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> 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 U

> 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"
      - Amadou 13y ago
        I doubt they would even need a warrant, I expect facebook will roll over for even an administrative subpoena (which are signed by clerks of the court rather than judges and are essentially pro forma).
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Well, maybe they assume most people will just roll their eyes, disbelieve, ignore and forget about it. Which is a silly assumption of cour-- hey wait.
  - Amadou 13y ago
    I expect we will learn that the NSA turned their eye of sauron on occupy protestors, if not within the US then certainly on protestors outside of the US. If this young woman had any involvement with the protests she could well have ended up on a list of those that are regularly monitored. I'm not saying that is what happened, there are other plausible explanations too. I am just saying that such a scenario is entirely plausible.
  - Kylekramer 13y ago
    The real reason it seems unlikely is not about whether they were able to access Facebook messages (though the scope of PRISM is still unclear). It is more that it seems unlikely the NSA or other groups who may be able to get access to private messages care about German teenagers attempting to work in America. Alternative explanations (they got it from the host family, it was actually public, etc.) + vague reporting is just much more probable.
    - laumars 13y ago
      > It is more that it seems unlikely the NSA or other groups who may be able to get access to private messages care about German teenagers attempting to work in America. Playing devils advocate here; there maybe more to this teenager than we're aware of. She might be an active protester or have left vocal remarks on other locations online that triggered closer inspection. I'm not trying to say that your explanations are wrong or less plausible though, just that assumptions are being made on both sides of the argument.
      - Kylekramer 13y ago
        Certainly a possibility. But the assumption that she was a person of interest to intelligence agencies is much greater than the assumption that the newspaper report is either misleading or being misinterpreted.
  - mehwoot 13y ago
    We already know that the NSA has access to information specifically requested by an individual either by showing probable cause if they are a U.S. citizen or using some other specific request if they aren't. It doesn't seem likely a low level border agent would have access to this. If this is standard operating procedure, don't you think we would have heard about it from other people who were presented with printouts of their facebook messages when arriving at the border? Or more likely, this is FUD that leaves out specific facts (border agents don't have broad access to facebook messages) to give the impression it is linked to a big trending news story.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- darkarmani 13y ago
  > I think the point is that the facts provided by the article don't seem very likely. Exactly! How would the US gov't have access to someone's private correspondences on Facebook? They'd having to be spying on FB's users for that to be the case...
  - icebraining 13y ago
    That's not the part that I find unlikely.
  - pmelendez 13y ago
    And have real time access to the Facebook database for each border agent? to check every single foreign teenager that are attempting to land in USA? To read at the moment of landing every single message of their facebook story? Right now very unlikely.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      Or for DHS to have a process of checks run on every person scheduled to arrive. I could even be part of a batch process for each flight, or for each day. Border agents know who is arriving through flight manifests.
- AJ007 13y ago
  Never has there been any dispute that the NSA can freely read what non Americans are doing without any sort of legal authorization. One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too. Some of the NSA leakers think this is wrong, but I have not heard any elected government official state otherwise. Too some extent, this NSA story should be of equal or greater disturbance to non-Americans. Using Facebook's private messaging, with or without NSA spying, is very stupid because we know Facebook stores all of this forever, including after you "delete" your account. That could make it accessible even in a non-criminal civil dispute.
  - doktrin 13y ago
    > Never has there been any dispute that the NSA can freely read what non Americans are doing without any sort of legal authorization. One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too. This makes no sense whatsoever. Even if PRISM allowed at-will searches across the FB accounts of would-be au-pairs, there is frankly no way the NSA would be sharing this with low level customs officials. At most there would be a simple flag on her record, at which point she would be shipped back without explanation. Frankly, the fact that a significant number of commenters in this thread are taking this non-story at face value is bewildering. BS alarms should be going off left right and center, here.
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      Just because the NSA didn't share the data doesn't mean another government agency couldn't also request it from Facebook.
      - davidmr 13y ago
        Are you suggesting that the TSA agent interviewing this woman called up some TSA hotline who called up someone at Facebook who just gave it to them, sans warrant, all within the span of a couple hours? Words fail me for an adjective to describe how unlikely that sounds. The far, far, far simpler explanation would that she had a printout of the conversations because it had an address or directions or that she voluntarily handed over a device (or, possibly, was bullied into doing so, which is in the rights of border control to do).
- belorn 13y ago
  So because you think its unlikely that US immigration officials has access to private communications on FB, that speculation is enough to dismiss the whole article about how two young girls, traveling to the US with hopes and dreams to study the language and experience the world, and then at the border was interrogated and immediately sent back. Is it just me who feels that is a bit heartless?
  - nostromo 13y ago
    Heartless, yes, but not outrageous. If a young Mexican woman showed up at the border with papers describing how she intends to work as an illegal nanny, would we react the same way?
    - mynameishere 13y ago
      There are over 11 million illegals in this country. The typical reaction is to give them extensive welfare, and in certain cases, job and tuition preferences over citizens.
      - philmcc 13y ago
        Do you think that's the expressed intended reaction or an unintended result? My guess is it would be difficult to find any piece of document where it states something along the lines of "The goal of this program is to make this country more appealing for illegal immigrants, by offering them extensive welfare and preferential job and tuition situations, especially over those of our citizens." I think what's more likely is that you are citing unfortunate byproducts of an imperfect solution to a complicated problem. Not a "typical reaction." I'm not an expert on these things, though.
      - ZoFreX 13y ago
        Myth status: BUSTED Illegal immigrants pay more into social security than they take out. I don't even live in your country and I know this, come on - read a book.
        13y ago
- miket 13y ago
  Not at all unlikely, but routine. TechCrunch previously wrote about what these Facebook comprehensive account reports to these "lawful" requests look like: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/heres-what-a-facebook-response-to-a-user-data-subpoena-looks-like/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/heres-what-a-facebook-respo...
- vabmit 13y ago
  It's common for US immigration and border control agents (and Canadian agents) to do Google and other internet searches. This has been disclosed and acknowledged in the US media several times. While the messages were not likely Facebook "chat" messages, they could have been "friends only" posts (or even public posts that the woman considered "private" from a foreign government). My understanding is that US law enforcement has access to Facebook "God view" where they can see all your Facebook posts. They don't need a warrant because Facebook owns the data and is the one giving them permission to view it. It's a different class of data than a "chat/email" in that it's posted, not directly communicated, so there's no reasonable legal expectation of "privacy". As for personal experience with this, I had a musician friend that posted on his website that he was going to be performing a series of shows in Canada. He was asked at the border if he planned to work while in Canada. He said no and did not have a visa that allows it. The border agent showed him his website, which was found with google, showing that he was planning to work. He was denied entry and banned from Canada for 1 year for lying to a border agent.
  - jacalata 13y ago
    My understanding is that US law enforcement has access to Facebook "God view" where they can see all your Facebook posts. Where do you get this understanding from?
rieter 13y ago
> the US authorities may have been reading her private Facebook messages for weeks. That's ridiculous and puts the whole article under doubt. Nobody would waste that much time on her.
- laumars 13y ago
  I disagree, It's already well documented how the US government follows social networks and decline people entry over comments made[1]. Where this case differs is that the comments were over private messages - which means that the intel would have been collated covertly. So the real question is whether this is another piece of the PRISM jigsaw or just a sensationalist article cashing in on the hysteria that the NSA leaks have generated. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/30/leigh-van-bryan-and-emily-bunting-banned-from-entering-us-after-twitter-joke-about-destroying-america_n_1241104.html http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/30/leigh-van-bryan-a... (though in that case - I actually blame the visitors for posting dumb comments rather than the US government)
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Thank goodness the gov't protects us from crass tourists. Totally worth the billions spent and the invasion of everyone's privacy.
- benaiah 13y ago
  "reading" doesn't necessarily have to be done by a human. As PRISM has shown, the government has capabilities we weren't aware (or at least sure) of. Would it be that ridiculous that they would have algorithmic scrapers running through all the FB data they have available? They say they aren't, but they've already proven we can't trust them farther than we can throw them. Even if they aren't, she's a foreign national, who they have almost no restrictions on investigating, so they may have been "reading" her messages, even if those of US citizens were left intact (which I personally doubt). Long story short, it wouldn't necessarily waste much time to go through her records, and it would probably be completely legal. The part that seems unlikely to me is that they would show their hand by using PRISM for such a small thing, unless there is some bigger reason they want her out of the country. It's hardly a sure argument, though.
diminoten 13y ago
> private Facebook messages What makes you think this is a thing that exists, aside from the rest of this conversation? She sent a bunch of data to Facebook, with instructions to give that data to someone else. Why does she or anyone have an expectation of privacy when you hand an unsealed (read: unencrypted) piece of paper to a courrier? If something's important, you protect it by putting it in an envelope.

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"
    - Amadou 13y ago
      I doubt they would even need a warrant, I expect facebook will roll over for even an administrative subpoena (which are signed by clerks of the court rather than judges and are essentially pro forma).
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Well, maybe they assume most people will just roll their eyes, disbelieve, ignore and forget about it. Which is a silly assumption of cour-- hey wait.
- Amadou 13y ago
  I expect we will learn that the NSA turned their eye of sauron on occupy protestors, if not within the US then certainly on protestors outside of the US. If this young woman had any involvement with the protests she could well have ended up on a list of those that are regularly monitored. I'm not saying that is what happened, there are other plausible explanations too. I am just saying that such a scenario is entirely plausible.
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  The real reason it seems unlikely is not about whether they were able to access Facebook messages (though the scope of PRISM is still unclear). It is more that it seems unlikely the NSA or other groups who may be able to get access to private messages care about German teenagers attempting to work in America. Alternative explanations (they got it from the host family, it was actually public, etc.) + vague reporting is just much more probable.
  - laumars 13y ago
    > It is more that it seems unlikely the NSA or other groups who may be able to get access to private messages care about German teenagers attempting to work in America. Playing devils advocate here; there maybe more to this teenager than we're aware of. She might be an active protester or have left vocal remarks on other locations online that triggered closer inspection. I'm not trying to say that your explanations are wrong or less plausible though, just that assumptions are being made on both sides of the argument.
    - Kylekramer 13y ago
      Certainly a possibility. But the assumption that she was a person of interest to intelligence agencies is much greater than the assumption that the newspaper report is either misleading or being misinterpreted.
- mehwoot 13y ago
  We already know that the NSA has access to information specifically requested by an individual either by showing probable cause if they are a U.S. citizen or using some other specific request if they aren't. It doesn't seem likely a low level border agent would have access to this. If this is standard operating procedure, don't you think we would have heard about it from other people who were presented with printouts of their facebook messages when arriving at the border? Or more likely, this is FUD that leaves out specific facts (border agents don't have broad access to facebook messages) to give the impression it is linked to a big trending news story.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
darkarmani 13y ago
> I think the point is that the facts provided by the article don't seem very likely. Exactly! How would the US gov't have access to someone's private correspondences on Facebook? They'd having to be spying on FB's users for that to be the case...
- icebraining 13y ago
  That's not the part that I find unlikely.
- pmelendez 13y ago
  And have real time access to the Facebook database for each border agent? to check every single foreign teenager that are attempting to land in USA? To read at the moment of landing every single message of their facebook story? Right now very unlikely.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Or for DHS to have a process of checks run on every person scheduled to arrive. I could even be part of a batch process for each flight, or for each day. Border agents know who is arriving through flight manifests.
AJ007 13y ago
Never has there been any dispute that the NSA can freely read what non Americans are doing without any sort of legal authorization. One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too. Some of the NSA leakers think this is wrong, but I have not heard any elected government official state otherwise. Too some extent, this NSA story should be of equal or greater disturbance to non-Americans. Using Facebook's private messaging, with or without NSA spying, is very stupid because we know Facebook stores all of this forever, including after you "delete" your account. That could make it accessible even in a non-criminal civil dispute.
- doktrin 13y ago
  > Never has there been any dispute that the NSA can freely read what non Americans are doing without any sort of legal authorization. One would assume that access is given to Customs & Dept of Homeland Security too. This makes no sense whatsoever. Even if PRISM allowed at-will searches across the FB accounts of would-be au-pairs, there is frankly no way the NSA would be sharing this with low level customs officials. At most there would be a simple flag on her record, at which point she would be shipped back without explanation. Frankly, the fact that a significant number of commenters in this thread are taking this non-story at face value is bewildering. BS alarms should be going off left right and center, here.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Just because the NSA didn't share the data doesn't mean another government agency couldn't also request it from Facebook.
    - davidmr 13y ago
      Are you suggesting that the TSA agent interviewing this woman called up some TSA hotline who called up someone at Facebook who just gave it to them, sans warrant, all within the span of a couple hours? Words fail me for an adjective to describe how unlikely that sounds. The far, far, far simpler explanation would that she had a printout of the conversations because it had an address or directions or that she voluntarily handed over a device (or, possibly, was bullied into doing so, which is in the rights of border control to do).
belorn 13y ago
So because you think its unlikely that US immigration officials has access to private communications on FB, that speculation is enough to dismiss the whole article about how two young girls, traveling to the US with hopes and dreams to study the language and experience the world, and then at the border was interrogated and immediately sent back. Is it just me who feels that is a bit heartless?
- nostromo 13y ago
  Heartless, yes, but not outrageous. If a young Mexican woman showed up at the border with papers describing how she intends to work as an illegal nanny, would we react the same way?
  - mynameishere 13y ago
    There are over 11 million illegals in this country. The typical reaction is to give them extensive welfare, and in certain cases, job and tuition preferences over citizens.
    - philmcc 13y ago
      Do you think that's the expressed intended reaction or an unintended result? My guess is it would be difficult to find any piece of document where it states something along the lines of "The goal of this program is to make this country more appealing for illegal immigrants, by offering them extensive welfare and preferential job and tuition situations, especially over those of our citizens." I think what's more likely is that you are citing unfortunate byproducts of an imperfect solution to a complicated problem. Not a "typical reaction." I'm not an expert on these things, though.
    - ZoFreX 13y ago
      Myth status: BUSTED Illegal immigrants pay more into social security than they take out. I don't even live in your country and I know this, come on - read a book.
      - 13y ago
miket 13y ago
Not at all unlikely, but routine. TechCrunch previously wrote about what these Facebook comprehensive account reports to these "lawful" requests look like: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/heres-what-a-facebook-response-to-a-user-data-subpoena-looks-like/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/heres-what-a-facebook-respo...
vabmit 13y ago
It's common for US immigration and border control agents (and Canadian agents) to do Google and other internet searches. This has been disclosed and acknowledged in the US media several times. While the messages were not likely Facebook "chat" messages, they could have been "friends only" posts (or even public posts that the woman considered "private" from a foreign government). My understanding is that US law enforcement has access to Facebook "God view" where they can see all your Facebook posts. They don't need a warrant because Facebook owns the data and is the one giving them permission to view it. It's a different class of data than a "chat/email" in that it's posted, not directly communicated, so there's no reasonable legal expectation of "privacy". As for personal experience with this, I had a musician friend that posted on his website that he was going to be performing a series of shows in Canada. He was asked at the border if he planned to work while in Canada. He said no and did not have a visa that allows it. The border agent showed him his website, which was found with google, showing that he was planning to work. He was denied entry and banned from Canada for 1 year for lying to a border agent.
- jacalata 13y ago
  My understanding is that US law enforcement has access to Facebook "God view" where they can see all your Facebook posts. Where do you get this understanding from?

rieter 13y ago

> the US authorities may have been reading her private Facebook messages for weeks. That's ridiculous and puts the whole article under doubt. Nobody would waste that much time on her.

laumars 13y ago
I disagree, It's already well documented how the US government follows social networks and decline people entry over comments made[1]. Where this case differs is that the comments were over private messages - which means that the intel would have been collated covertly. So the real question is whether this is another piece of the PRISM jigsaw or just a sensationalist article cashing in on the hysteria that the NSA leaks have generated. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/30/leigh-van-bryan-and-emily-bunting-banned-from-entering-us-after-twitter-joke-about-destroying-america_n_1241104.html http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/01/30/leigh-van-bryan-a... (though in that case - I actually blame the visitors for posting dumb comments rather than the US government)
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  Thank goodness the gov't protects us from crass tourists. Totally worth the billions spent and the invasion of everyone's privacy.
benaiah 13y ago
"reading" doesn't necessarily have to be done by a human. As PRISM has shown, the government has capabilities we weren't aware (or at least sure) of. Would it be that ridiculous that they would have algorithmic scrapers running through all the FB data they have available? They say they aren't, but they've already proven we can't trust them farther than we can throw them. Even if they aren't, she's a foreign national, who they have almost no restrictions on investigating, so they may have been "reading" her messages, even if those of US citizens were left intact (which I personally doubt). Long story short, it wouldn't necessarily waste much time to go through her records, and it would probably be completely legal. The part that seems unlikely to me is that they would show their hand by using PRISM for such a small thing, unless there is some bigger reason they want her out of the country. It's hardly a sure argument, though.

diminoten 13y ago

> private Facebook messages What makes you think this is a thing that exists, aside from the rest of this conversation? She sent a bunch of data to Facebook, with instructions to give that data to someone else. Why does she or anyone have an expectation of privacy when you hand an unsealed (read: unencrypted) piece of paper to a courrier? If something's important, you protect it by putting it in an envelope.