I'm all for privacy and the government not overstepping their bounds, but could someone please let me know why this is so bad? I'm genuinely curious.<p>Your social media info is Public. If you have information public, that is your own fault and the govt can access that regardless if you give them your handles or not. If they were asking for passwords and access to accounts - <i>of course</i> that would be a different ball game.<p>But simply asking for your handles (while you can easily say you don't have accounts) doesn't seem like too much of an intrusion to me.
Headline is a bit misleading. This was possible before, it's just a bit more official now. "Visa applicants might have faced requests for their social media handles in the past, but the practice is now explicit...."
It certainly seems like bad guys will lie. Which makes it sound stupid at first. But maybe there's some logic to the law.<p>At least for those who lie, it adds a punishable offense that can potentially be used for prosecution at a later date, if and when the evidence emerges.<p>So, for example, let's say a foreign national living in the US is found later on to be apparently plotting a terror attack, but they haven't yet followed through with it, so there is nothing to prosecute them with.<p>The authorities could dredge up deportation-worthy crimes by going back and doing a detailed look at the person and finding that they had committed the crime of providing false or incomplete information.
Just under the surface, this policy seems like a long play to reduce the global virality of radical online tendencies. While it might aid in US national security, it's a small part of a broader plan to transform national and global culture away from collaboration (horizontal growth) towards competition (vertical value). This is the essence of "Make America Great Again".
Every headline on this story has been misleading.<p>When I read it I thought to myself - this is the first thing I really disagree with Trump on...but reading on:<p>> The supplemental questionnaire will only be given to “a fraction of 1% of the 13 or so million people who apply for a visa to visit the United States each year
Oh no !. Now I have to create twitter,facebook and instagram accounts to travel to US ? Because I dont have any. If I declare in my visa form that I dont have any account, they are not going to believe it anyway.<p>US is isolating themselves & getting funnier day by day.
Hmm.. this is way too much friction. I call upon the tech giants to brainstorm and make the process more seamless.<p>For example: why can't the govt take your picture and upload it to their servers at FB/Google/etc and get all the relevant info in a jiffy?
for real? i mean isn't that something those secret agencies should have done so already by fancy machine learning and stuff?<p>And i remember, if you ask something, like a phone-number (of a girl in a club), you don't always get the proper information!