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Trump to require immigrants' Internet id's

Don2 (Don1 Revised)

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The Trump administration has rolled out a new questionnaire for U.S. visa applicants worldwide that asks for social media handles for the last five years and biographical information going back 15 years.

The new questions, part of an effort to tighten vetting of would-be visitors to the United States, was approved on May 23 by the Office of Management and Budget despite criticism from a range of education officials and academic groups during a public comment period.

Critics argued that the new questions would be overly burdensome, lead to long delays in processing and discourage international students and scientists from coming to the United States.

Under the new procedures, consular officials can request all prior passport numbers, five years' worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-visa-idUSKBN18R3F8

Okay, seriously. They want to know usernames like mrbeefy and jerkoffbud69. Isn't that a little personal? Also, I am constantly surprised by how Trump makes big changes without a law being passed. Is this even legal to get into people's private lives without cause?
 
The Trump administration has rolled out a new questionnaire for U.S. visa applicants worldwide that asks for social media handles for the last five years and biographical information going back 15 years.

The new questions, part of an effort to tighten vetting of would-be visitors to the United States, was approved on May 23 by the Office of Management and Budget despite criticism from a range of education officials and academic groups during a public comment period.

Critics argued that the new questions would be overly burdensome, lead to long delays in processing and discourage international students and scientists from coming to the United States.

Under the new procedures, consular officials can request all prior passport numbers, five years' worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-visa-idUSKBN18R3F8

Okay, seriously. They want to know usernames like mrbeefy and jerkoffbud69. Isn't that a little personal? Also, I am constantly surprised by how Trump makes big changes without a law being passed. Is this even legal to get into people's private lives without cause?
Don't they have weird clauses that allow individual decisions to be valid in absence of specific laws? To illustrate, in business, there might be a policy manual that allows higher ranking staff sufficient scope to address unspecified issues or even to countermand policy. In law, there are rules in certain departments that allow auditors decisions not specifically addressed in law to be treated as enforceable.

Anyhoots, seems likely there are loopholes of one kind or another. Heck, what about laws who have no bearing on an issue for which it was intended but to not let an immoral deed allow the bad guy to win or good guy to suffer wrongly, it is adapted in such a way it would cause eyebrows to raise yet grins to beam.

Also, immigrants don't quite deserve the same protections as the rest who have already been granted certain protections. If you start treating foreigners as family instead of outsiders by giving them certain freedoms and liberties that the home team have, you run greater risks than necessary. For instance, there's not much we can do to the weirdos already apart of those already afforded protections, but we have more room to violate unwritten rules of decency towards immigrants in favor of casting all our rights onto others abroad willynilly.
 
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-visa-idUSKBN18R3F8

Okay, seriously. They want to know usernames like mrbeefy and jerkoffbud69. Isn't that a little personal? Also, I am constantly surprised by how Trump makes big changes without a law being passed. Is this even legal to get into people's private lives without cause?
Don't they have weird clauses that allow individual decisions to be valid in absence of specific laws? To illustrate, in business, there might be a policy manual that allows higher ranking staff sufficient scope to address unspecified issues or even to countermand policy. In law, there are rules in certain departments that allow auditors decisions not specifically addressed in law to be treated as enforceable.

Anyhoots, seems likely there are loopholes of one kind or another. Heck, what about laws who have no bearing on an issue for which it was intended but to not let an immoral deed allow the bad guy to win or good guy to suffer wrongly, it is adapted in such a way it would cause eyebrows to raise yet grins to beam.

Also, immigrants don't quite deserve the same protections as the rest who have already been granted certain protections. If you start treating foreigners as family instead of outsiders by giving them certain freedoms and liberties that the home team have, you run greater risks than necessary. For instance, there's not much we can do to the weirdos already apart of those already afforded protections, but we have more room to violate unwritten rules of decency towards immigrants in favor of casting all our rights onto others abroad willynilly.

Immigrants? This isn't about immigrants.

This is about visitors. People who want to enter the US for a short time, either on vacation, or for business, and who require a visa to do so.

I have no intention of emigrating to the US; And if they want all this information (much of which I would struggle to recall even if I wanted to divulge it), then I shall take my tourist dollars and my business deals elsewhere. As will many others.

This is beyond fucking stupid.
 
Don't they have weird clauses that allow individual decisions to be valid in absence of specific laws? To illustrate, in business, there might be a policy manual that allows higher ranking staff sufficient scope to address unspecified issues or even to countermand policy. In law, there are rules in certain departments that allow auditors decisions not specifically addressed in law to be treated as enforceable.

Anyhoots, seems likely there are loopholes of one kind or another. Heck, what about laws who have no bearing on an issue for which it was intended but to not let an immoral deed allow the bad guy to win or good guy to suffer wrongly, it is adapted in such a way it would cause eyebrows to raise yet grins to beam.

Also, immigrants don't quite deserve the same protections as the rest who have already been granted certain protections. If you start treating foreigners as family instead of outsiders by giving them certain freedoms and liberties that the home team have, you run greater risks than necessary. For instance, there's not much we can do to the weirdos already apart of those already afforded protections, but we have more room to violate unwritten rules of decency towards immigrants in favor of casting all our rights onto others abroad willynilly.

Immigrants? This isn't about immigrants.

This is about visitors. People who want to enter the US for a short time, either on vacation, or for business, and who require a visa to do so.

I have no intention of emigrating to the US; And if they want all this information (much of which I would struggle to recall even if I wanted to divulge it), then I shall take my tourist dollars and my business deals elsewhere. As will many others.

This is beyond fucking stupid.
Visitors? That's even worse. We need to know whether the ID is poontang37 or ikillyou91. One of the terrorists with an ego will divulge their true intent with their screen name. This way, we'll know who to target for sex and who to target for being a possible terrorist.
 
So would be terrorists would have to create fake twitter/facebook accounts just to satisfy visa requirements?
I have a suspicion that this is designed to circumvent "muslim ban" ban. This will be predominantly applied to muslim countries. It would be hard to make europian tourists to comply with that anyway.
 
The Trump administration has rolled out a new questionnaire for U.S. visa applicants worldwide that asks for social media handles for the last five years and biographical information going back 15 years.

The new questions, part of an effort to tighten vetting of would-be visitors to the United States, was approved on May 23 by the Office of Management and Budget despite criticism from a range of education officials and academic groups during a public comment period.

Critics argued that the new questions would be overly burdensome, lead to long delays in processing and discourage international students and scientists from coming to the United States.

Under the new procedures, consular officials can request all prior passport numbers, five years' worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-visa-idUSKBN18R3F8

Okay, seriously. They want to know usernames like mrbeefy and jerkoffbud69. Isn't that a little personal? Also, I am constantly surprised by how Trump makes big changes without a law being passed. Is this even legal to get into people's private lives without cause?

I'm not an expert, but isn't it possible to trace someone's ID anyway. We have a problem with internet scams but these to be from abroad.
 
Tis pretty silly. Unless El Cheato wants to double the Customs budget so the agents can spend endless hours perusing trivia looking for a needle in a hay field, I don’t see this being anything other than a cheap burger tossed to the Trumpeteers. Beyond further reducing the popularity of the US for visitors and future international conferences, this won’t accomplish jack. Never mind that userid’s on their own are useless in many online environments.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-visa-idUSKBN18R3F8

Okay, seriously. They want to know usernames like mrbeefy and jerkoffbud69. Isn't that a little personal? Also, I am constantly surprised by how Trump makes big changes without a law being passed. Is this even legal to get into people's private lives without cause?

I'm not an expert, but isn't it possible to trace someone's ID anyway. We have a problem with internet scams but these to be from abroad.
Yes, in theory. But you are clearly not an expert in this area at all, as demonstrated by your obtuse question…
 
Visitors? That's even worse. We need to know whether the ID is poontang37 or ikillyou91.
Hey. How did you get my usernames?

Well...you know that late night where you were j$(&ing #!! to the vids on that squirrel porn site? Well, you let a Trojan leave behind a wiretap program when you clicked OK to that security warning, and it has been sniffing for your online accounts and sending them off to the MIB monitoring site.
 
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-visa-idUSKBN18R3F8

Okay, seriously. They want to know usernames like mrbeefy and jerkoffbud69. Isn't that a little personal? Also, I am constantly surprised by how Trump makes big changes without a law being passed. Is this even legal to get into people's private lives without cause?

I'm not an expert, but isn't it possible to trace someone's ID anyway. We have a problem with internet scams but these to be from abroad.

Only if the internet service provider AND the specific web site BOTH record, retain, and offer that data.
 
So would be terrorists would have to create fake twitter/facebook accounts just to satisfy visa requirements?
Sounds like it. This is one of those "what a great idea... no wait... not a great idea" plans. Except for those in the Trump Admin, the "..." is around 174 years.
I have a suspicion that this is designed to circumvent "muslim ban" ban.
You think?

So... after 100+ days of reviewing the VISA protocol, this is their solution. *sigh*
 
Well...you know that late night where you were j$(&ing #!! to the vids on that squirrel porn site? Well, you let a Trojan leave behind a wiretap program when you clicked OK to that security warning, and it has been sniffing for your online accounts and sending them off to the MIB monitoring site.

You mean that search I did on "homemade amateur squirrel group tube"?

Later,
ElectEngr
 
I'm not an expert, but isn't it possible to trace someone's ID anyway. We have a problem with internet scams but these to be from abroad.

Only if the internet service provider AND the specific web site BOTH record, retain, and offer that data.

Actually it is more complicated than that. Though this in theory would be about foreign nationals getting visas to enter the US, so that would negate what goes on in the US.

In the US the NSA does broad data collection and requires ISP's to cooperate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Documents leaked to the media in June 2013 described PRISM, a national security electronic surveillance program operated by the NSA, as enabling in-depth surveillance on live internet communications and stored information.[10][11] Reports linked the data center to the NSA's controversial expansion of activities, which store extremely large amounts of data. Privacy and civil liberties advocates raised concerns about the unique capabilities that such a facility would give to intelligence agencies.
<snip>
An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes in the near term, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years.

Anywho, back to foreigners...there is a huge difference between large scale data sweeps like PRISM, and targeted hacking/monitoring/tracking of specific individuals digital footprint. Yeah, if the CIA thinks they have a link to a major player (like a key leader in al Qaeda), they would put major resources into probing even in most any foreign nation legally within that nation or otherwise. And even then, I'm sure they have a significant failure rate, whatever it might be. If it was a friendly western country, they would probably as their respective intelligence agency to probe if allowed. The US certainly can't make foreign ISP's cooperate with broad data collation, never mind the mind boggling data storage and processing requires of such metadata.

However, in the context of dealing with 10,000,000 visa applications a year, this is utterly absurd. Specifically, the US agencies absolutely could not chase down all the userid's on their own. And even if given them by 10 million potential visitors, the US has almost no capacity to root around to learn anything by it. Even assuming they could reduce the 10 million to 500,000 of the most suspicious, that would be a hell of a lot of manual investigation effort to try and find anything. Even assuming that some cubical warrior could search thru one person's application information and digital footprint in a day, this person could only process 250 applicants a year. They would need 2,000 employees and another massive data center to search thru such noise. Never mind how does one investigate some guy out of Riyadh, Karachi, or Ankara? I'm sure the CIA has lots of mind blowing tools to do all sorts of nefarious things (Stuxnet), but to do this against simple visa applicants...again utterly absurd.

Then again, in Yorkshire...
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/10/07/intercept-theres-nsa-data-center-uk/
Menwith Hill Station in North Yorkshire is the largest base NSA spies have built outside of the US. The facility’s scope has widened from its original purpose of monitoring Soviet communications during the Cold War to playing a key role in the NSA’s global surveillance network.

The 10,000-square foot data center was built between 2009 and 2012 as part of a new $40 million operations building at the base, according to The Intercept. No further details have been revealed about the server farm, other than its purpose of storing and analyzing data collected through intercepted communications.
 
Tis pretty silly. Unless El Cheato wants to double the Customs budget so the agents can spend endless hours perusing trivia looking for a needle in a hay field, I don’t see this being anything other than a cheap burger tossed to the Trumpeteers. Beyond further reducing the popularity of the US for visitors and future international conferences, this won’t accomplish jack. Never mind that userid’s on their own are useless in many online environments.

I'm not an expert, but isn't it possible to trace someone's ID anyway. We have a problem with internet scams but these to be from abroad.
Yes, in theory. But you are clearly not an expert in this area at all, as demonstrated by your obtuse question…

As confucius once said, "Ask a question and one is a fool for a moment."
Fail to ask a question and one is a fool for ever."


No I'm not an expert. That's why I asked :)
 
Only if the internet service provider AND the specific web site BOTH record, retain, and offer that data.

Actually it is more complicated than that. Though this in theory would be about foreign nationals getting visas to enter the US, so that would negate what goes on in the US.

In the US the NSA does broad data collection and requires ISP's to cooperate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Documents leaked to the media in June 2013 described PRISM, a national security electronic surveillance program operated by the NSA, as enabling in-depth surveillance on live internet communications and stored information.[10][11] Reports linked the data center to the NSA's controversial expansion of activities, which store extremely large amounts of data. Privacy and civil liberties advocates raised concerns about the unique capabilities that such a facility would give to intelligence agencies.
<snip>
An article by Forbes estimates the storage capacity as between 3 and 12 exabytes in the near term, based on analysis of unclassified blueprints, but mentions Moore's Law, meaning that advances in technology could be expected to increase the capacity by orders of magnitude in the coming years.

Anywho, back to foreigners...there is a huge difference between large scale data sweeps like PRISM, and targeted hacking/monitoring/tracking of specific individuals digital footprint. Yeah, if the CIA thinks they have a link to a major player (like a key leader in al Qaeda), they would put major resources into probing even in most any foreign nation legally within that nation or otherwise. And even then, I'm sure they have a significant failure rate, whatever it might be. If it was a friendly western country, they would probably as their respective intelligence agency to probe if allowed. The US certainly can't make foreign ISP's cooperate with broad data collation, never mind the mind boggling data storage and processing requires of such metadata.

However, in the context of dealing with 10,000,000 visa applications a year, this is utterly absurd. Specifically, the US agencies absolutely could not chase down all the userid's on their own. And even if given them by 10 million potential visitors, the US has almost no capacity to root around to learn anything by it. Even assuming they could reduce the 10 million to 500,000 of the most suspicious, that would be a hell of a lot of manual investigation effort to try and find anything. Even assuming that some cubical warrior could search thru one person's application information and digital footprint in a day, this person could only process 250 applicants a year. They would need 2,000 employees and another massive data center to search thru such noise. Never mind how does one investigate some guy out of Riyadh, Karachi, or Ankara? I'm sure the CIA has lots of mind blowing tools to do all sorts of nefarious things (Stuxnet), but to do this against simple visa applicants...again utterly absurd.

Then again, in Yorkshire...
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/10/07/intercept-theres-nsa-data-center-uk/
Menwith Hill Station in North Yorkshire is the largest base NSA spies have built outside of the US. The facility’s scope has widened from its original purpose of monitoring Soviet communications during the Cold War to playing a key role in the NSA’s global surveillance network.

The 10,000-square foot data center was built between 2009 and 2012 as part of a new $40 million operations building at the base, according to The Intercept. No further details have been revealed about the server farm, other than its purpose of storing and analyzing data collected through intercepted communications.

From my recollection of immigration procedures in Hong Kong and the Philippines, the security checks tend to be the last ones, once the person is verified as likely acceptable. This reduces the security checks. I am not sure however if the agencies do spot check some of the applicants.
 
Tis pretty silly. Unless El Cheato wants to double the Customs budget so the agents can spend endless hours perusing trivia looking for a needle in a hay field, I don’t see this being anything other than a cheap burger tossed to the Trumpeteers. Beyond further reducing the popularity of the US for visitors and future international conferences, this won’t accomplish jack. Never mind that userid’s on their own are useless in many online environments.


Yes, in theory. But you are clearly not an expert in this area at all, as demonstrated by your obtuse question…

As confucius once said, "Ask a question and one is a fool for a moment."
Fail to ask a question and one is a fool for ever."

There must be a LOT of questions you are failing to ask.
 
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