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This story seems highly unlikely to be true given the following 4 assumptions: 1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program. 2) Giving

This story seems highly unlikely to be true given the following 4 assumptions: 1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program. 2) Giving the data to a large number of border guards would have increased the chance of its dissemination. 3) It would be unnecessary to show her the data to refuse her admission to the US and showing her would violate #2. 4) She would not be a valuable enough target to expose the fact that the US had the data. Additionally: It is much more likely that if the border guards were using the NSA data, they would simply receive lists of those that could not enter. She would have probably been a target for that since she was trying to obtain work in the US illegally. Alternatively, and even more likely, boarder patrol could have searched public websites for her name and seen her occupation and the rest could have been an exaggeration.

notahacker 13y ago
The publicly viewable Facebook message theory sounds more plausible given that (i) plenty of people seem to have little concept of what is and isn't private in Facebook and (ii) the US does have a track record of denying people entry based on public social media posts: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-get-them-denied-entry-to-the-u-s/ http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-... Chances are they got a tipoff or she got caught by profiling or a random check as I doubt anyone bothers to check the Facebook profile pages of every foreigner entering the US.
- killerpopiller 13y ago
  yep, I remembered that same story. Is it still far grasped to assume US agencies have a file on "everybody" digital present which gets automagically filled/flagged with US-related facts?
- smartician 13y ago
  An 18 year old entering the country with the intent of staying longer than a few weeks alone will raise eyebrows at the border. Next question will be regarding available funds. How can she afford to travel that long? Staying "with friends" is also suspicious, especially when she hasn't met them in person before.
danielweber 13y ago
Yes, I expect if I were to commit a murder, the NSA would sit on evidence rather than deal with figuring out how to admit it into court and deal with revealing the program. Oddly, now that the program has been exposed, the "cost of revealing the program" has already been spent.
njharman 13y ago
You are inventing (and then attempting to disprove) links that are no where other than in your mind. Nothing in this article or HN title mention NSA, PRISM or any thing like it. Companies provide information to numerous law enforcement agencies all the time. Via agreement, court order, subpoena, etc. No secret NSA databases required.
- danielweber 13y ago
  He can probably be forgiven for assuming this was supposed to be about the NSA, given that it's a top story on HN, and with the context that 8 of the 10 top stories on HN right now are about NSAgatewater.
nano111 13y ago
plus, they can refuse entry to any non-citizens for any reason or no reason
leoc 13y ago
> 1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program. Well, more precisely it wanted to avoid drawing attention to the program, which wasn't really a secret at this point. But I'll also add a fifth reason: the fewer than 2000 FISA orders a year http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/05/fisacases.pdf http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/05/fisaca... , combined with the fact that David Drummond appears confident the average number of people covered per order isn't very high. If FISA orders were being used routinely, or even often, to investigate simple immigration cases then there would be a lot more of them; as things are, if you were busted for run-of-the-mill illegal immgration by a FISA order then you'd have to have been very unlucky. It's possible you could be identified by chance as part of a search for terrorists, but again not statistically likely, and as you say the government would want to be very careful about tipping its hand in that situation. There are also NSLs, but Google's NSL tally suggests that there aren't huge numbers of those per month either.

notahacker 13y ago

The publicly viewable Facebook message theory sounds more plausible given that (i) plenty of people seem to have little concept of what is and isn't private in Facebook and (ii) the US does have a track record of denying people entry based on public social media posts: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-get-them-denied-entry-to-the-u-s/ http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-... Chances are they got a tipoff or she got caught by profiling or a random check as I doubt anyone bothers to check the Facebook profile pages of every foreigner entering the US.

killerpopiller 13y ago
yep, I remembered that same story. Is it still far grasped to assume US agencies have a file on "everybody" digital present which gets automagically filled/flagged with US-related facts?
smartician 13y ago
An 18 year old entering the country with the intent of staying longer than a few weeks alone will raise eyebrows at the border. Next question will be regarding available funds. How can she afford to travel that long? Staying "with friends" is also suspicious, especially when she hasn't met them in person before.

danielweber 13y ago

Yes, I expect if I were to commit a murder, the NSA would sit on evidence rather than deal with figuring out how to admit it into court and deal with revealing the program. Oddly, now that the program has been exposed, the "cost of revealing the program" has already been spent.

njharman 13y ago

You are inventing (and then attempting to disprove) links that are no where other than in your mind. Nothing in this article or HN title mention NSA, PRISM or any thing like it. Companies provide information to numerous law enforcement agencies all the time. Via agreement, court order, subpoena, etc. No secret NSA databases required.

danielweber 13y ago
He can probably be forgiven for assuming this was supposed to be about the NSA, given that it's a top story on HN, and with the context that 8 of the 10 top stories on HN right now are about NSAgatewater.

nano111 13y ago

plus, they can refuse entry to any non-citizens for any reason or no reason

leoc 13y ago

> 1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program. Well, more precisely it wanted to avoid drawing attention to the program, which wasn't really a secret at this point. But I'll also add a fifth reason: the fewer than 2000 FISA orders a year http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/05/fisacases.pdf http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2013/05/fisaca... , combined with the fact that David Drummond appears confident the average number of people covered per order isn't very high. If FISA orders were being used routinely, or even often, to investigate simple immigration cases then there would be a lot more of them; as things are, if you were busted for run-of-the-mill illegal immgration by a FISA order then you'd have to have been very unlucky. It's possible you could be identified by chance as part of a search for terrorists, but again not statistically likely, and as you say the government would want to be very careful about tipping its hand in that situation. There are also NSLs, but Google's NSL tally suggests that there aren't huge numbers of those per month either.