German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

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.

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.

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.

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.