had had with her host father. Their accusation: The young woman wanted to work in the States illegally. The authorities had obviously read along in Jana's private messages on the social network Facebook for weeks. Jana was not allowed to enter. The next airplane brought the 18-year-old back to Germany.

It wasn't an isolated incident. The dream of another youth of an internship on a horse ranch in the US also never came to fruition due to snooped Facebook messages – he, too, ended up right back at the airport after the flight over the pond.

291 words.

I'm not going to type down a translation, but I can tell you this computer generated translation is very accurate.

Heh. Saw a story where some Britishers were refused entry to US simply because they tweeted something like "2 weeks till I destroy America on my vacation". They were specifically asked stuff like "How do you plan to destroy America?"

Srsly?

A similar case is surfacing in Norway aswell, only here it is for a top lawyer: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

DHS CIS (immigration authorities) has been using Facebook and other social networks to detect relationship fraud in citizenship applications. EFF foia-ed a memo on the subject: https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/social_network/DHS_Custom...

The United States is not going to blow the operational security of a Top Secret program to bust a teenaged nanny. There's more to this poorly-translated story.

Or as it turns out: less.

also keep in mind that this isn't the Spiegel

Should we infer that the NSA or some other government organization used a FISA request to read a German girl's Facebook messages about her upcoming au pair work in the US? This seems very unlikely, and I believe would be a clear violation of FISA unless they also thought she was a terrorist or spy.

I found this story several hours ago, as well. I found the news to be a possible sensationalist story and didn't even think about posting it on HN. Yes, it is a very interesting story. But it a speculative story. You never know if the media did their research properly or if they just wanted to have more readers. There are other more reputable and trusted news sources in Germany than this one. I don't say it is made up, but some facts could be wrong.

I know I'm reading a Google translation, but the story seems weak.

It's a real newspaper, but we've got an article with an unknown source, about a girl with no last name, landing in an unnamed city on an unnamed date. There's no statement from any authority and no way to corroborate any part of this.

It's one step above this story that I heard from my best friend, whose cousin's mom totally said ...

I find it quite unbelievable people are buying into this story.

Border guards have access to private email to catch people who possibly might work on the wrong visa, sure....

And boarder guards have kept this secrete for years but the leak came from within the NSA.

What is wrong with people. This is why the governmenat walks all over you, there's just no common sense amongst the masses.

Maybe the border agents were in possession of her laptop and used that to get access to her private messages.

Maybe 'private messages' actually refers to public wall posts.

My sister moved to America about 7-8 years ago and the school where she got a job as a teacher found her website hosted here in Sweden, under a fake name. They demanded that she take it down because she posted about something the schools lawyers objected to. I'm not sure if it was amazon links or about her BDSM hobbies. Either way I was amazed by the fact that they found it, and traced it to her. She didn't even have a computer at the time so she had to call me who worked at the hosting company where it was hosted for free, just so I could take it down for her.

It's interesting how much personal image speaks to character in some societies. I'm not saying this is unique to the USA, it's just interesting how we judge people superficially.

It seems as if she lied to the immigration officers. From the story it is not quite clear how it was discovered, but it seems probable that the story is biased and that there are no secondary sources. Also the comments suggest that. So ??

So? America is horrible. Especially how they won't let us in.

Rings of this incident with UK tourists and Twitter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3533270

The whole story doesn't seem to add up, I have a feeling that some crucial information is missing.

Apparently, the reason she was sent home was that she gave wrong information about her reasons to enter the country. That's why she was confronted with contradictory information in her messages (she claimed she wanted visit friends of her parents, while she was really going there to work). So was she actually trying to enter illegaly and was sent back because of that? That sounds like a visa issue to me (tourist vs. work visa).

Certainly the NSA or Homeland Security or whoever weren't reading every facebook message just so they could check if the girl would state a matching reason for entering the country.

To me it looks like something else must have triggered all of this, something that is not mentioned in the article. I understand that the main point here is that Immigration had access to her facebook chats. I just wonder: at what point in time did they decide to access her chats. Was it when the girl was already at Immigrations? Was it as a (random?) background check when she applied for her visa or ESTA? Or was it after something, e.g. keywords, in her chats triggered a check?

(Please understand that I'm not in the slightest trying to defend that customs had access to the FB chats, I just find the article a bit lacking.)

I've read that laptops can be searched at the border. I wonder if her laptop was suspended with Facebook active, or had saved login cookies to Facebook, allowing customs guys to log onto the machine [1] to see what she's been up to.

I decided long ago, when there was the initial flap about post-9/11 laptop border searches, that if I ever travel internationally, I'll wipe the HD of any laptops I'm taking with me before I cross any national border, and just use scp to transfer files as needed.

If I need to use large files that are too large to upload or download with the time and bandwidth available, this strategy becomes...problematic. But that scenario's pretty unlikely since I'd be going as a software developer/tourist mostly working with Git repos, still photos and short video clips, not a documentary filmmaker producing hours of high-definition video.

[1] Or pop the hard drive out and put it in another machine (assuming it's unencrypted). Which is what they should be doing if these procedures were ever reviewed by a competent lawyer (less chance of accidentally destroying evidence or the user's data this way).

Would you like to share this status update with

  - everyone?
  - just friends and the CIA?
  - just close friends and the CIA?
  - just the CIA?

As a native German speaker, I just wanted you to know, that the provided translation wouldn't make any sense, if you at least didn't have a basic gasp of the German language. The original German article does not provide any information about how HS dept got to read the Facebook messages. Further, it seems a rather badly researched article out of an insignificant tabloid.

The bigger revelation here to me is that it would appear the information access is shared beyond the NSA for more than security purposes.

The whole story is suspect. Why now? If the US government were to use this kind of intel to address issues as small as this, and this is at the level of shop lifting, wouldn't such incidents have made it to international news several times by now?

First of all, the only thing that makes this story interesting is whether or not the officers had access to the _private_ FB messages, as compared to her public profile. Her being sent back for lying about her intentions to work was a correct decision. As it is, the story (I'm reading the native German version) is very vague on the Facebook issue. I find it rather unlikely that immigration officials are sitting at every point of entry into the US with a massive folder of facebook printouts of everyone arriving on a plane. I'm almost certain there's more to this story (like, maybe she applied for a Student or Work Visa, which was refused for some reason, and then again applied as a tourist immediately after, which caused her to be flagged). Without that info, and without knowing what kind of data they actually got from Facebook, this whole discussion is moot.

Here is a similar story from one year ago:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Buntin...

This case was public twitter messages and not private facebook conversations, but otherwise similar.

There's a lot of skeptics in this thread whether the US immigration would actually snoop through social networking sites. But if these two cases are true as reported, it seems there's some level of semi-automatic filtering of social media accounts for people entering the country.

That is completely different to what is being alleged, especially in light of events this week, that they had access to private facebook messages.

I'm kind of confused - if US immigration authorities are so powerful and omnipresent that they read Facebook feeds of every random German girl in case they ever want to come to the US, how comes we still have illegal immigration problem in the US? Or was there something special about this particular girl that triggered the attention of the law enforcement well in advance of her visit? Or they just took her laptop, logged in to facebook and clicked "print"? Kind of unclear what exactly happened.

Here's a story from 2012 where a UK subject made a twitter comment about "destroying america" and was subsequently denied entry to the US.

(http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/30/this-is-what-happen...)

Obviously, tweets are public. But still, this kind of stuff isn't unknown.

Honestly, this seems to me (German) like a very lurid headline. Article seems like more entertaining then a serious press release and does not belong on top of hacker news imho.

I haven't heard this mentioned yet: Do we really think facebook "private" messages are in any way private, or even billed by facebook to be private? I am reading the facebook privacy policy and they do mention that they "... may use the information we receive about you: ...to protect Facebook's or others' rights or property..."

So we have rights to free speech, do we also have rights to private speech?

It's hard to know which depiction of the NSA to believe:

* Amazingly competent agency that is secretly reading all SSL-encrypted Internet traffic and thoroughly concerned with the messageboard postings of average Americans

* Amazingly incompetent agency that develops ground-breaking technology and shares it with low-level Customs officials to bust 18-year old au pairs

It could also be that her Facebook profile was public and she posted public status updates (default FB privacy setting) about what she plans to do in the US. No PRISM necessary for that, just a FB account.

Just try a search on FB for a random name and open a couple of profiles. It is baffling how much personal information is publicly available.

I can't believe this is factually accurate. Providing a hard copy of private facebook messages seems like a rather dumb thing to do as this would confirm that US agencies are checking up on foreign nationals intentions. Even if they checking up, implicating themselves with such a daft move seems implausible.

I call bullshit!

It's not totally clear to me that these were private messages.

I know that the Canadian Border services agency will look things up that are posted publicly on the internet to verify stories. My guess is that the messages were public and the immigration staff just looked them up and happened to see them.

She was planing to get a "salary" and didn't tell the immigration office about it and didn't have the right visa for that. -> She didn't play by the rules, so why should this be any more outraging than any other illegal immigrant?

The US is spending billions on immigration control, and still have several millions of illegal immigrants. For me this is a sign that restrictions on immigration as they now exist don't work, don't benefit society and should be rethought.

I don't think Customs needs any help from the NSA. Search incoming passenger manifests for anyone with a return ticket more than 5 months from arrival, then just search twitter and facebook pages for anyone on that list. Voila!

If you want to come to US and work illegally and get caught, what do you expect?

Why was this voted down? No one other than US citizens has a right to enter the US.

The girl wanted to work illegally. That is my main point of concern in case you didn't get it.

Isn't this an outrage. We should only be denying entry to hispanics, Muslims and darkies who we suspect of wanting to overstay their visas.

But you know, we don't have enough border security and we need more.

Whether this is true or not this is certainly not good PR for the US tourism industry and the US in general. Germans were not so long ago the people in the world who had the best image of the US.

Google translate needs some work on translating. It doesn't seem to understand the differences in how sentences are constructed (order of operations) in different languages.

Well, I was going to one day visit the US, but I'll never risk entering with the kind of inane (but possibly incriminating) crap I've bantered with friends over chat.

What a sham.

I wonder if this is part of a plan to deincentivise immigration.

Well I guess the guns and gates will still hold Nikita in. :(

I question the authenticity of this article.

Translation there no good hard read to.

quite ironic that the (German) site shoves a "like this on FB" prompt in my face as I read

You might want to look into some anti-tracking software that disables that.

Is this a Aprils fools joke? If not this would be unreal.

I think this is a case of a $5 wrench and not big brother http://xkcd.com/538/

when you are taken for questioning they may put you in a cell while they go trhu your stuff.

In that little cell, you are not allowed even you shoe laces!!!!

so they probably got her, unlocked her iphone (either she had no password or they have backdoors) and got the messages.

From a German perspective, it probably doesn't matter at all whether or not this story is even true or how the messages were retrieved if it is true. The US has earned the mistrust of the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com