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German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

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Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#21

Post by kanja »

ColinWright wrote: post #2

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…

her actions are extremely harmless in the grand-scheme of things, and it's ridiculous and unsettling that her private conversation was used against her like this.

Surely you're not seriously suggesting that this was in any shape or form acceptable behavior by the state.

Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#22

Post by magic_haze »

Tenoke wrote: post #10
ColinWright wrote: post #2

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…

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.

> Additionally, she was not even an american citizen or resident.

In all probability, it's /because/ she's not an american citizen or resident. The fourth amendment doesn't apply for non-persons.

Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#23

Post by jhh »

sauravc wrote: post #4

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.

WAZ is a mainstream newspaper with wide circulation in western Germany. It has better reputation than a tabloid, worse than a top tier newspaper like NYT or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#24

Post by kmm »

tombot wrote: post #9
valdiorn wrote: post #5

"Finally, the officials baffled Jana submitted a printout of the entire Facebook correspondence with their host-father. " Maybe something is lost in translation, but could the officials just have received the correspondence from the family she was coming to visit??

Does anyone have a link to a human translated version of story?

I'm not going to type down a translation, but I can tell you this computer generated translation is very accurate.

Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#25

Post by nostromo »

It'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 this is similar to what this young woman experienced.

Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#26

Post by uh_oh »

sauravc wrote: post #4

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.

It is certainly not one of the big newspapers, but still the largest regional one.

Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#27

Post by nahreally »

swalsh wrote: post #19

The bigger revelation here to me is that it would appear the information access is shared beyond the NSA for more than security purposes.

The whole story is suspect. Why now? If the US government were to use this kind of intel to address issues as small as this, and this is at the level of shop lifting, wouldn't such incidents have made it to international news several times by now?

Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#28

Post by smartician »

valdiorn wrote: post #5

"Finally, the officials baffled Jana submitted a printout of the entire Facebook correspondence with their host-father. " Maybe something is lost in translation, but could the officials just have received the correspondence from the family she was coming to visit??

Native German speaker here. The article alleges that "apparently" authorities had been monitoring their private correspondence for weeks. I highly doubt that this was the case. Usually it works like this: Once you're deemed suspicious at the passport control, you're sent for "secondary inspection" to an office in the back. There, you're being questioned further, and officials will search publicly available information for anything suspicious. This includes your Amazon wishlist [1] and in some cases searches of personal items like laptop data [2]. The most common case is when future au-pairs bring physical letters from their hosts with them, and CBO agents find them. There have been thousands of stories like this going back for decades, that's nothing new. What's new is the ubiquity of social media.

In this case, I assume the girl was stupid enough to post publicly on the wall of her future employer, and the CBO agents could easily find it and print it out. I seriously doubt that their private conversations have been monitored. That just wouldn't make any sense.

[1] http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/16/16039/1.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

Re: German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

#29

Post by rdouble »

Tenoke wrote: post #10
ColinWright wrote: post #2

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…

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.

The USCIS reviews Facebook for those applying for long term visas, to prevent fraud. It doesn't have anything to do with the NSA.
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