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Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

reuters.com

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Re: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

#12
post #2

Submitting a complete record of 15 years of travel history would be quite challenging to many people, to say the least.

I applied for an Indian visa a couple months ago. The page gave me 100 characters to list countries I'd visited in the previous few years. If I used 2 letter abbreviations and skipped the commas I could have just about done it. As it stands I started at NZ and moved west. Ran out of space just before listing Pakistan. Oh well.

Why do you visit so many countries?

Re: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

#13
People won't include the social media accounts they don't want to call attention to.

Net effect: Not safer as a whole, but we'll see how deep the social network surveillance actually goes and how good the pseudo-anonymous attribution algorithms really are.

Re: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

#14
post #3

What does social media include? Will I have to list my HN and reddit usernames? What about throwaways, am I expected to list those too?

Yes

What about anonymous social media like 4chan? Would they settle for a list of post URLs?

Re: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

#15
".... and discourage international students and scientists from coming to the United States."

Not just students and scientists - it will discourage everyone from coming to the United States, as if it wasn't unappealing already.

Tourists will go elsewhere. It's good for tourism in other countries.

Important to remember though that these Trump decisions are the will of the people - democracy in action.

Re: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied for an Indian visa a couple months ago. The page gave me 100 characters to list countries I'd visited in the previous few years. If I used 2 letter abbreviations and skipped the commas I could have just about done it. As it stands I started at NZ and moved west. Ran out of space just before listing Pakistan. Oh well.

Why do you visit so many countries?

Good question! That's what immigration will be suspicious about....

Re: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

#17
post #2

Submitting a complete record of 15 years of travel history would be quite challenging to many people, to say the least.

I was a Canadian Permanent Resident and now a Canadian citizen and I needed to provide the last five years travel history more than a few times. I knew this and I kept a Google Sheet with the info from the moment I landed in Canada. Turned out that was not enough: the citizenship application required the list of countries visited in the last five years even before landing in Canada. Doh! I could scrape it together, though because I applied at like 4.5 years in. But 15 years? That is pretty near impossible to put together.

Re: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

#18
Social media handles

> 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.

Including social media handles is quite different than what the title implies with "accounts"

Edit: Yay the post title was fixed!

Re: Trump administration approves tougher visa vetting, including social media check

#19
This appears not to apply to all applicants. From here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/05/04/2017-08...

> Respondents: Immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applicants who have been determined to warrant additional scrutiny in connection with terrorism or other national security-related visa ineligibilities.

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