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Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

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Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#31

Post by outworlder »

Well, this "problem" with sort out itself, eventually. Taking the ridiculous border controls, the economic situation, disregard of human rights (specially for foreigners), it means that the US is rapidly becoming an unattractive place to work, study and even go on vacation. Before long, you won't have many people trying to get in.

Guess where the entrepreneurs, scientists and highly skilled workers will go? Hint: not the US. What that means for the future of the country is left as an exercise to the reader.

I can't believe that in 2013 we are still worried about which piece of land someone were when he got out of the womb.

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#32

Post by jdotjdot »

weego wrote: post #10

Are we going to trawl up and link every single case of someone being denied re-entry to the US? It's just getting rather tedious. Though as the constant karma farming off similarly tedious and usually poorly researched and written blog posts of the last week continues unabated perhaps I am in a minority of readers who gets their news from decent sources and likes to come to HN for interesting technical articles.

While I agree about missing the technical articles; I appreciate seeing these, as I actually had no idea about the seriousness of some of these re-entry issues.

Maybe the solution is a dedicated HN technology page, and a separate, dedicated "Of interest" page.

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#33

Post by [deleted] »

sp332 wrote: post #26
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #12

I wonder if this is one of those vague "security" problems. It seems like if people get denied for normal stuff (overstaying, violating their visas, etc) they're told and can at least fight it a little. But when you get a black mark against you it seems like you get stuck in an administrative blackhole where nobody is authorised to tell you WHY or they themselves don't know. It was the same way with the no-fly list f…

The worst one I know of was when they wouldn't let Nelson Mandela into the country because some computer had flagged him as having ties to terrorist groups. Condoleezza Rice personally went to the airport to wave him through security. She was so mad, she might have single-handedly taken the teeth out of that system. Edit: more info, and some evidence that I was right :) http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-…

[deleted]

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#34

Post by morgosmaci »

l33tbro wrote: post #20
weego wrote: post #10

Are we going to trawl up and link every single case of someone being denied re-entry to the US? It's just getting rather tedious. Though as the constant karma farming off similarly tedious and usually poorly researched and written blog posts of the last week continues unabated perhaps I am in a minority of readers who gets their news from decent sources and likes to come to HN for interesting technical articles.

Hmmm, I think HN is pretty great for interesting news from decent sources (usually Atlantic, NYT, New Yorker, etc). I also think people getting questionably denied entrance to the US is pretty newsworthy given the bomb that has been dropped in the last few days. Maybe don't click if it doesn't interest you?

Unfortunately I can't stop people from voting this stuff up and there is no way for the majority of us to vote it back down.

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#35

Post by gilgoomesh »

kohanz wrote: post #11

Perhaps because recent events have me grasping for sources of positive news from Americans, I am touched by the sincerity and tone of this letter. I would much rather believe that the attitude expressed in this letter is that of most Americans.

Is this most Americans? Yes it is. Americans paid $250 grand for this "Omar, PhD" but their purchase was lost in shipping. It's time to start yelling at a few parcel carriers.

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#36

Post by mikeash »

jdotjdot wrote: post #30
TylerE wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually good security practice. If the terrorist's find out they got flagged because of X, now they know not to do X any more.

It's only a good practice if X is very, very highly correlated with (and only with) being a terrorist. It's not really that great security practice if you're missing a ton of real terrorists who don't do X, and you're catching a lot of non-terrorists who do do X, and no one can figure out what's going on since no one knows what X is. That's not protecting our methods; at that point, it's really just picking people ou…

We must always remember how rare terrorists are, and what that means for any test you apply to a person.

You have a test that flags terrorists 99% of the time, and also flags innocent people 1% of the time. The test flags a person. What are the odds that this person is a terrorist?

Answer: roughly one in a million, depending exactly on the terrorist:non-terrorist ratio in your sample population. Since there are millions of normal people for each terrorist, a small false positive rate still grabs so many people as to make the test nearly useless.

And of course it goes well beyond this. Since actual terrorists are so rare, you can never confidently state that a test will flag terrorists 99% of the time. You can easily measure the false positive rate, but it's basically impossible to measure the true positive rate with any accuracy. You can guess and extrapolate, but when it comes to actually measuring performance in the real world, you'll have a very difficult time distinguishing between a test that flags 99% of terrorists, and a test that flags 1% of terrorists.

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#37

Post by nashequilibrium »

sp332 wrote: post #26
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #12

I wonder if this is one of those vague "security" problems. It seems like if people get denied for normal stuff (overstaying, violating their visas, etc) they're told and can at least fight it a little. But when you get a black mark against you it seems like you get stuck in an administrative blackhole where nobody is authorised to tell you WHY or they themselves don't know. It was the same way with the no-fly list f…

The worst one I know of was when they wouldn't let Nelson Mandela into the country because some computer had flagged him as having ties to terrorist groups. Condoleezza Rice personally went to the airport to wave him through security. She was so mad, she might have single-handedly taken the teeth out of that system. Edit: more info, and some evidence that I was right :) http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-…

The reason Nelson Mandela and the whole ANC party who fought apartheid were on the no fly list is because they were labelled as a terrorist group. Nobody bothered to adjust this until a couple of embarrassing moments like this. It is kind of funny that the apartheid government were never denied entry to any country, yet the people fighting an oppressive government were labelled as terrorist. It is also surprising that the countries that helped the ANC were so called communist countries, the world seems more like the Soprano's than countries guided by principles, love and life.

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#38

Post by HarryHirsch »

TylerE wrote: post #19
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #12

I wonder if this is one of those vague "security" problems. It seems like if people get denied for normal stuff (overstaying, violating their visas, etc) they're told and can at least fight it a little. But when you get a black mark against you it seems like you get stuck in an administrative blackhole where nobody is authorised to tell you WHY or they themselves don't know. It was the same way with the no-fly list f…

It's actually good security practice. If the terrorist's find out they got flagged because of X, now they know not to do X any more.

The fellow had been in the country for years. If he hadn't crossed the border he would now have his PhD, and would be doing what he had been doing before. No one is safer because they turned him away at the border.

It's either a false positive (that's most likely, considering how few terrorists there actually are), or a subtle hint to discourage his associates from ... doing things.

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#39

Post by mikeash »

sp332 wrote: post #26
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #12

I wonder if this is one of those vague "security" problems. It seems like if people get denied for normal stuff (overstaying, violating their visas, etc) they're told and can at least fight it a little. But when you get a black mark against you it seems like you get stuck in an administrative blackhole where nobody is authorised to tell you WHY or they themselves don't know. It was the same way with the no-fly list f…

The worst one I know of was when they wouldn't let Nelson Mandela into the country because some computer had flagged him as having ties to terrorist groups. Condoleezza Rice personally went to the airport to wave him through security. She was so mad, she might have single-handedly taken the teeth out of that system. Edit: more info, and some evidence that I was right :) http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-…

I find the "some computer" comment a bit odd, because Nelson Mandela most certainly did have ties to terrorist groups. He co-founded one.

This is not a swipe against Mandela in any way. It's just an example that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and how rigid systems can end up giving you politically inconvenient results.

If you make a blanket rule that people with ties to terrorism cannot enter the country, then you can end up "correctly" denying entry to Nobel Peace Prize winners.

Re: Jordanian citizen was denied re-entry to the US on eve of his PhD defense at JHU

#40

Post by VLM »

monsterix wrote: post #3
lmgftp wrote: post #2

Their decision was probably based in some way (assuming it's based on available information, which is admittedly risky) in his marriage to a foreign national while expressing interest in moving to the states, and the embassy's reluctance to chance him violating his visa permissions and in some way moving here with his wife in a permanent resident-alien w/o a visa type manner. Not claiming to know anything special, bu…

> but I find these single cases to be ridiculous, because there are competent individuals in government who oft do what they're supposed to, even if the whole government mechanism appears corrupt and broken. Most likely there was a legitimate reason, and of course we only have one side of the story here, by an associate professor and his PhD student. You'll understand only when you face it. What legitimate reasons ar…

"What legitimate reasons are you applying to justify treatment of any or every person on the planet as potential threat"

Because they are? Approximately zero risk, true, but slightly over zero. Its a pretty simple straightforward game theory problem. Whats the total aggregate sum of the trouble you'll get into by letting 1 out of 100 million terrorist thru, vs simply stamping "denied national security" on any random visa and stonewalling? In fact the guy who dared complain about it is probably now on some secret NSA list, and perhaps also now on the no-fly list. That'll show people what happens to complainers, hopefully that prof never has to fly anywhere again for the rest of his life... and probably his families lives, too.

Note, I'm not supporting an unjust system, just explaining how it works from a game theory perspective. I don't see why any individual inspector would ever permit a visa unless there's some kind of piecework payment system or a really good non-retribution system (anonymity?). If a terrorist ever got past them, there would be demands for punishment. Therefore "the system" is going to select for inspectors who are either reckless, careless, actively working against the interests of the USA... None of which will probably have ideal outcomes.

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