I'm not sure what the problem is, really. Let them sit in warehouses forever. At worst the state won't get tax revenue because no one will want the land/warehouses, but eventually it will become economical and some entrepreneur will go in and dismantle the CRTs for their minerals. It is not like they are going to contaminate the water table with lead or phosphor sitting in a warehouse.
One thing that people tend to forget is that all these minerals came out of the ground to begin with, and there are plenty of places (like the desert) where you can safely bury trash literally forever. Where trash becomes a problem is where you have a high or mobile water table or lots of rainfall to carry water mobile chemicals into the water table. Burying e-waste in the middle of the desert is like burying your cell phone in the sand of your lizard's terrarium. In 10 years it will be virtually unchanged (assuming you bury the e-waste deep enough).
Nice idea but it seems like it wouldn't work with a lot of services. You can sign up for various VOIP accounts for free and they obliged to provide emergency service for safety. IP addresses are easily masked. Even credit cards are easily bought for a few Bitcoins and someone can always use a payphone.
A better, simpler solution would be to not send in armed police, fingers on triggers because of a single phone call.
Unfortunately, it is completely unrealistic to expect the police not to be anticipating a fight if you supposedly call them threatening to kill someone or blow up something etc. That is just not the real world.
Yes, there are ways to circumvent any system in theory. However, those VOIP sevices (which I have used myself in the past) would be required to get a scan of your drivers license, credit card, and their software/hardware would take that information and integrate it into your IP or IP route (or something along those lines) to generate the trust certificate. Could you work around it? Possibly, but you would potentially have to hack firmware/hardware that was periodically updated to detect manipulation/hacking of the certificate process. That would also be a felony. The trick here is not to make it impossible, just hard enough so that most can't do it, and then you make it 10 years in PMITA federal prison for anyone who tries or succeeds in manipulating their cert. If it is too big of a risk, the only people doing it will be the 10 hardcore criminals/terrorists who also have the skills, as opposed to every 17 year old script kiddie playing Call of Duty in their moms basement.
This would not be a new surveillance tool. The VOIP digital signature/trust cert would be run by private industry, but when the government comes to the phone company with a warrant, or if you call 911, that information is readily available and accurate. In theory you are already identified when you call 911, unless you are spoofing or otherwise manipulating your information.
Not sure how someone would die for lack of 911. That is like saying you didn't connect your phone to your phone line and that is somehow the phone companies fault that you can't call 911. Current phone technology is not perfect either, but that doesn't mean we give up trying to improve it.
As part of the setup if you want a VOIP phone system (which are predominantly business phones BTW) you have to put in your information and get it verified and digitally signed by a trusted source. No system is perfect, but at this point in technology, there is no reasonable need to be able to spoof your caller ID number/origination point other than malicious criminality.
Not sure about the cross racial violence proportions, but it is a sad fact that 50% of all murders in the US are committed by young black men who are only a few percent of the population. The vast majority of victims are other blacks (80% plus). The root cause of this travesty is the degradation of the nuclear family and the loss of fatherhood brought about by the welfare state. Until we as a society realize how demoralizing welfare is and work to get everyone a job who needs one (the welfare to work program under Bill Clinton was a good compromise and worked well to help people off of welfare and back into the workforce), I don't see those numbers changing. Boys particularly need their fathers to stick around to be role models for manhood, how to work hard and how to be a father themselves. The current source of a father figure is the gangs, and the stats above bear out how devastating that is to the community.
As others have stated, those hiding their identity during protests are usually doing so to avoid identification so they can commit crimes during their "protesting". It is already illegal in Washington DC, but it should be illegal (and enforced) nation wide.
The US needs to force phone companies to update the ancient VOIP protocols with some kind of security certificate/trust system to eliminate spoofed phone numbers and crack down on SWATing. In an act where Krebs or one of his family members could have been killed, this kind of behavior needs to be treated like attempted murder, not some prank. Even under the best of circumstances, the family pet is often killed by the SWAT team to avoid injury.
With a security cert system, the phone network would refuse to route any calls without a valid certificate, and valid certificates could be traced back to a credit card/drivers license/IP address all tied to that certificate number, as well as a physical device and it's actual IP. I am sure there are still ways to circumvent it, but it would be a good starting point, and would catch most of the script kiddies, which is where 90% of this SWATing comes from.
Fly by night shady companies that refuse to collect this information or programs of the same nature simply wouldn't be able to place calls at all. For the same reason that it should be illegal to protest with a mask concealing your face, it should be illegal to obscure/spoof your identity through the phone system, and attempting to do so in and of it'self should be a federal crime with heavy penalties (I am looking at you telemarketers).
She might have tried to delete content, but, depending on how that content is controlled, it might not be possible for her to permanently delete all records of the content from FB servers or the record that one day she came in right before applying to enter the US and purged a bunch of posts...
There are a lot of assumptions floating around, and I guess my bottom line position is that I want every tool possible, including any and all online behavior, available to the investigators who are vetting people from countries rife with radical islam. It doesn't mean that each tool will be 100% effective in every case, but it is just very poor judgement to leave investigative tools on the table because sometimes they won't be effective and can be thwarted in certain hypothetical examples. The fact was that the San Bernadino shooter did have a lot of radical posts on her FB and that would have kept her out of the US had it been known.
If it isn't worth the effort to pursue H1Bs for the company, then that is as intended. The consulting companies who just facilitate H1Bs don't actually sponsor them, so those companies and H1Bs would be unaffected. As long as the H1B is sponsored by the local company and they are being paid 50% or higher market wage, the program should function as intended.
It is what the lawyers (FTFY) get paid for. And the lawyers know that if they make a TOS that is 50 pages long, literally 2 people in a million will read the TOS and instead everyone will assume that their rights will be protected by the laws of the land.
The simple solution for this kind of bullshit is to legislatively eliminate the customer as the product business model. If you want to run your site as advertising, that is fine, but no company should be able to own your data or your posts. As a side note, I wonder that there have not been any prosections of FB et all for IP infringement (say an employee uploads copyrighted or other restricted materials to FB). Since FB claims ownership of all uploaded content, doesn't that make them criminally liable for posession of stolen goods/IP violation? I know the courts are too clueless to actually follow that logic, but technically it does seem like they don't get the common carrier exemption for what their servers contain considering they claim ownership of it.
The sad thing is that FB made $27.6B in 2015 in sales and $10B in profits. In other words, they could get rid of all the draconian bullshit and just charge $3/month of each user (all 1.2B of them) and everyone could own their own posts and content and FB would increase profits by 100%. Most users would be happy to pay $3/month for an add free experience where you know your live streamed birth to family members won't end up on the national news...
We are NOT trying protectionism, that is what the rest of the world has been doing for literally forever... We are moving to fair trade around the world. Let me educate you my fellow slashdot citizens: The US during the cold war set up trade deals to foster freedom and democracy around the world. We essentially used our economy to subsidize other free countries to help them grow and stabilize many regions. The cold war ended over 25 years ago, but the lopsided trade deals remained and many of our trading partners have further pushed their unfair trade advantages with the US to further extremes. The American people have been hurting ever since the dot com bubble burst and the 9-11 terrorist attacks drained ~$3 trillion from the US economy, with the war on terror draining another ~$3 trillion, with the rest of the world offering only token support while they grow fat on their socialistic benefits, made possible in large part by the US subsidizing their national defense with our military and subsidizing their economy with lopsided trade deals. The US citizens have looked around the world and collectively said WTF, no more of this bullshit and elected Trump to do what every other leader of every other country around the world does and is expected to do: put his own country's interests first...
Fact: The labor participation rates under Obama were the lowest they have been in 40 years (since Jimmy Carter).
Inflation has been created by the Fed lending the federal government trillions of dollars (more than half to most of the $12T of debt that Obama racked up in his 8 years, we don't have accurate numbers because the Fed or treasury won't release them). My guess is Trump won't release them either for fear of panicking the markets and destroying the economy even further thanks to Obama.
Median income growth was -2.3% in the US (that is just a hard fact) over the 8 years since Obama took office. That might not seem like much, but under Bill Clinton and Ronald Regan's presidencies that number was around 4% PER YEAR, that means than in either 8 year term you could expect to see your income rise by 37% on average if you were between the ages of 25-39 (where most of the middle class' bump up in income). Beyond that, if you use a real CPI, based on the things that real people buy, real income is down much more than 2.3%.
I know personally that 10 years ago I could buy more with my dollar than today, and the things I bought weren't cheap Chicom knockoffs from once proud companies that have been bankrupted by the flood of cheap junk competition from China. Probably 50% of our landfills today are filled with junk from China that was a "better deal" but only lasted 6 months before falling apart.
Any company that does consulting should be automatically ineligible for H1B as their business model is to provide labor directly on a speculative basis. H1B is meant to fill existing jobs that no one in the country can/will fill, and this does not meet the description of any job in a consulting business model.
Typical government employees pissing away taxpayer dollars. No business in their right minds would absorb the costs of errors committed by a supplier, and Trump should have the head of the bureaucrat who signed off on this contract on a platter. At minimum the industry standard of "if you screw it up you fix it on your dime" should be in every contract... Maybe this will change with an administration that actually ran a business instead of a community organizer... we sure have been getting the shaft for the last 40 years.
I have been around the world and the US is still the most desirable place to be or do business by far. If you want a socialist paradise or a communist totalitarian state, there are other options. The EU is uncomfortable, dirty, and has about 10 years of life left and then it will fragment as member states go bankrupt under their massive socialist spending and donor states like the UK and Germany leave. Good luck starting a business in the EU. France is deteriorating fast and will become a Muslim majority country around 2050, the radicals they have invited in may turn it into a war zone long before that. Look to the middle east to see how that will turn out. I have hope for the UK, but the world in general is pretty unstable and uncertain.
You do realize that they are not looking in the legal searching sense, they are looking to exclude potential terrorists. They would not be introducing FB content in a court of law, but they might kick someone out of the country or refer someone to the FBI for further investigation.
We just had 8 years of Barak Hussain Obama, your glorious liberal leader and his first 2 years he had TOTAL CONTROL of the house and senate. Remember that? If border searches were such a terrible injustice, why were the laws not changed then? EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD vets and searches foreigners entering its borders to varying degrees, depending on where they come from. The US is actively in a war with radical Islam and those crazy fuckers want to murder us. We have every right to screen people coming in to the country and the laws reflect this.
Gutless coward mods me down and then replies AC and then mods himself up... A shame he doesn't have the guts to just post his views.
Let me correct your brainwashing and inform you on the classical and accurate political spectrum, it is up to you to accept it or continue to live in your fantasy bubble:
Right wing: Want zero/minimal government interference; Anarchists, Libertarians to varying degrees
Moderate: Want limited government for collective good to have military, police force, maintain roads etc. most conservatives are here
Left Wing: Want government control of all aspects of life: Fascists, Socialists, Communists all here to varying degrees.
Regarding buying a social media account, I highly doubt that only the forward facing part of the account is being evaluated by the feds. I would expect DHS to also get a FISA warrant/signed waiver from the applicant if you are coming from a dangerous country and they will look through the IP logs on the account from Facebook server side. If all of the logs are from one region and then suddenly they switch to the region that you are trying to immigrate from, you will likely get denied and maybe black bagged as well to see why you tried to deceive you way into the US.
Yes, there are ways to conceal/spoof etc, and screening/hunting terrorists is always a game of cat and mouse, but the point is to not take potential data sources off of the table, especially when terrorists who want to murder our children in their beds are operating in those countries...
It is hardly arbitrary. People spend much of their time these days on social media. FB alone has 1,860,000,000 users. That is a pretty big chunk of the modernized world population. If the federal government had had access to the San Bernadino shooters FB account when she was screened to enter the US, she would never have gotten in and her husband would have been flagged.
They don't have to be active on social media, but it adds another layer of screening that we can do for potential immigrants. And those without accounts will likely be screened that much more closely.
The threats around the world are constantly evolving and changing. We have been getting a decent track record so far at keeping the terrorists out, but in 2001 we screwed the pooch and just 19 terrorists killed 3000 people and caused $3 trillion in damage and loss of life. If we let in 100,000 refugees and our screening process is 99.9% effective, that means we let in 100 terrorists. If they carry out similarly effective attacks, we are looking at 15,000 dead and $15 trillion dollars in damage. It would effectively destroy our economy for years. The margin for error on the screening of immigrants from Islamist countries must be zero or it makes no sense to invite them in. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations must be forced to get off their asses and use their UN military troops to create safe zones for civilians, which they should have done years ago. The US can easily provide food and shelter for these civilian refugees at no risk to our population. We can then use our military in cooperation with the Russians and Asad to turn ISIS into a fine red mist and then these refugees can go home.
Letting in refugees from Syria and Iraq and the other 7 countries right now is like if the US had let in 100,000 Japanese civilians, 2:1 male to live in the general US population in 1943 by simply asking them if they were pro American. It would have been suicidal and insane and there probably would have been thousands of Japanese spies and saboteurs mixed in and it probably would have destroyed the US if we had done that.
This is not a bad idea, but the root problem is that FB doesn't cooperate with the federal government anymore. The best solution would be for the potential applicants to give their FB account information and sign a waiver to give the feds full read access to their account. This is probably what will eventually happen, assuming FB pulls the stick out of it's ass and starts working to be part of the solution. The account password is a short term nuclear fix due in large part to FB obstructionism.
100% sure you cannot be charged with a crime, let alone a felony for any action taken when compelled by law over the wishes of any business. When some company, even one as large as Facebook, has TOS that violate federal law/lawful executive orders, guess which one wins. That part of the TOS is invalid and therefore not covered under CFAA...
Seriously, a 5 year old could understand this... Mommy tells me to give her the crayon, therefore I don't get in trouble when I obey Mommy, even if my little brother Johnny tells me not to and throws a tantrum when I do... Geez.
We are fine with your choices here in the US. May we suggest alternatives vacation destinations like Iran, Libya, China, and Syria. Please make sure to share your views about religion and politics vocally in public and denigrate the country you are visiting and let me know how great the rest of the world is.
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I'm not sure what the problem is, really. Let them sit in warehouses forever. At worst the state won't get tax revenue because no one will want the land/warehouses, but eventually it will become economical and some entrepreneur will go in and dismantle the CRTs for their minerals. It is not like they are going to contaminate the water table with lead or phosphor sitting in a warehouse.
One thing that people tend to forget is that all these minerals came out of the ground to begin with, and there are plenty of places (like the desert) where you can safely bury trash literally forever. Where trash becomes a problem is where you have a high or mobile water table or lots of rainfall to carry water mobile chemicals into the water table. Burying e-waste in the middle of the desert is like burying your cell phone in the sand of your lizard's terrarium. In 10 years it will be virtually unchanged (assuming you bury the e-waste deep enough).
Nice idea but it seems like it wouldn't work with a lot of services. You can sign up for various VOIP accounts for free and they obliged to provide emergency service for safety. IP addresses are easily masked. Even credit cards are easily bought for a few Bitcoins and someone can always use a payphone.
A better, simpler solution would be to not send in armed police, fingers on triggers because of a single phone call.
Unfortunately, it is completely unrealistic to expect the police not to be anticipating a fight if you supposedly call them threatening to kill someone or blow up something etc. That is just not the real world.
Yes, there are ways to circumvent any system in theory. However, those VOIP sevices (which I have used myself in the past) would be required to get a scan of your drivers license, credit card, and their software/hardware would take that information and integrate it into your IP or IP route (or something along those lines) to generate the trust certificate. Could you work around it? Possibly, but you would potentially have to hack firmware/hardware that was periodically updated to detect manipulation/hacking of the certificate process. That would also be a felony. The trick here is not to make it impossible, just hard enough so that most can't do it, and then you make it 10 years in PMITA federal prison for anyone who tries or succeeds in manipulating their cert. If it is too big of a risk, the only people doing it will be the 10 hardcore criminals/terrorists who also have the skills, as opposed to every 17 year old script kiddie playing Call of Duty in their moms basement.
This would not be a new surveillance tool. The VOIP digital signature/trust cert would be run by private industry, but when the government comes to the phone company with a warrant, or if you call 911, that information is readily available and accurate. In theory you are already identified when you call 911, unless you are spoofing or otherwise manipulating your information.
Not sure how someone would die for lack of 911. That is like saying you didn't connect your phone to your phone line and that is somehow the phone companies fault that you can't call 911. Current phone technology is not perfect either, but that doesn't mean we give up trying to improve it.
As part of the setup if you want a VOIP phone system (which are predominantly business phones BTW) you have to put in your information and get it verified and digitally signed by a trusted source. No system is perfect, but at this point in technology, there is no reasonable need to be able to spoof your caller ID number/origination point other than malicious criminality.
Not sure about the cross racial violence proportions, but it is a sad fact that 50% of all murders in the US are committed by young black men who are only a few percent of the population. The vast majority of victims are other blacks (80% plus). The root cause of this travesty is the degradation of the nuclear family and the loss of fatherhood brought about by the welfare state. Until we as a society realize how demoralizing welfare is and work to get everyone a job who needs one (the welfare to work program under Bill Clinton was a good compromise and worked well to help people off of welfare and back into the workforce), I don't see those numbers changing. Boys particularly need their fathers to stick around to be role models for manhood, how to work hard and how to be a father themselves. The current source of a father figure is the gangs, and the stats above bear out how devastating that is to the community.
As others have stated, those hiding their identity during protests are usually doing so to avoid identification so they can commit crimes during their "protesting". It is already illegal in Washington DC, but it should be illegal (and enforced) nation wide.
The US needs to force phone companies to update the ancient VOIP protocols with some kind of security certificate/trust system to eliminate spoofed phone numbers and crack down on SWATing. In an act where Krebs or one of his family members could have been killed, this kind of behavior needs to be treated like attempted murder, not some prank. Even under the best of circumstances, the family pet is often killed by the SWAT team to avoid injury.
With a security cert system, the phone network would refuse to route any calls without a valid certificate, and valid certificates could be traced back to a credit card/drivers license/IP address all tied to that certificate number, as well as a physical device and it's actual IP. I am sure there are still ways to circumvent it, but it would be a good starting point, and would catch most of the script kiddies, which is where 90% of this SWATing comes from.
Fly by night shady companies that refuse to collect this information or programs of the same nature simply wouldn't be able to place calls at all. For the same reason that it should be illegal to protest with a mask concealing your face, it should be illegal to obscure/spoof your identity through the phone system, and attempting to do so in and of it'self should be a federal crime with heavy penalties (I am looking at you telemarketers).
She might have tried to delete content, but, depending on how that content is controlled, it might not be possible for her to permanently delete all records of the content from FB servers or the record that one day she came in right before applying to enter the US and purged a bunch of posts...
There are a lot of assumptions floating around, and I guess my bottom line position is that I want every tool possible, including any and all online behavior, available to the investigators who are vetting people from countries rife with radical islam. It doesn't mean that each tool will be 100% effective in every case, but it is just very poor judgement to leave investigative tools on the table because sometimes they won't be effective and can be thwarted in certain hypothetical examples. The fact was that the San Bernadino shooter did have a lot of radical posts on her FB and that would have kept her out of the US had it been known.
*50% meaning median or average wage for their position.
If it isn't worth the effort to pursue H1Bs for the company, then that is as intended. The consulting companies who just facilitate H1Bs don't actually sponsor them, so those companies and H1Bs would be unaffected. As long as the H1B is sponsored by the local company and they are being paid 50% or higher market wage, the program should function as intended.
It is what the lawyers (FTFY) get paid for. And the lawyers know that if they make a TOS that is 50 pages long, literally 2 people in a million will read the TOS and instead everyone will assume that their rights will be protected by the laws of the land.
The simple solution for this kind of bullshit is to legislatively eliminate the customer as the product business model. If you want to run your site as advertising, that is fine, but no company should be able to own your data or your posts. As a side note, I wonder that there have not been any prosections of FB et all for IP infringement (say an employee uploads copyrighted or other restricted materials to FB). Since FB claims ownership of all uploaded content, doesn't that make them criminally liable for posession of stolen goods/IP violation? I know the courts are too clueless to actually follow that logic, but technically it does seem like they don't get the common carrier exemption for what their servers contain considering they claim ownership of it.
The sad thing is that FB made $27.6B in 2015 in sales and $10B in profits. In other words, they could get rid of all the draconian bullshit and just charge $3/month of each user (all 1.2B of them) and everyone could own their own posts and content and FB would increase profits by 100%. Most users would be happy to pay $3/month for an add free experience where you know your live streamed birth to family members won't end up on the national news...
We are NOT trying protectionism, that is what the rest of the world has been doing for literally forever... We are moving to fair trade around the world. Let me educate you my fellow slashdot citizens: The US during the cold war set up trade deals to foster freedom and democracy around the world. We essentially used our economy to subsidize other free countries to help them grow and stabilize many regions. The cold war ended over 25 years ago, but the lopsided trade deals remained and many of our trading partners have further pushed their unfair trade advantages with the US to further extremes. The American people have been hurting ever since the dot com bubble burst and the 9-11 terrorist attacks drained ~$3 trillion from the US economy, with the war on terror draining another ~$3 trillion, with the rest of the world offering only token support while they grow fat on their socialistic benefits, made possible in large part by the US subsidizing their national defense with our military and subsidizing their economy with lopsided trade deals. The US citizens have looked around the world and collectively said WTF, no more of this bullshit and elected Trump to do what every other leader of every other country around the world does and is expected to do: put his own country's interests first...
Fact: The labor participation rates under Obama were the lowest they have been in 40 years (since Jimmy Carter).
Inflation has been created by the Fed lending the federal government trillions of dollars (more than half to most of the $12T of debt that Obama racked up in his 8 years, we don't have accurate numbers because the Fed or treasury won't release them). My guess is Trump won't release them either for fear of panicking the markets and destroying the economy even further thanks to Obama.
Median income growth was -2.3% in the US (that is just a hard fact) over the 8 years since Obama took office. That might not seem like much, but under Bill Clinton and Ronald Regan's presidencies that number was around 4% PER YEAR, that means than in either 8 year term you could expect to see your income rise by 37% on average if you were between the ages of 25-39 (where most of the middle class' bump up in income). Beyond that, if you use a real CPI, based on the things that real people buy, real income is down much more than 2.3%.
I know personally that 10 years ago I could buy more with my dollar than today, and the things I bought weren't cheap Chicom knockoffs from once proud companies that have been bankrupted by the flood of cheap junk competition from China. Probably 50% of our landfills today are filled with junk from China that was a "better deal" but only lasted 6 months before falling apart.
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog...
Any company that does consulting should be automatically ineligible for H1B as their business model is to provide labor directly on a speculative basis. H1B is meant to fill existing jobs that no one in the country can/will fill, and this does not meet the description of any job in a consulting business model.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain...
Typical government employees pissing away taxpayer dollars. No business in their right minds would absorb the costs of errors committed by a supplier, and Trump should have the head of the bureaucrat who signed off on this contract on a platter. At minimum the industry standard of "if you screw it up you fix it on your dime" should be in every contract... Maybe this will change with an administration that actually ran a business instead of a community organizer... we sure have been getting the shaft for the last 40 years.
I have been around the world and the US is still the most desirable place to be or do business by far. If you want a socialist paradise or a communist totalitarian state, there are other options. The EU is uncomfortable, dirty, and has about 10 years of life left and then it will fragment as member states go bankrupt under their massive socialist spending and donor states like the UK and Germany leave. Good luck starting a business in the EU. France is deteriorating fast and will become a Muslim majority country around 2050, the radicals they have invited in may turn it into a war zone long before that. Look to the middle east to see how that will turn out. I have hope for the UK, but the world in general is pretty unstable and uncertain.
You do realize that they are not looking in the legal searching sense, they are looking to exclude potential terrorists. They would not be introducing FB content in a court of law, but they might kick someone out of the country or refer someone to the FBI for further investigation.
We just had 8 years of Barak Hussain Obama, your glorious liberal leader and his first 2 years he had TOTAL CONTROL of the house and senate. Remember that? If border searches were such a terrible injustice, why were the laws not changed then? EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD vets and searches foreigners entering its borders to varying degrees, depending on where they come from. The US is actively in a war with radical Islam and those crazy fuckers want to murder us. We have every right to screen people coming in to the country and the laws reflect this.
Gutless coward mods me down and then replies AC and then mods himself up... A shame he doesn't have the guts to just post his views.
Let me correct your brainwashing and inform you on the classical and accurate political spectrum, it is up to you to accept it or continue to live in your fantasy bubble:
Right wing: Want zero/minimal government interference; Anarchists, Libertarians to varying degrees
Moderate: Want limited government for collective good to have military, police force, maintain roads etc. most conservatives are here
Left Wing: Want government control of all aspects of life: Fascists, Socialists, Communists all here to varying degrees.
Regarding buying a social media account, I highly doubt that only the forward facing part of the account is being evaluated by the feds. I would expect DHS to also get a FISA warrant/signed waiver from the applicant if you are coming from a dangerous country and they will look through the IP logs on the account from Facebook server side. If all of the logs are from one region and then suddenly they switch to the region that you are trying to immigrate from, you will likely get denied and maybe black bagged as well to see why you tried to deceive you way into the US.
Yes, there are ways to conceal/spoof etc, and screening/hunting terrorists is always a game of cat and mouse, but the point is to not take potential data sources off of the table, especially when terrorists who want to murder our children in their beds are operating in those countries...
It is hardly arbitrary. People spend much of their time these days on social media. FB alone has 1,860,000,000 users. That is a pretty big chunk of the modernized world population. If the federal government had had access to the San Bernadino shooters FB account when she was screened to enter the US, she would never have gotten in and her husband would have been flagged.
They don't have to be active on social media, but it adds another layer of screening that we can do for potential immigrants. And those without accounts will likely be screened that much more closely.
The threats around the world are constantly evolving and changing. We have been getting a decent track record so far at keeping the terrorists out, but in 2001 we screwed the pooch and just 19 terrorists killed 3000 people and caused $3 trillion in damage and loss of life. If we let in 100,000 refugees and our screening process is 99.9% effective, that means we let in 100 terrorists. If they carry out similarly effective attacks, we are looking at 15,000 dead and $15 trillion dollars in damage. It would effectively destroy our economy for years. The margin for error on the screening of immigrants from Islamist countries must be zero or it makes no sense to invite them in. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations must be forced to get off their asses and use their UN military troops to create safe zones for civilians, which they should have done years ago. The US can easily provide food and shelter for these civilian refugees at no risk to our population. We can then use our military in cooperation with the Russians and Asad to turn ISIS into a fine red mist and then these refugees can go home.
Letting in refugees from Syria and Iraq and the other 7 countries right now is like if the US had let in 100,000 Japanese civilians, 2:1 male to live in the general US population in 1943 by simply asking them if they were pro American. It would have been suicidal and insane and there probably would have been thousands of Japanese spies and saboteurs mixed in and it probably would have destroyed the US if we had done that.
http://www.politico.com/magazi...
This is not a bad idea, but the root problem is that FB doesn't cooperate with the federal government anymore. The best solution would be for the potential applicants to give their FB account information and sign a waiver to give the feds full read access to their account. This is probably what will eventually happen, assuming FB pulls the stick out of it's ass and starts working to be part of the solution. The account password is a short term nuclear fix due in large part to FB obstructionism.
100% sure you cannot be charged with a crime, let alone a felony for any action taken when compelled by law over the wishes of any business. When some company, even one as large as Facebook, has TOS that violate federal law/lawful executive orders, guess which one wins. That part of the TOS is invalid and therefore not covered under CFAA...
Seriously, a 5 year old could understand this... Mommy tells me to give her the crayon, therefore I don't get in trouble when I obey Mommy, even if my little brother Johnny tells me not to and throws a tantrum when I do... Geez.
We are fine with your choices here in the US. May we suggest alternatives vacation destinations like Iran, Libya, China, and Syria. Please make sure to share your views about religion and politics vocally in public and denigrate the country you are visiting and let me know how great the rest of the world is.