121–130 of 257 posts
It's a real newspaper, but we've got an article with an unknown source, about a girl with no last name, landing in an unnamed city on an unnamed date. There's no statement from any authority and no way to corroborate any part of this.
It's one step above this story that I heard from my best friend, whose cousin's mom totally said ...
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What sort of "correspondence" was this?
It was an email thread. In part of it we had given her our address and directions to our house and phone numbers on how to reach us when she got here. She had printed it out and was carrying it with her in her carry on. She allegedly fit the 'profile' and every woman travelling alone on her flight had their bags searched apparently.
(http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/30/this-is-what-happen...)
Obviously, tweets are public. But still, this kind of stuff isn't unknown.
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I agree. It sounds utterly implausible on just about every conceivable level.
What's the "utterly implausible" part? In the past we've had verified incidents of people being refused entry because of things posted on for instance public Twitter feeds. So we know that the monitoring of social media, collating that with the identity of incoming travelers and passing that on to officials at the border is an existing practice. We also know that once monitoring starts for one purpose, it rapidly exp…
It's completely in-consistent with logic.
We're making a couple assumptions here :
1. The NSA, via PRISM, can search FB private messages at will (this is a stretch)
2. They are sharing this ability with customs & border patrol (highly implausible)
3. Customs is using this ability in routine border checks, and/or monitoring 18 year old german girls for weeks (highly implausible. seriously.)
4. Customs officials are in turn sharing this with their suspects when they have no reason to. (highly implausible)
Yes, this is utterly implausible. I expect more common sense out of HN.
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> 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.
Is it just me who feels that is a bit heartless?
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What sort of "correspondence" was this?
It was an email thread. In part of it we had given her our address and directions to our house and phone numbers on how to reach us when she got here. She had printed it out and was carrying it with her in her carry on. She allegedly fit the 'profile' and every woman travelling alone on her flight had their bags searched apparently.
Let's not conflate standard (even if objectionable) border entry policies with digital surveillance policies.
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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.…
Maybe, but even so, from giving access to the department, to allowing border officers to prove to foreign citizens that they can read their PMs goes a long way.
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.
She lives in Germany, which has a widely different fact gathering process, being much more restrictive and protective of the defendant's privacy.
Moreover, she's 18 and from a country which is probably much less lawsuit-happy than the US. It doesn't seem stupid to me at all that she didn't consider being sued when sending PMs to her host.
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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.
So because you think its unlikely that US immigration officials has access to private communications on FB, that speculation is enough to dismiss the whole article about how two young girls, traveling to the US with hopes and dreams to study the language and experience the world, and then at the border was interrogated and immediately sent back. Is it just me who feels that is a bit heartless?
If a young Mexican woman showed up at the border with papers describing how she intends to work as an illegal nanny, would we react the same way?
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It was an email thread. In part of it we had given her our address and directions to our house and phone numbers on how to reach us when she got here. She had printed it out and was carrying it with her in her carry on. She allegedly fit the 'profile' and every woman travelling alone on her flight had their bags searched apparently.
Your failure to mention the printout in your original post is deceptive considering we are discussing internet "wiretapping." Of course possessions are searched upon entry, it happens every day in every country. If you're a Malaysian with a visitor visa and show up at customs in Australia with a bag full of resumes, you'll be turned away too.