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.
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.
http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/crcl-bor...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130308/13380622263/9th-ci...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/04/israel-airport-emai...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.