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It's unclear to me who provided the print-out of Jana's private messages. Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not Homeland Sec

• ttrreeww 13y ago
  Facebook provided it. Doh.
• rl3 13y ago
  Data acquisition methods in order of highest probability: 1. ^ This. 2. Was actually public information; story details lost in transmission or translation. 3. Her phone was still logged into Facebook. 4. They gained access to Facebook via links in e-mail. [...] 10. Normal federal law enforcement powers. 11. Special federal law enforcement powers, e.g. Patriot Act. [...] 100. NSA data that requires TS/SAP + full-scope poly to access.
  • zmitri 13y ago
    They do sometimes ask to see your phone.
    • loup-vaillant 13y ago
      Do you recall any specific story where they ask you to unlock it?
      • cantos 13y ago
        All electronic devices are subject to search at the U.S. border. http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/crcl-border-search-impact-assessment_06-03-13_1.pdf http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/crcl-bor...
        • fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
          No. (Thank the stars for Alex Kozinski). http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130308/13380622263/9th-circuit-appeals-court-4th-amendment-applies-border-also-password-protected-files-shouldnt-arouse-suspicion.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130308/13380622263/9th-ci...
          • cantos 13y ago
            Let me be more specific. All that is required is "reasonable suspicion" in order to require access to all the files on your computer, unencrypted. "Reasonable suspicion" is a very weak requirement, as you can see from the document linked to in the techdirt article, and is exactly the same as what is needed for an extended physical search or an extended search of non-electronic property. In other words, there are no special considerations that apply to property just because it is electronic.
      • llamataboot 13y ago
        Israel regularly makes people log into email and social media accounts. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/04/israel-airport-email-search_n_1569163.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/04/israel-airport-emai...
        • darklajid 13y ago
          Oh, don't get me started.. I still cringe about multiple 'turn on the computer' scenes in Tel Aviv, where 'turn it on' obviously (..) wasn't satisfied by pressing the button, nor by logging in: I had to 'open a file, just any file' (the clueless guys would be impatient by now, being annoyed by my failure to understand this useless requirement). Usually I chose a default windows wallpaper -> Done. Braindead, waste of time.
          • simonh 13y ago
            It's fairly easy to rig a laptop display to a micro controller just clever enough to run a login screen simulator, gut out the actual computer electronics and battery, and replace them with contraband or a bomb. Tel Aviv security, which I've been through several times, want to be sure the computer is of the kind it's supposed to be. Login screen simulators are old tech. Friends of mine used to run them on the terminals at the college I studied at in the 80s to harvest other student's account details. Nowadays they're a lot more sophisticated. If you think you know more about security than the Israelis you're sadly mistaken.
            • jlgreco 13y ago
              I mean, if you were willing to invest that sort of effort, it might even be easier just to put the innards from a modern slim "ultrabook" laptop into the case of a 2000 era thinkpad monster. Throw on a "third party extended battery" for good measure... Actually, don't bother with that. There is plenty of air-space in many older laptops that you could pack with explosives if you don't worry about being able to run the computer for more than several minutes without it overheating... The entire "turn on the computer" check is idiotic security theater. Either they can tell if there is a bomb in the computer anyway through other means (in which case why are they bothering to do that check?) or they cannot (in which case, how can they possibly hope to catch anything?). My money is obviously on the first.
      • zmitri 13y ago
        Once I was looking for the number of the person I was going to stay with in the USA and they asked to have my phone. I said it's okay, I'll find it for you.
  • smartician 13y ago
    They probably have a semi-automatic data collection system where you can type in a name, and it collects all sorts of public data in real time. To a non-technical person, this can look like they have a file on you, when in reality this crawler just compiled all the data in a few minutes.
    • marcosdumay 13y ago
      I use one of those tools at work. It's called Google :)
      • smartician 13y ago
        Right... It's probably more sophisticated like that. Similar to what many HR departments use to screen future employees.
        • rdouble 13y ago
          HR departments just use Google...
          • smartician 13y ago
            There are subscription services that do all the dirty work for you. Like beenverified.com (However that explicitly "forbids" its users to use it for employment verification. Pinky promise!)
        • eru 13y ago
          Why would they? That's incredibly risky from a legal point of view.
          • fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
            So they like to say...
  • Amadou 13y ago
    > 100. NSA data that requires TS/SAP + full-scope poly to access. You may be over-estimating the classification level here. The government classification isn't about protecting the secrets of private citizens, only government secrets. I have some experience in this field - handling fingerprints of non-criminals which were classified at the bare minimum for the agency. It would not surprise me if any non-specific NSA drag-net data itself was not classified any higher than CUI - controlled unclassified information.
    • rl3 13y ago
      > The government classification isn't about protecting the secrets of private citizens, only government secrets. Using that logic, Facebook private messages supplied courtesy of the NSA would be highly classified, considering their collection mechanism would be PRISM or similar closely-held programs. > I have some experience in this field - handling fingerprints of non-criminals which were classified at the bare minimum for the agency. Fingerprint data is available to nearly every local law enforcement organization in the country. There's no mystery about the collection method. It's a foregone conclusion that it's aggregated up the chain. As other comments have said, if immigration officials were using NSA-supplied data, it would likely be in vague, aggregate form that did not hint at the underlying collection mechanism.
      • Amadou 13y ago
        That only flies if there is no other possible way for another agency to have acquired the information. An administrative subpoena would be one way to do it -- I expect there is a term for that sort of thing, although the obvious "warrant laundering" does not seem to pull up any meaningful hits in google. BTW, unless something has changed since I was last in west virginia, fingerprint info is not widely available in the general case. You take prints from an arrestee or latents from an object, you send them to IAFIS for matching and they return hits which may not even include a copy of the matched prints depending on the circumstances.
        • chc 13y ago
          Do you really believe they're getting administrative subpoenas to Facebook for every 18-year-old tourist who might do some side work?
  • darklajid 13y ago
    I'm no friend of FB or the US. But the idea that somehow all FB messages are thoroughly searched seems .. unlikely. The German article says the girl 'found a nice family' and had 'a regular contact with her guest dad'. How unlikely is it, that the guest dad - or someone with access to his account .. - notified the border control? I refuse to believe in the Orwellian surveillance theory here and put my money on a jealous spouse.
• jgh 13y ago
  Yeah the TN wording is picky, but I can't imagine a situation where one would even think of using Facebook communications as evidence for your visa/status application. In the case of the TN, the only evidence you need to provide (beyond the letter you mentioned) are your degree, letters from previous employers (if relevant), marriage certificate (if relevant), passport (obviously), and your school grades.
• smartician 13y ago
  My translation would be "Officials baffled Jana with a printout of her complete Facebook correspondence with her future host. Their allegation: the young woman intended to work illegally in the US. The authorities had apparently been reading Jana's private messages on Facebook for weeks". The key word being "apparently", i.e. bad journalism, jumping to conclusions for a more sensationalist story.
  • Yver 13y ago
    It's an automatic translation, so wording may be haphazard. I note that "offenbar" (from the original article) can also mean "obvious", as in "It was apparent that the authorities had read her correspondence." Edit: just noticed you had written "my translation", not "the translation". My German is nowhere good enough to translate the article, I'm just working off Google's.
    • graup 13y ago
      "offenbar" can indeed mean "obviously", but in the context of a news article it's a weasel word more close to "apparently". To a native speaker, this word sounds as though they are presenting facts, but reading closely they are only assuming, just like smartician said.
    • smartician 13y ago
      Slightly off-topic, but "obvious" would be "offensichtlich" in German. "Offenbar" implies a higher degree of uncertainty. "Scheinbar" or "anscheinend" is even more uncertain, to the point of doubt. And finally, "angeblich" is very questionable, almost an accusation of lying.
• Vivtek 13y ago
  I'd say it's far more likely that the border official noticed that this girl only had a return ticket a year from entry, searched her name on Facebook, and found she was lying. They're really picky about employment vs. tourism visa status, and a lie can get you barred. This girl was pretty naive about how immigration works.
• untog 13y ago
  A friend of a friend (I know, I know) was stopped on the border between Canada and the US, and had her possessions searched. Inside they found her diary, which detailed her life and job in New York- which she shouldn't have had, because she was repeatedly entering the country on a tourist visa. She was rejected at the border. This may well be the same- even if the girl did not intend to show those messages to the border control agents, they can search her suitcase for evidence to then later present to her. So, to the extent that the word "provided" does not also imply "voluntarily", I suspect you're right.
  • wahnfrieden 13y ago
    How was she even attempting to do this when Canadians are limited to 6 months per year in the US?
    • untog 13y ago
      AFAIK, it wasn't an arrangement she'd been in for a long time. I doubt she'd hit the six month point, and had been hoping to secure a visa to stay in the country legitimately.
      • dedward 13y ago
        Ack.. that's just incredibly poor judgement. If you have to lie to the officials when entering the country, you really shouldn't expect that a closer look later on is going to get you a visa - as soon as they discover you lied about it you're done for.
        • fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
          It's pretty common to lie to border agents. Both US and Canadian agents themselves have advised me to do so in the past. Ticking the "Have you been on a farm?" check box triggers a compulsory search for seeds (both smuggled and inadvertently stuck to your shoes). It is time consuming, and they know it to be a fruitless waste of time.
    • 13y ago
• rbehrends 13y ago
  > Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not Homeland Security. No, according to the article the printouts were provided by the US immigration officials. In fact, the article draws the inference that the US authorities may have been reading her private Facebook messages for weeks. I'm a native speaker of German; there really isn't any ambiguity here.
  • icebraining 13y ago
    No, according to the article the printouts were provided by the US immigration officials. I think the point is that the facts provided by the article don't seem very likely.
    • laumars 13y ago
      Why don't they seem likely? We already know that the NSA had access to private messages from Facebook and other popular sites.
      • Stevens 13y ago
        they didn't have access to all private messages from Facebook and I doubt the turnaround time would have been fast enough to retrieve messages at customs.
      • icebraining 13y ago
        The unlikely part is not that the US government agencies could get the private messages, it's that they'd jeopardize the whole system by letting regular border officers use it directly (instead of, for example, data-mining and send out no-entry-lists) and show proof of its existence to (foreign!) citizens. I mean, I don't know why Snowden bothered to leak the info, if they're just telling any 18-year-old German girl about it.
        • laumars 13y ago
          To be fair, the NSA outcry was largely over the scale of the monitoring and the lack of warrants. However that doesn't mean that (other) government organisations couldn't approach Facebook with a warrant and request specific data, such as private messages from a suspect. Assuming for the moment that this story did happen exactly as we're lead to believe (and I'm only making that assumption for the sake of playing devils advocate - I'm firmly on the fence with this story due to how sketchy the details are), then it would be very easy for the NSA to cover up how they had such data: "We'd been investigating her for a few weeks - here's a warrant"
• ritchiea 13y ago
  Indeed. The only thing scarier than the US monitoring 95% of internet traffic is the US deciding the best use of its super-secret super-powerful internet surveillance is to keep illegal au pairs out of the country. But I doubt they're actually that foolish.
• Zimahl 13y ago
  Occam's razor clearly makes this story less interesting than face value. I think we can assume that the NSA is legitimately looking for real problems, not ones that involve the illegal hiring of an au pair.