5 ms·

US government agency “friending” people applying for citizenship

38 points by cwan 16y ago

FrancescoRizzi 16y ago
Should USCIS have an official badge on social sites and be required to use an account bearing the badge when linking up with petitioners/beneficiaries?
- eru 16y ago
  They shouldn't use it at all. There should be some proper non-discrimination laws, and you should be able to sue them, if they disrespect them.
  - Robin_Message 16y ago
    > They shouldn't use it at all. There should be some proper non-discrimination laws, and you should be able to sue them, if they disrespect them. Why not? What is discriminatory about looking you up on facebook? Is the issue the pretext used to get the information, or getting that information at all, or how the information will be used? Your vehement desire for "proper" laws and the ability to sue "them" lacks detail — do you know what you really want, and if so, what is it?
    - sxdfvgbnhjhgbv 16y ago
      How many degrees of separation are they allowed? Your face book page links to the eff = rejected? A friend of yours links to eff, a friend of a friend ^ 6 links to eff? Also AFAIK you don't put a social security number on facebook. Do they just look up John Doe, assume thats you and base their decision on that person?
    - eru 16y ago
      Why do they have to get those information from facebook at all? Why not reform the process of getting citizenship to something much simpler and saner? Just auction off all the slots for new citizenships each year. (Or get rid of those limits completely, and just let anybody in whose richer or better educated than the average, plus some room for political asylum.)
      - anigbrowl 16y ago
        Those are questions of policy rather than law. What you propose seems very sensible to me from an economic and diplomatic point of view. But as you must have noticed, there are a lot of people who are loudly against more immigration; primarily illegal immigration, but once you get past that the main lobbying groups (CIS, FAIR) would like less of all immigration. Also, such reforms are never popular during periods of high unemployment; and finally, a very small number of people who come to the US are actual crooks fleeing from justice, or involved in the flesh trade, etc..
        eru 16y ago
        I know. Though limits on immigration don't make auctioning off a bad idea. Quite the opposite, they make it more necessary. Crooks and other nasty people should be dealt with. Whether they are new or old Americans. But we shouldn't make more things criminal than necessary.
- Robin_Message 16y ago
  There you raise an excellent point which enables us to relate Facebook back to the real world where I think our intuitions and laws are better. Suppose a plain-clothes USCIS agent comes to find you in a place you are likely to be and chats to you - say in a bar, or your place of work. Is anything they discover during that chat admissible, even if they don't admit to being a USCIS agent? Because if that is okay, then why should a social network be any different? On the other hand, if that would be inadmissible, or require some evidence beforehand for them to mount such an undercover operation, then viewing your private online data under the pretext of friendship should be out too.
  - anigbrowl 16y ago
    Is anything they discover during that chat admissible Yes. Once a person has stated or otherwise shown that they are not a US citizen, the burden of proof for eligibility to be present in the US switches to them. A false claim to US citizenship is a felony, though of course exceptions exist. This is quite different from the legal situation of a US person.
nkassis 16y ago
In a way, when you are applying for citizenship or even just permanent residency you pretty much know they are going to look up everything they can about you. The questionnaires are really personal on many things. You should have already suspected that Facebook/twitter was used too.
dmlorenzetti 16y ago
When starting the process of getting a green card for my wife, I read on a number of web sites that USCIS agents are allowed to lie to you during the interview-- for example, separating the husband and wife, then coming in to one of them and falsely stating, "Your spouse just admitted this is a fraudulent marriage." I don't know if it's true, but that, anyway, is conventional wisdom. Compared to that, "friending" somebody in order to view their social network site seems like small potatoes. My general sense is that the USCIS mission in these proceedings is to take a skeptical stance from the start. That is, merely applying for a green card (or, by extension, citizenship through marriage) puts you under enough of what EFF calls "suspicion" to warrant an investigation.
- mcargian 16y ago
  Oddly I had exactly the opposite experience. My wife and I were interviewed together, the agent asked very straight forward questions about our past with me present. There was nothing tricky in the slightest. I guess it depends upon the situation, but if you've got nothing to hide then the above article is a non-starter.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    > "but if you've got nothing to hide" You would think after so many cases of abuse - some large, some small, some invoking Godwin's Law... that people would stop touting the bullshit that is "if you have nothing to hide..."
    - mcargian 16y ago
      lol, ok thanks for ganging up on half my comment and the down votes. My wording choice was poor and I agree that "nothing to hide" does not make it right for the abuse that we are seeing lately. But I still stick to my response to the previous commenter, our interview was very straight forward.
      - eru 16y ago
        Thanks for your reasoned answer. If you hadn't started this one with `lol' you would have even gotten some up-votes, I guess.
anigbrowl 16y ago
This article is a crock IMO. For background, there are almost 2m applications annually for green card/citizenship, and roughly 2000 prosecutions for immigration fraud. [extract quoted from memo] In other words, USCIS is specifically instructing its agents to attempt to “friend” citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud... Well, if your job is to investigate suspected fraud... First, the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target. Right...because determinations about whether an application is suspicious will be made before the case file is sent to FDNS. You can browse (almost) all of the Adjudicator's field manual to find out what criteria are used to make that determination; the current version is accessible via http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=a2e29c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextchannel=a2e29c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b... Nor does the memo address whether or not DHS agents must reveal their government affiliation or even their real name during the friend request (...) True, but then they're not obliged to wear uniforms or travel in marked cars either. Second, and perhaps more disturbing, the memo assumes a user’s online profile always accurately reflects her offline life. No, it says that this is '[g]enerally' the case. It's an outdated 2 page 'did you know?' bulletin, not the guiding legal authority of immigration investigation. Unfortunately, this memo suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation. Doubtless there will be a few false positives, but that's why appeal procedures exist. Again, this division's job is to investigate applications that look dubious to begin with; it's not as if the rest of the agency rubber stamps everything sent in to them and FDNS just picks out cases at random, any more than the EFF makes FOIA requests for random document numbers and hopes for the occasional interesting find.

38 points by cwan 16y ago

Should USCIS have an official badge on social sites and be required to use an account bearing the badge when linking up with petitioners/beneficiaries?

eru 16y ago
They shouldn't use it at all. There should be some proper non-discrimination laws, and you should be able to sue them, if they disrespect them.
- Robin_Message 16y ago
  > They shouldn't use it at all. There should be some proper non-discrimination laws, and you should be able to sue them, if they disrespect them. Why not? What is discriminatory about looking you up on facebook? Is the issue the pretext used to get the information, or getting that information at all, or how the information will be used? Your vehement desire for "proper" laws and the ability to sue "them" lacks detail — do you know what you really want, and if so, what is it?
  - sxdfvgbnhjhgbv 16y ago
    How many degrees of separation are they allowed? Your face book page links to the eff = rejected? A friend of yours links to eff, a friend of a friend ^ 6 links to eff? Also AFAIK you don't put a social security number on facebook. Do they just look up John Doe, assume thats you and base their decision on that person?
  - eru 16y ago
    Why do they have to get those information from facebook at all? Why not reform the process of getting citizenship to something much simpler and saner? Just auction off all the slots for new citizenships each year. (Or get rid of those limits completely, and just let anybody in whose richer or better educated than the average, plus some room for political asylum.)
    - anigbrowl 16y ago
      Those are questions of policy rather than law. What you propose seems very sensible to me from an economic and diplomatic point of view. But as you must have noticed, there are a lot of people who are loudly against more immigration; primarily illegal immigration, but once you get past that the main lobbying groups (CIS, FAIR) would like less of all immigration. Also, such reforms are never popular during periods of high unemployment; and finally, a very small number of people who come to the US are actual crooks fleeing from justice, or involved in the flesh trade, etc..
      - eru 16y ago
        I know. Though limits on immigration don't make auctioning off a bad idea. Quite the opposite, they make it more necessary. Crooks and other nasty people should be dealt with. Whether they are new or old Americans. But we shouldn't make more things criminal than necessary.
Robin_Message 16y ago
There you raise an excellent point which enables us to relate Facebook back to the real world where I think our intuitions and laws are better. Suppose a plain-clothes USCIS agent comes to find you in a place you are likely to be and chats to you - say in a bar, or your place of work. Is anything they discover during that chat admissible, even if they don't admit to being a USCIS agent? Because if that is okay, then why should a social network be any different? On the other hand, if that would be inadmissible, or require some evidence beforehand for them to mount such an undercover operation, then viewing your private online data under the pretext of friendship should be out too.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  Is anything they discover during that chat admissible Yes. Once a person has stated or otherwise shown that they are not a US citizen, the burden of proof for eligibility to be present in the US switches to them. A false claim to US citizenship is a felony, though of course exceptions exist. This is quite different from the legal situation of a US person.

nkassis 16y ago

In a way, when you are applying for citizenship or even just permanent residency you pretty much know they are going to look up everything they can about you. The questionnaires are really personal on many things. You should have already suspected that Facebook/twitter was used too.

dmlorenzetti 16y ago

When starting the process of getting a green card for my wife, I read on a number of web sites that USCIS agents are allowed to lie to you during the interview-- for example, separating the husband and wife, then coming in to one of them and falsely stating, "Your spouse just admitted this is a fraudulent marriage." I don't know if it's true, but that, anyway, is conventional wisdom. Compared to that, "friending" somebody in order to view their social network site seems like small potatoes. My general sense is that the USCIS mission in these proceedings is to take a skeptical stance from the start. That is, merely applying for a green card (or, by extension, citizenship through marriage) puts you under enough of what EFF calls "suspicion" to warrant an investigation.

mcargian 16y ago
Oddly I had exactly the opposite experience. My wife and I were interviewed together, the agent asked very straight forward questions about our past with me present. There was nothing tricky in the slightest. I guess it depends upon the situation, but if you've got nothing to hide then the above article is a non-starter.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  > "but if you've got nothing to hide" You would think after so many cases of abuse - some large, some small, some invoking Godwin's Law... that people would stop touting the bullshit that is "if you have nothing to hide..."
  - mcargian 16y ago
    lol, ok thanks for ganging up on half my comment and the down votes. My wording choice was poor and I agree that "nothing to hide" does not make it right for the abuse that we are seeing lately. But I still stick to my response to the previous commenter, our interview was very straight forward.
    - eru 16y ago
      Thanks for your reasoned answer. If you hadn't started this one with `lol' you would have even gotten some up-votes, I guess.

anigbrowl 16y ago

This article is a crock IMO. For background, there are almost 2m applications annually for green card/citizenship, and roughly 2000 prosecutions for immigration fraud. [extract quoted from memo] In other words, USCIS is specifically instructing its agents to attempt to “friend” citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud... Well, if your job is to investigate suspected fraud... First, the memo makes no mention of what level of suspicion, if any, an agent must find before conducting such surveillance, leaving every applicant as a potential target. Right...because determinations about whether an application is suspicious will be made before the case file is sent to FDNS. You can browse (almost) all of the Adjudicator's field manual to find out what criteria are used to make that determination; the current version is accessible via http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=a2e29c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextchannel=a2e29c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b... Nor does the memo address whether or not DHS agents must reveal their government affiliation or even their real name during the friend request (...) True, but then they're not obliged to wear uniforms or travel in marked cars either. Second, and perhaps more disturbing, the memo assumes a user’s online profile always accurately reflects her offline life. No, it says that this is '[g]enerally' the case. It's an outdated 2 page 'did you know?' bulletin, not the guiding legal authority of immigration investigation. Unfortunately, this memo suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation. Doubtless there will be a few false positives, but that's why appeal procedures exist. Again, this division's job is to investigate applications that look dubious to begin with; it's not as if the rest of the agency rubber stamps everything sent in to them and FDNS just picks out cases at random, any more than the EFF makes FOIA requests for random document numbers and hopes for the occasional interesting find.