1. Unless you are taking extraordinary measures to sever all connections between yourself and your online presence, odds are there are enough links for any Government to tie a person to an account. Given how much is collected at the border already along with the big-data collected passively by the various TLA Government Orgs, they simply need to pop in your Passport ID or Drivers License or State ID and they'll have the relevant data; this collection seems more or less like a convenience to the government if anything. Same goes for foreigners, given the reaches of the various NSA programs; just pop in any number from some database and you'll likely get a match.
2. You have no obligation to use social media, and I don't think the government is going to mandate its use (I mean, I wouldn't put it past certain politicians, but yeah). Setting up a sanitized account honestly would draw more suspicion than anything, especially if it was on the heels of an announcement or proclamation that they're suddenly requiring or requesting such information. Regular social media users have fairly regular patterns, and barring some real dedication to the sanitized account, it'd be pretty easy for TLAs to figure out if it's a front or not. Not that it would immediately warrant investigation, it's just it feels like theatre more than a practical protection.
If I wanted to get real conspiracy theorist on this, this motion is just a front that allows the government to segue into actually including this stuff as part of standard background checks, which they likely are already doing with questionable legality. That is, the inclusion of the field is just formalizing what they're already doing, so that the articles that inevitably would arise have less "oomph" behind their reaction. It's not as shocking to the public if the government is surveilling social media when the government outright asks for your info. There's no real smoking gun, just a bunch of guys in suits going "yeah, we asked you for it."
This is a symptom of the constant disrespect for privacy within the US government, not some new issue that's arisen. The same thinking that leads to the NSA led to this, and it's honestly not too unusual that they are asking for it. If anything, my initial reaction was less "How dare they!" and more "was wondering when you'd get to this point."
Last year i set up a facebook account with a fake name and then never accessed it ever. After a few weeks i started getting emails from fb asking if i knew xxxxxxx, the only way they could have known that i knew these people is by tracking my ip and comparing it with others, looking at those ips and working out who was common amongst their connections. Two people logging from the same ip, creates a bridge between two social graphs, even if they never explicitly declareds that, having, a corporate email address domain in common with sombody else creates a weak link between two branches of the overall graph. Each touch point creates associations which can be mined for knowledge about who you know and interact with. The new face tagging code is scary and can also create thise indirect associations, if yoh appear in multiple peoples photos, and eventualy one of them says thats "xxxxxxx", then you are deanomised for ever. FB is the worlds most amazingly efficient survelence machine, and we feed it willingly.
After spending 34 years without any photographs of myself landing on social media, my grandmother put up a photo of me on Facebook. I felt bad scolding her, because she really doesn't know any better. ...which is odd, because she was alive for the years when certain governments were identifying their homosexual and ethnic citizens and sending them off to gas chambers and/or internment camps.
I worry that Facebook and its ilk will be a lot more effective than IBM's punchcard system for locating, identifying, and classifying their society's undesirables.
> I worry that Facebook and its ilk will be a lot more effective than IBM's punchcard system for locating, identifying, and classifying their society's undesirables.
Yes, consider what's happening in Turkey [1]. A newly minted dictatorial regime could even mine your old posts for evidence against you. The only thing stopping this kind of thing in North America is the checks and balances that are slowly being undermined in the name of security.
> which is odd, because she was alive for the years when certain governments were identifying their homosexual and ethnic citizens and sending them off to gas chambers and/or internment camps
excess trust in authority figures also runs deep in the greatest generation
Here's what worries me: let's say they set up some kind of scoring system. If you don't use social media, there's no info on you there so your score is 0. If you have an account with anti-government propaganda, that lowers your score obviously.
Now at some point, anyone with a score less than strictly positive will be subject to extra background screening / denied entry. You still have no obligation to use a social media account in a way that nets you a positive score, but they have no obligation to let you in either.
Someone, somewhere might have looked at China's "citizen score" system and thought it was a good idea. You have no obligation to support the Party on social media but it can be taken into account in job applications.
Computer Court 9: "Guilty. Take her down."
Convicted Blank: "I know my rights. I won't be judged by a machine!"
Dragul: "You don't have any rights. You're a Blank."
Convicted Blank: "Blank is beautiful!
Blank is beautiful!
Blank is beautiful!"
I'd be curious to know how they correlate a facebook / twitter identity to a passport number. The number of people with the same name is huge. You could use circles of friends to identify family numbers which you can use if you have access to the Vital Records, but in many (developed) countries, Vital Records are not even digitized.
We've known about COTRAVELER[1] for several years.
The basic idea of correlating arbitrary data (with timestamps) to estimate associations can easily be extended to other types of data. This is why almost any kind of data can potentially be "personally identifying". On it's own a random piece of analytics or "anonymized" data doesn't reveal much, but when you correlate many of those data points together you get a very nice fingerprint.
And that's just a a few SQL JOINs. I'm sure a lot more is possible with modern analysis techniques.
1. Unless you are taking extraordinary measures to sever all connections between yourself and your online presence, odds are there are enough links for any Government to tie a person to an account. Given how much is collected at the border already along with the big-data collected passively by the various TLA Government Orgs, they simply need to pop in your Passport ID or Drivers License or State ID and they'll have the relevant data; this collection seems more or less like a convenience to the government if anything. Same goes for foreigners, given the reaches of the various NSA programs; just pop in any number from some database and you'll likely get a match.
2. You have no obligation to use social media, and I don't think the government is going to mandate its use (I mean, I wouldn't put it past certain politicians, but yeah). Setting up a sanitized account honestly would draw more suspicion than anything, especially if it was on the heels of an announcement or proclamation that they're suddenly requiring or requesting such information. Regular social media users have fairly regular patterns, and barring some real dedication to the sanitized account, it'd be pretty easy for TLAs to figure out if it's a front or not. Not that it would immediately warrant investigation, it's just it feels like theatre more than a practical protection.
If I wanted to get real conspiracy theorist on this, this motion is just a front that allows the government to segue into actually including this stuff as part of standard background checks, which they likely are already doing with questionable legality. That is, the inclusion of the field is just formalizing what they're already doing, so that the articles that inevitably would arise have less "oomph" behind their reaction. It's not as shocking to the public if the government is surveilling social media when the government outright asks for your info. There's no real smoking gun, just a bunch of guys in suits going "yeah, we asked you for it."
This is a symptom of the constant disrespect for privacy within the US government, not some new issue that's arisen. The same thinking that leads to the NSA led to this, and it's honestly not too unusual that they are asking for it. If anything, my initial reaction was less "How dare they!" and more "was wondering when you'd get to this point."