Human rights activists are expressing concern that a new State Department directive requiring consular officials to look through social media accounts of some visa applicants will effectively expand President Trump’s Muslim ban — and be used to exclude people with certain political viewpoints.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that even as some key parts of Trump’s Muslim ban executive order are being held up by legal challenges, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has ordered “mandatory social media checks” on visa applicants who have ever spent time in territory controlled by ISIS. He also directed embassies and diplomatic missions to identify other “populations warranting increased scrutiny,” whose visas would receive increased scrutiny.
Amnesty International sent a letter to the State Department, requesting that the memoranda and instructions related to the new measures be made public. “These implementation memos should be disclosed because they are a matter of public concern,” the letter reads. “Thousands of people apply for visas to travel to the United States — for urgently needed medical care, to escape persecution, to reunite with their families.”
Naureen Shah, a director at Amnesty International, told The Intercept that if the directive is applied with limited oversight, it could even further broaden Trump’s Muslim ban.
“This is a plan to go beyond the letter of the executive order in ways that the public doesn’t have notice of, and Congress doesn’t either,” she said.
“I read these in the context of an executive order that is premised on the notion that people are presumptively dangerous based on who they are — not on what they’ve done,” said Shah. “I’m not saying that the officials are going to act on that, but that’s implicit here in what’s coming from the State Department at the highest level.”
Shah also expressed concern that the social media vetting will allow the State Department to bar admission to people because they have expressed certain political viewpoints. “The first thing that occurred to me when I read the Reuters story was that this could enable the Trump administration to block people from entering the country who had been on the ground in Iraq and Syria, people like our researchers.”
“There are people who have done this work, who have travelled in ISIS-controlled territory, that come into the United States because they have something to say. They have information to provide. It puts such huge amounts of discretion in the hands of these officials based on the presumption that people are dangerous because they’ve been there. We’re really worried about the ways that could be used.”
The U.S. has a long history of banning entry to people based on ideology. At the height of McCarthyism, Congress passed a law allowing the State Department to ban anyone who acted “prejudicial to the public interest.” The law was promptly used to bar entry to leftist novels, poets, writers, and activists. The government even used the law to block Pierre Trudeau — who would go on to become the Canadian prime minister decades later.
Similarly, the Patriot Act — passed in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks — allows the State Department to ban anyone who it determines “undermines the United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activities.” Under Presidents Bush and Obama, that led to blocking of visas for anti-apartheid academic Adam Habib, Greek economist John Milios, and hip-hop artist M.I.A.
The Bush administration in 2004 denied entry to Tariq Ramadan — an internationally renowned professor of Islamic studies and Iraq War critic. The ACLU filed suit on his behalf and won, after the government failed to show a connect to terrorism. But the court, not ruling on whether the law is unconstitutional, did not strike down the law.
Top photo: The Facebook logo is reflected in the eye of a girl surfing the internet in 2008 in London.
Yes if social media accounts can show the true nature of the applicant as someone who loves: Isis videos, kalishnakofs, beheadings, 72 virgins and constantly rants about hating America then bar them!
At the Tijuana – San Ysidro, CA border, immigration officers, have already taken away 3 persons visas because they found Trump memes on their social media accounts.
Not a comment on the article, but a point about optics: the reflection of the Facebook web page on the eyeball would be reversed left-to-right if it were real. Photoshop vs. Physics.
profiling technology must outpace the public understanding of demographics, this is the essence of advanced surveillance
eventually profiling technology will outpace the understanding of the people using it, which would in a sense be ideal
People who say mean things about Israel will offend the Jewish billionaires running congress.
Shylock will get his pound of flesh if he has to bribe every last member of Congress.
As Benito intimates below, this is sure to be followed by demands for the social media data on everyone. But there is a problem for those who do not use social media. When they ask one of them for their account information, it is very unlikely that they will be satisfied by they answer and as a result they may be prevented from traveling.
The solution of course is for the Government to mandate that everyone have social media accounts. Perhaps just one will do, depending on how much that particular company has contributed to the election campaigns, relative to all others. Even that would not necessarily be sufficient, however: what if someone has the requisite account(s) but has not posted anything? The Government could impose a requirement for posting, or better yet take the absence of posts as evidence of Antisocial Behavior (Article 51 in the parlance of dear departed Alexandr Denisovich).
I would speculate that the State Department will be granted access to XKEYSCORE and people will be forced to identify their main email account whereby a search will be done to determine all social media accounts.
After all, why bother asking when you can simply take what you want without objection.
Alternatively, the State Department could simply be outsourced to the NSA and CIA.
That might help explain the deep cuts in the State budget as proposed by our Beloved Führer.
This is a dangerous time, especially given this administration’s admiration for autocratic regimes. There needs to be oversight of these measures and even court challenges.
HOW TO STOP IMMIGRATION / IMPORTATION OF PERSONS *** AND **** PAY FOR THE THE WALL?
TAX THE SHIT OUT OF IMMIGRANTS / IMPORTEES. (Clinton Slavetraders won’t like this at all.)
NOT ONLY THE IMMIGRANTS BUT THEIR OFFSPRING AS WELL. (That would bring about social justice, returning the continent to the indigenous peoples.)
Someone was right.
Universal Citation: 21 OK Stat § 21-1266.1 (2014)
Upon evidence and proof already presented before this legislature, congress, the courts of this state, and the courts of the United States, it is here now found and declared to be a fact that there exists an International Communist conspiracy which is committed to the overthrow of the government of the United States and of the several states, including that of the State of Oklahoma, by force or violence, such conspiracy including the Communist Party of the United States, its component or related parts and members, and that such conspiracy constitutes a clear and present danger to the government of the United States and of this state.
So anyone speaking uncomfortable truth to power or one who is openly critical of American policy can expect to be banned from the US? That’s not healthy for your society, but it’s your country, so got it: I’ll stay here and vacation at home in Canada. America’s loss – we tip well.
Why overstate it, Hugh? The practice of vetting for entry from regions where the US has inflicted grievous violence in conduct of foreign policy isn’t anything new, ..it’s just not been as articulated and practiced with any degree of truly practical discipline.
As we all know, removing shoes before boarding with obligatory groping is merely a behavioral conditioning relic of past security farce and incompetence of strictly ulterior purposes.
No one seems too objecting to the continuing murderous policies that inflame violent passions in victims of, say, illegal and indiscriminate US bombing in Syria or Yemen. We won’t go into the neo-McCarthyism now all the rage in this fun-house of mirrors, nor the tacit support of your so-called ‘liberal’ prime minister.
So, then potentially radicalized survivors who’ve seen their families blown to shit at a wedding or prayer gathering shouldn’t be thoroughly examined before being allowed entrance into the offending nation to potentially exercise justifiable vengeance against innocents of the opposing side? It’s the age-old dialog of human inflicted devastation.
Blowback is a bitch for allowing our government to engage malevolent foreign policy, not to mention the conception, covert funding, training, arming and orchestration of terror globally, now for generations to this very day.
Ask the Swedes, the French, the Poles, the Germans, etc., how they like their so-called domestic no-go-zones established due to rampant ‘refugee’ gang rape and violence. Just a figment of their imagination?
Maybe you have to have had a young daughter raped or murdered or both before you see the method in the madness. Because madness it is, friends, to have allowed successive neoliberalcon administrations to exercise fraudulent basis for waging war on the Muslim world as means to achieve perpetual tension for fortune 500 profit in this ‘security state’ of the greater empire of global hegemony.
It’s lose lose except for the tiny elite of filthy rich psychopaths that wage their wars of absolute mind control over the entire planet. Think that you’re an exception, Hugh? Canada will collapse along with the US bc you’re just too fucking polite to object to having a mass of mindless sociopaths for neighbors.
God bless Alberta.
“.. exercise justifiable vengeance ..” …quit reading at this point…Nick berg, Dan Pearl…
So, you self-righteously self- censor irony? Missed the point entirely.
Vengeance is always justifiable whether inflicted in Israel or Gaza, Republic of or Northern Ireland, USA or Afghanistan, etc.
You demonstrate head-in-the-sand bias that continuously drives the partisan violence you presumably distain; Nick Berg, Dan Pearl.
If they vetted my social media, they probably would revoke my passport.
Suggest another title : Trump’s Muslim ban expanded to non-Muslims.
The State Department doesn’t have the resources, especially after the proposed budget cuts, to properly analyze peoples’ social media accounts and create detailed profiles. So it would be better if they outsource this task to Facebook and Google. They are already profiling their livestock, er, customers, for sale to advertisers, so compiling the additional information that interests the government – health status, religion, political affiliations and activism – would be trivial.
Just as war has progressed from targeting entire countries to targeting individuals with drones, discrimination will progress from targeting entire demographic groups to targeting specific traits. There are ISIS members in England for example, who obviously should be excluded, as well as the people who simply dislike America. Then there are the football hooligans, practical jokers and insufferable bores – why should they be permitted entry? (unless of course they have enough money to help boost the economy).
As the esteemed Hans Gruber always reminds us, the US government must use all the tools in the toolbox.
Hey Alex,
What’s FirstLooks standard and practice for allowing reporters access to the Snowden archives.
Is it ultimately Glenn’s call or perhaps your respective editors?
We’ve noticed that most of the reporting fro the archives over the last 18 months or so has been of a “me to” quality. As in another outlet does some successful “investigative” reporting and summarily the Intercept collegially chimes in with a brief article and CA Snowden doc or two further elucidating a rival pubs narrative.
NSA, CIA and the FBI are out of control, but that’s the way we are going and it is expected, They use terrorism as an excuse to spy on us. Wake up and smell the coffee, if we don’t have outrage today what will tomorrow bring. Stop the Government from spying on everybody. Use the search engine that does not change its results for political reasons and respects your privacy, just good old fashion results that are not tracked. Lookseek.com The world is over as we once new it. Thank god for Wikileaks maybe the information can save us
Don’t forget that Obama was behind it.
The biggest swell of cyberwar capabilities was ordered by Obama.
Obama created “Cyber Command.”
But he is expected to sign a classified order in coming weeks that will create the military cybercommand, officials said. It is a recognition that the United States already has a growing number of computer weapons in its arsenal and must prepare strategies for their use — as a deterrent or alongside conventional weapons — in a wide variety of possible future conflicts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html?_r=0
You can send him a thank you letter.
What if people don’t have social media accounts?
My favourite cell handset is very basic – disabled voice (hearing difficulties) but communicates using SMS. That’s it. Doesn’t even have GPS.
Many, often older, people simply have better things to do with their time than send inane messages to each other.
Will such non-use be used by government to infer something?
You fall under Highly suspicious…..probably working for Putin, category.
Then the CIA will just create appropriate SoMe accounts for you. All updated and back-dated with whatever the occasion merits.
[[[ What if people don’t have social media accounts? ]]]
They are some of the smartest people on the planet — just like me.
[[[ My favourite cell handset is very basic – disabled voice (hearing difficulties) but communicates using SMS. That’s it. Doesn’t even have GPS. ]]]
I don’t even use a cellphone anymore. I got rid of it for reasons that even Ed Snowden and Glenn Greenwald won’t even mention.
“exclude people with certain political viewpoints.”
Yes, excluding those who might want to splatter Americans with a vehicle is a good idea. I would not condone that type of vetting of American citizens, but foreigners, absolutely.
Well, does that include Israeli-Americans with duel citizenship who might wanna do some tombstone tipping?.. or US Veterans ..Are they going to be asked, do you like black people? Do you like swords?
Shia LaBEEF got super trolled again: fourth attempt to install his He Will Not Divide Us flag overseas in Liverpool lol lol within hours police shut down the setup as trolls tried to remove it lol..elm rules lol. If he goes to Antarctica with his anti trump message. They will find it and troll him again lol.
What’s next a question about religion persuasion you are. In which case I would be probably be screwed. I don’t use any social media and I’m an atheist.
I’m an atheist, too. But I do use social media.
Just because your neighbor is rich and prosperous, and sometimes, if rarely, engages in criminal behavior, doesn’t mean it’s your right to demand an invite from him and settle yourself in his mansion. Yes, he may donate stuff and his garbage may even contain valuable items, but it would be totally wrong on your part to expect a cut from his party dinners.
Why this nonsense then? The rest of the world should stop fighting with each other and manage their own business properly. Muslim people are the biggest culprits in intergang rivalry, a notch above the Koreans and the Pakis. If they fought less then they would be just as prosperous. All they would have to do then is be wary of the rich neighbor so he doesn’t engage in the rare criminal activity.
Muslim people are the biggest culprits in intergang rivalry, a notch above the Koreans and the Pakis
This comment is totally ignorant, disgusting and sick.
If the comment makes you sick, then imagine what effect the action it describes has on the people who bear this violence.
Could you please help to get them to stop quarreling? Of course, you won’t, like the lazy Mayor of London.
Listen..can you hear that..humming noise..?.. look up , what are those things? Gotta go to work?, forget about the grid lock during rush hour..been to an American Airport lately? The TSA has authority to stick their hands inside your underwear and touch your cock if they want to!
Just thank your agent and revel in how much more safe you feel after he touched your cock, than before he touched your cock!..
So yes, it’s the Koreans and Paki’s fault that the TSA is allowed to stick their hands inside your underwear
For the ladies in the audience, when the TSA sticks their hand in your pants or bra, take a clue from this in how to respond:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-bsf2x-aeE
Touché..or, one could use the “Animal House” frat house , “thank you sir may I have another”
https://youtu.be/qdFLPn30dvQ