41–50 of 257 posts
Srsly?
Maybe the border agents were in possession of her laptop and used that to get access to her private messages.
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 e…
Chances are they got a tipoff or she got caught by profiling or a random check as I doubt anyone bothers to check the Facebook profile pages of every foreigner entering the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
By the NSA, for national security reasons. Not for visa fraud.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible. But if NSA data was being used to monitor au pair activity and provided to border control agents it would be a step beyond what we currently know.
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.
However I think it's likely that they misconstructed the story (not on purpose but because they made some bad assumptions). Pretty likely that this is yet another "routine check sniffing through social media etc. after the person acted suspicious in some way" ... which in itself is noteworthy but pretty different.
Not unlikely that the sources reported the story a tad wrong.
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 th…
And 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.