German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.derwesten.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Fdigital%2Fus-beamte-schickten-deutsche-nach-facebook-mails-zurueck-id8041896.html

by Navarr • 13 years ago

642 246 13 years ago

translate.google.com

ColinWright• 13 years ago

Yes. When asked the reason for her visit she said it was to visit family, friends, and do an English course. Her Facebook "private messages" showed that she was there to be an au pair, which means to do housework and child-minding in return for money.

In short, she was lying and got caught. And after all the recent brouhaha, are you surprised that the authorities had access to her "private" Facebook messages?

Added in edit, since most of the replies to this comment are saying the same thing, so I may as well reply to you all at once by adding my reply here: I put the word "private" in quotation marks. What's the odds that at least of what she posted was, in fact, public? Just how careful was she about privacy settings? Just how careful was she not to post anything at all that was publicly viewable? I'm not at all surprised that she was stopped, and given a second interview, nor that they checked social media.

I guess next time I put something in "scare quotes" I should spell out explicitly that it's a term that just might not be literally true.

nakedrobot2• 13 years ago

Right, this girl was clearly a terrorist and part of the threat to the USA that these NSA dragnets were built for... </sarcasm>

Tenoke• 13 years ago

I'm surprised that the authorities are using their access to her facebook messages for something so trivial and this openly (if they actually did). Additionally, she was not even an american citizen or resident.

magic_haze• 13 years ago

Additionally, she was not even an american citizen or resident.

In all probability, it's /because/ she's not an american citizen or resident. The fourth amendment doesn't apply for non-persons.

rdouble2• 13 years ago

The USCIS reviews Facebook for those applying for long term visas, to prevent fraud. It doesn't have anything to do with the NSA.

nahreally2• 13 years ago

I think the idea was that people should feel outrage because they found out about this kiddy, small-time, mockery of a fraud by reading some random civilian's chat logs.

rcthompson• 13 years ago

The point is that she was caught only because the authorities had access to her Facebook messages. That's obviously why this story was submitted here.

The only justification the executive branch has given for all these spying powers is anti-terror efforts. If the US border agents indeed obtained her private messages from Facebook (and not from her prospective employer), then this would show that the government's access to such data is being abused.

dedward5• 13 years ago

If they obtained it from NSA spying on facebook, yeah, that's bad...

But that seems really really unlikely. Much more likely is it was a piece of public information on facebook and she got busted.

rollo_tommasi• 13 years ago

The real question (assuming this story is true in the particulars) is why were they accessing her private messages in the first place? Was there any kind of flag, or do the border police just do random spot-checks into people's private correspondence?

kanja• 13 years ago

her actions are extremely harmless in the grand-scheme of things, and it's ridiculous and unsettling that her private conversation was used against her like this.

Surely you're not seriously suggesting that this was in any shape or form acceptable behavior by the state.

nollidge2• 13 years ago

Yes, I am. Or I would be, if I thought this story was remotely true.

sauravc• 13 years ago

Is this the only news outlet with this story? How credible is this publication? Before I get worked up about this story, I'd like to know it's not bullshit.

doktrin6• 13 years ago

I agree. It sounds utterly implausible on just about every conceivable level.

1morepassword• 13 years ago

What's the "utterly implausible" part?

In the past we've had verified incidents of people being refused entry because of things posted on for instance public Twitter feeds.

So we know that the monitoring of social media, collating that with the identity of incoming travelers and passing that on to officials at the border is an existing practice. We also know that once monitoring starts for one purpose, it rapidly expands to other use case. This pattern repeats itself around the world.

The only part open to debate is the suggestion of monitoring private Facebook communication.

So you're suggesting that everything published about the nature of US surveillance until this very day, including the recent PRISM-related publications, is all "utterly implausible"?

Because everything else I read in that article is perfectly consistent with what we already know as fact, and therefor completely plausible, albeit suspiciously thin on concrete facts.

jhh• 13 years ago

WAZ is a mainstream newspaper with wide circulation in western Germany. It has better reputation than a tabloid, worse than a top tier newspaper like NYT or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

uh_oh• 13 years ago

It is certainly not one of the big newspapers, but still the largest regional one.

WalterSear2• 13 years ago

Where's the fun in that?

kriro• 13 years ago

Der Westen/WAZ is usually pretty credible.

However I think it's likely that they misconstructed the story (not on purpose but because they made some bad assumptions). Pretty likely that this is yet another "routine check sniffing through social media etc. after the person acted suspicious in some way" ... which in itself is noteworthy but pretty different.

Not unlikely that the sources reported the story a tad wrong.

lukashed• 13 years ago

I don't agree on the credibility part. In my opinion they quite often write sensational judgemental stories, at least on local topics.

Also they rarely indicate their sources. Same with this article. No source, nothing.

If a viral story (though there's no direct mention of Prism, the NSA etc, the 'related articles' are all about this and it's clear that it's the same topic) was their aim: Mission accomplished. Not only the massive traffic from HN, but also more than 3 times as many Facebook shares for this article as the next-most-shared-one.

There are some critical comments on the site, which are blocked and removed quickly by the moderators (have seen this a couple of times now).

valdiorn• 13 years ago

"Finally, the officials baffled Jana submitted a printout of the entire Facebook correspondence with their host-father. "

Maybe something is lost in translation, but could the officials just have received the correspondence from the family she was coming to visit??

tombot• 13 years ago

Does anyone have a link to a human translated version of story?

kmm• 13 years ago

I'm not going to type down a translation, but I can tell you this computer generated translation is very accurate.

Vivtek3• 13 years ago

Essen. Anyone interested in traveling the US to experience everyday life there as an intern or an au pair should be careful with their correspondence. The staff of the immigration authorities appear to be happy to read along on social networks like Facebook. Two young women were put onto the next plane back to Germany right after landing.

After completing high school, Jana H. wanted to go abroad to the land of unlimited opportunity – the United States of America. She organized her own au pair exchange. Found a nice family she wanted to work for and live with for a year. For agreed-upon daily spending money, Jana would take care of the children. At the same time, she wanted to take a language course to improve her English. She had regular contact with her host father through Facebook.

When the high school graduate finally landed in the US, she was taken to the side and questioned at the passport control in the airport. The officials at the American immigration agency wanted to know the reasons for her travel and how long she wanted to stay.

Wrong answers

Jana was ready for this kind of question. She wanted to visit friends of her parents and take an English course. Was she sure of that? was the next question. Yes, she was sure. Really, really sure?

Finally, the officials presented the astounded Jana with a print-out of the entire Facebook correspondence she had had with her host father. Their accusation: The young woman wanted to work in the States illegally. The authorities had obviously read along in Jana's private messages on the social network Facebook for weeks. Jana was not allowed to enter. The next airplane brought the 18-year-old back to Germany.

It wasn't an isolated incident. The dream of another youth of an internship on a horse ranch in the US also never came to fruition due to snooped Facebook messages – he, too, ended up right back at the airport after the flight over the pond.

291 words.

rbehrends2• 13 years ago

Given that the article claims that it happened to another girl, too, this is unlikely.

Obviously, the problem is not that they were denied entry (as far as I can tell, they did violate US immigration law), but how the US authorities learned about it, namely by accessing private Facebook correspondence.

smartician8• 13 years ago

Native German speaker here. The article alleges that "apparently" authorities had been monitoring their private correspondence for weeks. I highly doubt that this was the case. Usually it works like this: Once you're deemed suspicious at the passport control, you're sent for "secondary inspection" to an office in the back. There, you're being questioned further, and officials will search publicly available information for anything suspicious. This includes your Amazon wishlist [1] and in some cases searches of personal items like laptop data [2]. The most common case is when future au-pairs bring physical letters from their hosts with them, and CBO agents find them. There have been thousands of stories like this going back for decades, that's nothing new. What's new is the ubiquity of social media.

In this case, I assume the girl was stupid enough to post publicly on the wall of her future employer, and the CBO agents could easily find it and print it out. I seriously doubt that their private conversations have been monitored. That just wouldn't make any sense.

[1] http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/16/16039/1.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

killermonkeys• 13 years ago

Exactly as I read it. The translation is better as "Jana was baffled when the officials showed her a print out of all of her facebook correspondence." The article makes it clear they asked her a lot of questions before they presented the facebook messages, so they clearly had suspicion.

wtvanhest• 13 years ago

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• 13 years 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-...

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• 13 years 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?

smartician8• 13 years 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.

danielweber3• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

danielweber3• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

leoc• 13 years 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/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.

kken• 13 years ago

It seems as if she lied to the immigration officers. From the story it is not quite clear how it was discovered, but it seems probable that the story is biased and that there are no secondary sources. Also the comments suggest that. So ??

youngerdryas• 13 years ago

So? America is horrible. Especially how they won't let us in.

Vivtek3• 13 years ago

And here's the flip side of Google Translate. German doesn't react well to n-gram statistics; too many long-distance dependencies. Also translating the city of "Essen" as "Food" is hilarious.

trendspotter2• 13 years ago

true :)

fhars• 13 years ago

I prefer the transpation of "Würzburg" as "peppering castle" that babelfish did when the web was still young...

hedonist• 13 years ago

Actually it's naming a city "Essen" in the first place that I find hilarious. Just like the name for that city next to it, "Theremouth" (Dortmund).

roin• 13 years ago

Should we infer that the NSA or some other government organization used a FISA request to read a German girl's Facebook messages about her upcoming au pair work in the US? This seems very unlikely, and I believe would be a clear violation of FISA unless they also thought she was a terrorist or spy.

swalsh• 13 years ago

The bigger revelation here to me is that it would appear the information access is shared beyond the NSA for more than security purposes.

nahreally2• 13 years ago

The whole story is suspect. Why now? If the US government were to use this kind of intel to address issues as small as this, and this is at the level of shop lifting, wouldn't such incidents have made it to international news several times by now?

jcomis• 13 years ago

Perhaps she posted her intent to work illegally in a public facebook post and not only via PM? Or perhaps her host family was under the impression she was official and triggered some sort of alert when they were arranging things (if she for example, listed them as a contact when she got to customs). The typical au pair process from Germany is quite strict and time consuming to get a visa for a 1 year stay, I've had a few friends come to the US to do it. You most definitely need a work visa to be an au pair and she was attempting to violate her tourist visa in two ways, by overstaying the 90 days allowed, and by working. A lot of things could be going on here.

jmacd• 13 years ago

My thought as well. My guess is she or he had posted something on her publicly visible wall and they just printed that off.

Hardly takes a genius. A couple pages of FB wall would take you back a few weeks as well, the agent probably just hit Print.

nostromo2• 13 years ago

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 Security.

I hired a Canadian once under a TN NAFTA "visa" and he had to bring some correspondence from me to the border. We had to be very careful to word things correctly and not to use specific words that could prevent him from coming to the US. It seems that this is similar to what this young woman experienced.

jgh• 13 years 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.

smartician8• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

Vivtek3• 13 years 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.

untog3• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

How was she even attempting to do this when Canadians are limited to 6 months per year in the US?

refurb• 13 years ago

How did she work in the US without a work visa? Every company that I have worked for (large and small) do the I-9 verification process at the start of employment. I can't see any company being so desperate for employees that they would skip that and hire someone without work authorization.

Of course, if you were working for yourself (freelance), there are no employment verification checks.

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

Facebook provided it. Doh.

rl33• 13 years 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.

zmitri2• 13 years ago

They do sometimes ask to see your phone.

smartician8• 13 years 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.

Amadou5• 13 years 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.

darklajid3• 13 years 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.

rbehrends2• 13 years 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.

icebraining5• 13 years 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.

rieter2• 13 years 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.

diminoten• 13 years 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.

ritchiea• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

benmmurphy• 13 years ago

Maybe the border agents were in possession of her laptop and used that to get access to her private messages.

WalterSear2• 13 years ago

Maybe 'private messages' actually refers to public wall posts.

manish_gill• 13 years ago

Heh. Saw a story where some Britishers were refused entry to US simply because they tweeted something like "2 weeks till I destroy America on my vacation". They were specifically asked stuff like "How do you plan to destroy America?"

Srsly?

oyho• 13 years ago

A similar case is surfacing in Norway aswell, only here it is for a top lawyer: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

pyre• 13 years ago

Rings of this incident with UK tourists and Twitter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3533270

llamataboot3• 13 years ago

When my partner (who is from the EU) got to the US this most recent time (she visits here for 90 days at a time, as allowed under VWP rules), immigration pulled her aside with a printout of (public-facing) facebook pages on their desk. Interesting only in that her face book is not under her official name. They had pages and pages of printouts that they thought proved she wasn't simple a tourist, and that she was working here, etc. Note, it was all public (or semi-public with a lot of crawling around under alternate emails, leading to other names, etc etc) so nothing "intercepted". But still a bit worrying when you get pulled aside and someone has a folder ready full of pictures of you, your business website (freelancer), your facebook posts, your tweets, etc

smartician8• 13 years ago

Interesting. Any theories on how they linked that FB profile to her real name? Maybe through the WHOIS record of her website, that got linked from that Facebook page often enough to imply a relationship?

llamataboot3• 13 years ago

Probably not even anything that difficult. If you search for her last name and city, her freelance site comes up. If you go through the freelance site you get an email. Under a search for that email, I think there is a livejournal. In livejournal info there is a link to the facebook page. Etc etc. Something like that. Just google search a few things and play "follow that link"

Worthwhile not because of super spy tactics, nothing any of us couldn't do in 10 minutes of looking for a person, but because its a reminder of how much info people leave out in the open even if they are semi privacy conscious, and also whether you think it is valid or not (I don't obv) immigration is going to get anything they can to figure out why you are here if you are a "frequent tourist" and seemingly from all of our interactions with them, the thing they are most concerned about, to the point of being fanatical, is whether or not you are making any money while you are in the US.

In the age of telecommuting, multinational clients, etc this makes no sense. (My partner can of course hire American clients when in Europe, but can't even work for European clients when in the US) but not exactly the first time bureaucracy is dragging behind the way we are actually living.

proland• 13 years ago

If someone has had their real name on their profile at any time, and later changed it, it's pretty easy to still find using the real name. Trivially so if they chose a username that contained their real name.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

email address?

trendspotter2• 13 years ago

I found this story several hours ago, as well. I found the news to be a possible sensationalist story and didn't even think about posting it on HN. Yes, it is a very interesting story. But it a speculative story. You never know if the media did their research properly or if they just wanted to have more readers. There are other more reputable and trusted news sources in Germany than this one. I don't say it is made up, but some facts could be wrong.

suyash2• 13 years ago

If you want to come to US and work illegally and get caught, what do you expect?

smalltalk• 13 years ago

Why was this voted down? No one other than US citizens has a right to enter the US.

suyash2• 13 years ago

The girl wanted to work illegally. That is my main point of concern in case you didn't get it.

stackedmidgets• 13 years ago

From a German perspective, it probably doesn't matter at all whether or not this story is even true or how the messages were retrieved if it is true. The US has earned the mistrust of the world.

ivv• 13 years ago

DHS CIS (immigration authorities) has been using Facebook and other social networks to detect relationship fraud in citizenship applications. EFF foia-ed a memo on the subject: https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/social_network/DHS_Custom...

runjake• 13 years ago

The United States is not going to blow the operational security of a Top Secret program to bust a teenaged nanny. There's more to this poorly-translated story.

VMG• 13 years ago

also keep in mind that this isn't the Spiegel

Beltiras• 13 years ago

Or as it turns out: less.

dhenzel• 13 years ago

Is this a Aprils fools joke? If not this would be unreal.

hoffsam• 13 years ago

It's not totally clear to me that these were private messages.

I know that the Canadian Border services agency will look things up that are posted publicly on the internet to verify stories. My guess is that the messages were public and the immigration staff just looked them up and happened to see them.

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

Just a note of caution, a friend of mine wanted to send their daughter over to visit the US during the summer before she headed off to college. We were of course happy to let her stay at our place which is a good west coast starting point for things California.

Somewhere in correspondence where she was trying to ask nicely if she could stay at our place she said "I could watch the kids or something" and later in that same correspondence we had said, "no worries, its no trouble for you to stay here." Based on that one statement she was refused entry at SFO and sent back on a plane to Paris and subsequently refused entry into the US for the next 5 years. It was insanely stupid.

iyulaev• 13 years ago

What sort of "correspondence" was this?

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

It was an email thread. In part of it we had given her our address and directions to our house and phone numbers on how to reach us when she got here. She had printed it out and was carrying it with her in her carry on. She allegedly fit the 'profile' and every woman travelling alone on her flight had their bags searched apparently.

kawsper• 13 years ago

Was it messages through Facebook?

pbiggar• 13 years ago

The irony is that anybody who's likely to go over to illegally work as an au pair is likely to know this, unless they're very naive. So the USCIS is probably not catching the actual au pairs - only the girls coming to visit legally!

grannyg00se• 13 years ago

What is the logic or basic reason for this level of extreme prejudice against people doing basic work in another country? It seems to me that someone working in a country is going to be contributing.

dedward5• 13 years ago

Someone working in another country is doing work someone in the country could also be doing, depriving them of a potential job. That's why you need a visa.

Bramble• 13 years ago

So ridiculous! Why are they cracking down on this? Are young French and German girls really posing such a risk to US employment rates? I have offered the same thing while asking if I could stay with relatives in other US cities (I'm American). Next, are they going to go around accusing 16 year old American girls of tax evasion since their bank accounts "fit the profile" for someone who's done babysitting?

Sorry, but the living standards are high enough and tuition costs low enough in France and Germany that I'm not really sure why any French/German college-aged kids would be sneaking into this country for real jobs.

radio4fan• 13 years ago

It's reasonably straightforward au-pairing legally in the US. You just need to be represented by one of the officially sanctioned au pair agencies, and you get a J1 visa.

So I guess they're miffed that girls are trying to cheat the official (rather inflexible IMO) system.

There are huge numbers of American girls in Europe doing a similar thing -- legally and illegally -- and in some countries you'd get the same hard-assed attitude.

In Germany, au pairs don't need a visa at all.

France, being France, they require a work permit (unless you're from CN, NZ or AU).

Spain is easy (just apply to the nearest consulate and it's rubber-stamped) and you can work there for up to two years.

In the UK, it's super-complicated. The UK authorities simply don't want non-EU workers under any circumstances (but what's the point in au-pairing in another English-speaking country?).

However, French and German girls are awesome, so please keep it up and with any luck, more will come here to Spain.

;-)

znowi• 13 years ago

And here goes the popular "I did nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide" sentiment :)

RockyMcNuts• 13 years ago

Would you like to share this status update with

  - everyone?
  - just friends and the CIA?
  - just close friends and the CIA?
  - just the CIA?

KenL• 13 years ago

I know I'm reading a Google translation, but the story seems weak.

It's a real newspaper, but we've got an article with an unknown source, about a girl with no last name, landing in an unnamed city on an unnamed date. There's no statement from any authority and no way to corroborate any part of this.

It's one step above this story that I heard from my best friend, whose cousin's mom totally said ...

DanBC• 13 years ago

Here's a story from 2012 where a UK subject made a twitter comment about "destroying america" and was subsequently denied entry to the US.

(http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/30/this-is-what-happen...)

Obviously, tweets are public. But still, this kind of stuff isn't unknown.

systematical• 13 years ago

Google translate needs some work on translating. It doesn't seem to understand the differences in how sentences are constructed (order of operations) in different languages.

csense• 13 years ago

I've read that laptops can be searched at the border. I wonder if her laptop was suspended with Facebook active, or had saved login cookies to Facebook, allowing customs guys to log onto the machine [1] to see what she's been up to.

I decided long ago, when there was the initial flap about post-9/11 laptop border searches, that if I ever travel internationally, I'll wipe the HD of any laptops I'm taking with me before I cross any national border, and just use scp to transfer files as needed.

If I need to use large files that are too large to upload or download with the time and bandwidth available, this strategy becomes...problematic. But that scenario's pretty unlikely since I'd be going as a software developer/tourist mostly working with Git repos, still photos and short video clips, not a documentary filmmaker producing hours of high-definition video.

[1] Or pop the hard drive out and put it in another machine (assuming it's unencrypted). Which is what they should be doing if these procedures were ever reviewed by a competent lawyer (less chance of accidentally destroying evidence or the user's data this way).

brown9-22• 13 years ago

It's hard to know which depiction of the NSA to believe:

* Amazingly competent agency that is secretly reading all SSL-encrypted Internet traffic and thoroughly concerned with the messageboard postings of average Americans

* Amazingly incompetent agency that develops ground-breaking technology and shares it with low-level Customs officials to bust 18-year old au pairs

frankblizzard• 13 years ago

Honestly, this seems to me (German) like a very lurid headline. Article seems like more entertaining then a serious press release and does not belong on top of hacker news imho.

kleiba2• 13 years ago

The whole story doesn't seem to add up, I have a feeling that some crucial information is missing.

Apparently, the reason she was sent home was that she gave wrong information about her reasons to enter the country. That's why she was confronted with contradictory information in her messages (she claimed she wanted visit friends of her parents, while she was really going there to work). So was she actually trying to enter illegaly and was sent back because of that? That sounds like a visa issue to me (tourist vs. work visa).

Certainly the NSA or Homeland Security or whoever weren't reading every facebook message just so they could check if the girl would state a matching reason for entering the country.

To me it looks like something else must have triggered all of this, something that is not mentioned in the article. I understand that the main point here is that Immigration had access to her facebook chats. I just wonder: at what point in time did they decide to access her chats. Was it when the girl was already at Immigrations? Was it as a (random?) background check when she applied for her visa or ESTA? Or was it after something, e.g. keywords, in her chats triggered a check?

(Please understand that I'm not in the slightest trying to defend that customs had access to the FB chats, I just find the article a bit lacking.)

gcb0• 13 years ago

I think this is a case of a $5 wrench and not big brother http://xkcd.com/538/

when you are taken for questioning they may put you in a cell while they go trhu your stuff.

In that little cell, you are not allowed even you shoe laces!!!!

so they probably got her, unlocked her iphone (either she had no password or they have backdoors) and got the messages.

smsm42• 13 years ago

I'm kind of confused - if US immigration authorities are so powerful and omnipresent that they read Facebook feeds of every random German girl in case they ever want to come to the US, how comes we still have illegal immigration problem in the US? Or was there something special about this particular girl that triggered the attention of the law enforcement well in advance of her visit? Or they just took her laptop, logged in to facebook and clicked "print"? Kind of unclear what exactly happened.

theojapa• 13 years ago

Translation there no good hard read to.

tessellated• 13 years ago

As a native German speaker, I just wanted you to know, that the provided translation wouldn't make any sense, if you at least didn't have a basic gasp of the German language. The original German article does not provide any information about how HS dept got to read the Facebook messages. Further, it seems a rather badly researched article out of an insignificant tabloid.

pekk• 13 years ago

Isn't this an outrage. We should only be denying entry to hispanics, Muslims and darkies who we suspect of wanting to overstay their visas.

But you know, we don't have enough border security and we need more.

aaron695• 13 years ago

I find it quite unbelievable people are buying into this story.

Border guards have access to private email to catch people who possibly might work on the wrong visa, sure....

And boarder guards have kept this secrete for years but the leak came from within the NSA.

What is wrong with people. This is why the governmenat walks all over you, there's just no common sense amongst the masses.

mehmehshoe• 13 years ago

I don't think Customs needs any help from the NSA. Search incoming passenger manifests for anyone with a return ticket more than 5 months from arrival, then just search twitter and facebook pages for anyone on that list. Voila!

Eva_Peron• 13 years ago

Well I guess the guns and gates will still hold Nikita in. :(

namank• 13 years ago

I question the authenticity of this article.

laurentoget• 13 years ago

Whether this is true or not this is certainly not good PR for the US tourism industry and the US in general. Germans were not so long ago the people in the world who had the best image of the US.

inquist• 13 years ago

I haven't heard this mentioned yet: Do we really think facebook "private" messages are in any way private, or even billed by facebook to be private? I am reading the facebook privacy policy and they do mention that they "... may use the information we receive about you: ...to protect Facebook's or others' rights or property..."

So we have rights to free speech, do we also have rights to private speech?

exDM69• 13 years ago

Here is a similar story from one year ago:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Buntin...

This case was public twitter messages and not private facebook conversations, but otherwise similar.

There's a lot of skeptics in this thread whether the US immigration would actually snoop through social networking sites. But if these two cases are true as reported, it seems there's some level of semi-automatic filtering of social media accounts for people entering the country.

mehwoot2• 13 years ago

That is completely different to what is being alleged, especially in light of events this week, that they had access to private facebook messages.

galaktor• 13 years ago

quite ironic that the (German) site shoves a "like this on FB" prompt in my face as I read

qwertzlcoatl• 13 years ago

You might want to look into some anti-tracking software that disables that.

mariuolo• 13 years ago

I wonder if this is part of a plan to deincentivise immigration.

mattront• 13 years ago

It could also be that her Facebook profile was public and she posted public status updates (default FB privacy setting) about what she plans to do in the US. No PRISM necessary for that, just a FB account.

Just try a search on FB for a random name and open a couple of profiles. It is baffling how much personal information is publicly available.

ryan-allen• 13 years ago

Well, I was going to one day visit the US, but I'll never risk entering with the kind of inane (but possibly incriminating) crap I've bantered with friends over chat.

What a sham.

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

The US is spending billions on immigration control, and still have several millions of illegal immigrants. For me this is a sign that restrictions on immigration as they now exist don't work, don't benefit society and should be rethought.

piqufoh• 13 years ago

I can't believe this is factually accurate. Providing a hard copy of private facebook messages seems like a rather dumb thing to do as this would confirm that US agencies are checking up on foreign nationals intentions. Even if they checking up, implicating themselves with such a daft move seems implausible.

I call bullshit!

olsn• 13 years ago

She was planing to get a "salary" and didn't tell the immigration office about it and didn't have the right visa for that. -> She didn't play by the rules, so why should this be any more outraging than any other illegal immigrant?

krautsourced• 13 years ago

First of all, the only thing that makes this story interesting is whether or not the officers had access to the _private_ FB messages, as compared to her public profile. Her being sent back for lying about her intentions to work was a correct decision. As it is, the story (I'm reading the native German version) is very vague on the Facebook issue. I find it rather unlikely that immigration officials are sitting at every point of entry into the US with a massive folder of facebook printouts of everyone arriving on a plane. I'm almost certain there's more to this story (like, maybe she applied for a Student or Work Visa, which was refused for some reason, and then again applied as a tourist immediately after, which caused her to be flagged). Without that info, and without knowing what kind of data they actually got from Facebook, this whole discussion is moot.

INTPenis• 13 years ago

My sister moved to America about 7-8 years ago and the school where she got a job as a teacher found her website hosted here in Sweden, under a fake name. They demanded that she take it down because she posted about something the schools lawyers objected to. I'm not sure if it was amazon links or about her BDSM hobbies. Either way I was amazed by the fact that they found it, and traced it to her. She didn't even have a computer at the time so she had to call me who worked at the hosting company where it was hosted for free, just so I could take it down for her.

It's interesting how much personal image speaks to character in some societies. I'm not saying this is unique to the USA, it's just interesting how we judge people superficially.

German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages

Related Stories