The US Government is proposing to require ALL visa applicants to provide more personal data, in order to track them online and via their phones. Would these measures infringe on individuals’ basic human rights?
If you scrolled through this week’s ICT/tech news roundup too quickly, you may have missed it, but there was a short news item from Breaking Belize News that the United States (US) Government may soon be requiring Belizean applying for a US visa “to submit their social media histories, previous email addresses, and phone numbers”.
Further investigation revealed that the basis for those measures would be for enhanced vetting of potential immigrants and visitors by the US State Department, which would affect the approximately 15 million people worldwide – including Caribbean nationals – who apply for US visas annually. However, at the time of publishing, those new requirements are not in effect. They have only been tabled, and are open for public comment until 29 May 2018.
If the requirements are approved by the Office of Management and Budget, applications for all visa types would list a number of social media platforms and require the applicant to provide any account names they may have had on them over the previous five years.
It would also give the applicant the option to volunteer information about social media accounts on platforms not listed in the application.
In addition to their social media histories, visa applicants will be asked for five years of previously used telephone numbers, email addresses, international travel and deportation status, as well as whether any family members have been involved in terrorist activities.
(Source: Independent.ie)
It should come as no surprise that the proposal has drawn deep concerns from several quarters. Organisations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and even Facebook, to name a few, were of the view that proposed measures were not only intrusive and may not be effective, but they also infringed upon the rights to privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of association (Source: New York Times) of prospective visa applicants and Americans alike.
Same story, different day
Although the specifics are different, the anticipated effects of this proposal are not new. For example, when former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Edwards Snowden, publicly revealed that the NSA had harvested large volumes of user data during transmissions over the Internet without permission, people felt violated and that their privacy had been breached.
Through those revelations, people globally – not just Americans – also got a sense of the lengths to which the US Government was prepared to disregard individuals’ basic human rights, with little or no actual justification, but using national security as a defence. The proposed wholesale demand for social media handles, plus current and previous emails addresses and personal telephone numbers, is not only invasive, but also could be construed as giving the US government a licence – through the means available to it – to access your personal affairs, or otherwise intercept your private communications.
Further, it must be emphasized that currently, the US Government only requires around 65,000 (or 0.05%) of visa applicants to provide their social media histories, email addresses, and phone numbers, when they are “deemed to pose a potential risk of terrorism” (Source: The Business of Federal Technology). The now-proposed broad brush approach, suggests that every applicant is considered a terrorist, unless proven otherwise.
In summary, although there are objections to the US State Department’s proposal, we will most likely have to wait and see if the measures will be adopted. Notwithstanding, the sheer fact that such a proposal was made in the first place, continues to highlights the extent to which organisations (and governments) are prepared to go to collect data – even if might not never have any significant or meaningful value to anyone, besides its owners.
Image credit: cytis (Pixabay)
