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.
German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
91–100 of 257 posts
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why don't they seem likely? We already know that the NSA had access to private messages from Facebook and other popular sites.
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.
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#93And 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.
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).
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#94When 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 work…
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.
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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...
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#96It'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 th…
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.
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#98Just 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…
What sort of "correspondence" was this?
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages
#100Would you like to share this status update with
- everyone?
- just friends and the CIA?
- just close friends and the CIA?
- just the CIA?