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Trump Administration Approves Tougher Visa Vetting, Including Social Media Checks (reuters.com)
The Trump administration has rolled out a new questionnaire for U.S. visa applicants worldwide that asks for social media handles for the last five years and biographical information going back 15 years. From a report: The new questions, part of an effort to tighten vetting of would-be visitors to the United States, was approved on May 23 by the Office of Management and Budget despite criticism from a range of education officials and academic groups during a public comment period. Critics argued that the new questions would be overly burdensome, lead to long delays in processing and discourage international students and scientists from coming to the United States. Under the new procedures, consular officials can request all prior passport numbers, five years' worth of social media handles, email addresses and phone numbers and 15 years of biographical information including addresses, employment and travel history.
Do you understand the impact of traffic volume on a system? What works at low levels does not work at higher levels. Airports become warehouses faster than anything when traffic is interrupted, and delays cost millions of dollars very quickly. Security theater is not just useless and counterproductive, it is actively destructive.
The checks are done well before a passenger flies. This obviates the airport jams you envision. Those who do not comply with
the checks won't even be permitted to board a flight which is traveling to the US.
I don't know what field you might have skills in, but it's not anything to do with this discussion, that is painfully obvious. Your comments
are the sort of thing I'd expect from a teenager who has little knowledge of such matters. Of course maybe you ARE a teenager who has
little knowledge of such matters. In any case, I'm not wasting any more of my time on you and your amateur attempt at pretending to be a security expert.
Why don't you go play a video game or do something else more productive and quit pretending to know about stuff you don't know
about.
Precisely! Discouraging travel is how you sabotage trade and the productivity of a country. Trump is your worst enemy as an American - every day he does more to damage the standing of the USA and empower other nations to fill that gap.
simple question should be sufficient: are you a terrorist?
Really? Because in the last five years I must have created or posted content (as described) on, I would guess, more than three hundred websites. Of those I probably remember ... 10? 15? at most. I certainly don't remember all the "unique usernames" I've used. Do you know every place you've posted a Disqus comment? Where your facebook comments ended up? What if you don't have a facecrap account - but someone with your name does? You think they're going to be able to tell the difference? Or even care they're wrong?
All prior passport numbers? I don't know. How do I find the number on a passport that expired 20 years ago and which was inadvertently destroyed ten years ago?
I don't remember every single address I've lived at (sure, the ones I own, or I was on a lease, or lived at as a child - generally fine). Time periods? No chance. Nearest YEAR at best. If I were a frequent traveller, that info would be just as foggy. Did I travel to Bali in March or May? NFI. And the list goes on.
Why should the other 99.999% be effectively forced to lie (either directly or by omission) because some bureaucrat somewhere in the US has a hardon for trawling through personal data yet with arguably ZERO chance of unearthing anything useful. Do you really think that a terrywrist ISN'T GOING TO LIE?!
Trump has already imposed travel restrictions that have been estimated to cost more than $7B annually in lost tourism spending. These new restrictions will add to that.
More than 14 million American work in the tourism industry. That is about 200 times more than the number of coal miners.
That means 82,191 passengers need vetting each day. Assuming they each take one hour
It doesn't take any longer than it does now. If they have a valid visa, then you let them in. If they don't, you send them back, just like now. All the vetting has already been done during visa application.
The past passport numbers would fill in most of a normal persons past world travel.
Having an interesting person on file in another nation when they should have been in their own nation or moving around some other nation would show:
Dual citizen with a passport they did not mention. Thats a lie.
Another travel document they did not mention.
Sharing or the use of fake documents.
People made mistakes in the 1960-90's thinking no database would ever reconnect be created and show their past support or movements to interesting nations.
That the only passport they had to consider is the one they use now.
Most normal nations have taken a lot of time and effort on every document they allowed in and out of their nation over the decades.
Every passport number, every face, all the details stayed on file. Now the databases are linked for all other nations, past decades and not just people who are wanted or passports that have been revoked.
All details are now shared, not just who is wanted or who has no passport.
No spelling errors, no issues with fonts, languages, translation. Every name can be fully considered rather than just trying to match a few names of interest.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If it goes on longer, the locals that are smart enough, will miss the foreigners.
I don't know, maybe we could turn Fisherman's Wharf into a nice park where you can see sealions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Your post-9/11 bullshit is already keeping people out of the US. How about you do something about it? Land of the free, home of the brave my arse. Home of the scared shitless. Do you even remember the '80s? US used to carry on about how the USSR was oppressive because you needed papers to travel. Travelling in the US is worse than that now. You need to present papers, and take your shoes off, and not lock your bag, and not take any liquids with you, and so on. If your name is similar to a name on a secret list, you're denied the right to fly and there's jack shit you can do about it. US used to carry on about DDR's mass surveillance where they were paying everyone to spy on everyone else as though it was some great evil as well. Yet you now wiretap all domestic communications. You've got your secret prisons where you disappear people, you've got your leaked torture incidents (although you seem to be getting better at covering that up), you punish people for embarrassing the government rather than actually addressing the issues that make the leaks embarrassing. It's just not worth visiting the US. You get treated like a criminal at the border, and you know you're visiting the most hypocritical country on earth.
...tourist industry. At least the hotel chains won't no longer have to worry about Booking.com and Tripadvisor.com.
Good, we don't want you faggots here anyway. We don't need the rest of the world, and it fucking feels good!
The rest of the world where all your shit gets built on the cheap then flogged back to you suckers for premium price because you can't possibly afford to build shit yourselves these days? I think you'll find it's the rest of the world that doesn't need you.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
The form estimates it will take 60 minutes to fill in. Only a very parochial American, like Trump, could find out all their travel, passport, and social media details within 60 minutes.
Anyone who travels for work, or lives in a smaller country near other countries, or likes personal travel, will take 60 minutes to find their travel history for the past year, or less. It would take days of work to collect 15 years of details.
I estimate that most of my work colleagues would find it impossible to collect travel details for 15 years, or social media handles for 15 years. They might not even remember where they lived 15 years ago.
This is an impossible task to complete precisely for most people. It is also impossible for the US government to verify that the person has submitted all the information asked for. Therefore it is both unreasonable for the applicant and wasteful for the US government.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"