The US State Department Wants To Force Visitors to Hand Over Social Media Information

[slashmarks]

Under this plan, both immigrants and non-immigrant visitors would be forced to fill out forms disclosing their use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. They have also discussed requiring visitors to list all phone numbers and email addresses they’ve used within the last five years. (If you’ve ever made a post or written an article that wasn’t attached to your real name, but did list an email for contact info, you know why that’s a problem.)

We don’t know exactly what they intend to use this information for, but we can guess based on searches of phones at the border and other countries’ use of monitoring social media: the potential to deny entry to people who have made posts critical of the American government or are just involved in local politics the State Department doesn’t like. (Or who post anything else they can’t explain).

Two Federal Register notices were issued seeking comments from the public. You can leave comments on the requirement for immigrant visas here and nonimmigrant visas here. The comment period closes May 29 for both.

Be clear, give detailed reasons, and don’t copy paste your comment from this article or other sources - they often assume those comments are from bots and discard them. You can go ahead and paraphrase me.

Here’s news coverage from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[cross-posted with minor modifications from my tumblr account]

Comments

[redbird]

If people are looking for arguments to use, I included "what if hostile governments hack our database?" for the immigrant visa one, and "this will hurt the tourist trade" for non-immigrant, as well as talking about freedom and privacy rights of Americans. I used the specific examples of Iran as a government that might steal data about defectors, and of Florida losing tourist dollars to Cuba.

I was amused to see that after I commented, the site offered me links to tweet or post to facebook about this. So I did, and added a few hashtags like #resist.

There's a "print your comment" option, but when I looked at the printed-to-PDF documents after closing the government website, it didn't have the actual text of my comments, just all the background for what I am commenting on.