Anonymous wrote:
You misread them. They are only anti-surveillance if it can affect them.
This is surveillance of foreigners that aren't even in the US yet. They don't care.

It won’t affect them until Putin is done with them.

When Putin is done with MAGA, he’ll have us kill them.

The MAGA movement is Putin’s way of getting conservative people (i.e., the people with guns and fighting skills) to make the rest of us to see conservative people as crazy monsters, so that it’s easy for Putin to eliminate them once they’ve served their purpose.

It’s like launching a satellite that’s designed burn up in the atmosphere once it’s served its purpose.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've been telling my teenagers not to associate their social media with their real names. Nothing good can come of it and their friends know who they are anyway.

I don’t have Facebook, but my dog from 2007 does, RIP.

Does your dog have a different ip address than you?

Even if it does, how about the computer MAC address, and the pattern of website visits that distinguishes each of us?

Even if we are good about using VPNs, how many of us have created a digital fingerprint by visiting this site, a site related to our current neighborhood and a site related to our birthplace regularly? How many of us have fleshed out our profiles by providing advice about travel to our current homes and sticking up for our alma maters?

Ideally, your MAC address should not go out over the wire. That's what the tcp/ip stack is supposed to hide through the operating system.

Thanks. I’m not very techie and know I’m getting the details wrong, but I know that this is about the government using an AI-powered version of an LSAT “Mr. Green eats fish on Monday, Ms. Red eats toast on Friday, Who eats beans on Wednesday” problem.

Our identity is the equivalent of who eats beans on Wednesday.

I can’t figure that out, but, set you up with the right computers and surveillance tools, and you probably can.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The civilized world should just request the same of Americans. If they find anything pro Trump or pro maga then you get turned away.

Could be next. And while not impossible it’s very, very inconvenient to navigate travel and many airports these days without a phone unless you get the paper ticket and closely follow the departure/arrival boards. I expect the next push will be NO paper tickets, only phone or you can’t board. Your Real ID is useless, your smartphone is now your ID card, welcome to 2026.

And don’t have a phone, left it home? That’s going to raise some eyebrows big time.

And, unless you’re very sneaky and very techie, your burner phone will be firmly connected with your real name. Only people with great spycraft skills can get a truly anonymous phone without help.

Anonymous wrote:I don’t have any workable social media accounts anymore. I have shell accounts to follow others, but they have no content.

My significant Reddit accounts got nuked a long time ago, I couldn’t even find my own posts if I wanted.

I guess if they want to find my posts here, they could try, but I don’t see how they could find them the way this board is structured.

The border patrol people might not be able to find that stuff.

Big spy agencies can probably identify us using statistical analysis. They use our LinkedIn entries and what DOGE stole to create dossiers.

They might get counts of the most unusual words we use in identifiable accounts, which are tied to our phone numbers or non-anonymous email addresses, to give us digital fingerprint codes.

They go to sites like Reddit and create similar digital fingerprints for user names there.

Then maybe they come to site like these and try to use AI and statistics to sort our posts into clusters and attribute each cluster to a user code. So, maybe I’m user A12035. Based on what posts seem to be linked to A12035, they give me a digital profile code of 1955268.6777.78928.

The AI then tries to use our digital profile codes to connect us to the digital profile codes based on our identifiable information dossiers and identify us that way.

If we only post three posts here, about something like Greek history, the AI might have a hard time attributing our posts here correctly.

If we have 1,000 posts here, and most are about how mean people are to Columbia University, where to get the best sushi in Bethesda, and what to do about the bums around DuPont Circle, and our publicly identifiable dossier shows we went to Columbia, live in Bethesda and work near DuPont Circle, and we sometimes post about those same topics in all of our accounts, and we frequently use semicolons and the word “wherewithal” in all of our accounts, connecting all of our posts here with our LinkedIn accounts might be very easy.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I won't talk about immigrants and human rights or ruined trade deals and the death of American farms or say "how is this America first."

All things considered, reviewing five years of a tourist's social media is not as horrific as other moves. But it suggests:

*utter disregard for the First Amendment
*our government going into mass surveillance mode
*a very predictable and costly negative effects on tourism (already happening!)

This fascism pure and simple. If a democrat had ever approximated any plans of this kind, you all would have lost your minds.

I want to understand how ANYONE who believes in civil liberties and core American principles can defend this.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-tourists-social-media-history-5-years-trump/

Going into?

Been there for at least a decade.


I just don’t want people who hate us to come over here and try to ruin our country.

Like Musk and Thiel?

Them as well.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Obviously screening of anti-American sentiment really just means anti-Israel expression.

No. It will mean whatever they want it to mean to detain you.

Well, they haven't detained many people other than visitors who've criticized Israel.

Well, as someone who is Jewish, I certainly don’t want this Country importing millions of individuals who want to brutally murder me, my children, and the entirety of the Jewish population.

We saw how that turned out in the 1920s-1940s. Some of us said never again, and it’s refreshing to have such a wonderful ally like Trump in the White House after four horrible years under Biden.

I understand the notion that we shouldn’t blindly, unconditionally welcome visitors who harbor enmity for the U.S., but only insofar as we are simultaneously working as a nation to determine the WHY of that enmity (and hopefully addressing / resolving that underlying issue, if possible) and especially excluding from that determination the voices of those who have a natural incentive to distort that WHY for their own purposes.

I don’t want anyone with a demonstrable connection to Ukraine having a voice in determining why a Russian visitor may be hostile to the U.S., and vice versa. There are plenty of actually objective agents to handle the task. Recuse the others, and hold them accountable if they fail to disclose a COI.

I don’t want anyone with a demonstrable connection to Pakistan having a voice in determining why an Indian visitor may be hostile to the U.S., and vice versa. There are plenty of actually objective agents to handle the task. Recuse the others, and hold them accountable if they fail to disclose a COI.

I don’t want anyone with a demonstrable connection to Israel having a voice in determining why an Arab or Muslim visitor may be hostile to the U.S., and vice versa. There are plenty of actually objective agents to handle the task. Recuse the others, and hold them accountable if they fail to disclose a COI.

And I don’t want anyone with a demonstrable connection to Taiwan having a voice in determining why a Chinese visitor may be hostile to the U.S., and vice versa. There are plenty of actually objective agents to handle the task. Recuse the others, and hold them accountable if they fail to disclose a COI.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Obviously screening of anti-American sentiment really just means anti-Israel expression.

No. It will mean whatever they want it to mean to detain you.

Well, they haven't detained many people other than visitors who've criticized Israel.

Anonymous wrote:Trump supporters are garbage. Stop asking them if they care about constitutional rights or anything. They care about themselves, first, foremost, and to the exclusion of all else, and harming people that are not like themselves. That’s all you need to know. They. Are. Trash.

+1

selfish a-hole trash

Anonymous wrote:Obviously screening of anti-American sentiment really just means anti-Israel expression.

No. It will mean whatever they want it to mean to detain you.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I won't talk about immigrants and human rights or ruined trade deals and the death of American farms or say "how is this America first."

All things considered, reviewing five years of a tourist's social media is not as horrific as other moves. But it suggests:

*utter disregard for the First Amendment
*our government going into mass surveillance mode
*a very predictable and costly negative effects on tourism (already happening!)

This fascism pure and simple. If a democrat had ever approximated any plans of this kind, you all would have lost your minds.

I want to understand how ANYONE who believes in civil liberties and core American principles can defend this.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-tourists-social-media-history-5-years-trump/

Going into?

Been there for at least a decade.


I just don’t want people who hate us to come over here and try to ruin our country.

Like Musk and Thiel?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I won't talk about immigrants and human rights or ruined trade deals and the death of American farms or say "how is this America first."

All things considered, reviewing five years of a tourist's social media is not as horrific as other moves. But it suggests:

*utter disregard for the First Amendment
*our government going into mass surveillance mode
*a very predictable and costly negative effects on tourism (already happening!)

This fascism pure and simple. If a democrat had ever approximated any plans of this kind, you all would have lost your minds.

I want to understand how ANYONE who believes in civil liberties and core American principles can defend this.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-tourists-social-media-history-5-years-trump/

It's strange how people get so up in arms about things only when it hits close to home. Not defending the policy but, and this goes with all those racist Euro-defenders, I had a friend (American born and raised) that was denied entrance at Heathrow over 30 years ago for simply looking too Irish even though they were, and had, a southern European surname; and they had to basically eat a round trip ticket from New England. Countries have been doing things like this since forever.

The US has used Immigration counters as de facto race-based admissions tests for decades but white people only seem to care when white people are targeted. Maybe open your damn mouths when it's your neighbor.

OP here. You could not be more wrong about me. Maybe don't make so many assumptions.

However, you are touching on some of the reasons I started the thread. When I have started other threads on say, immigration, there was so much disagreement in the basic positions that it was difficult to have a productive argument. So I brought this story up not only because it should be uncontroversial, but also because the couple of well-educated people I know who supported Trump are HUGE anti-surveillance people. They were always accusing Democratic governments of much worse.

You misread them. They are only anti-surveillance if it can affect them.
This is surveillance of foreigners that aren't even in the US yet. They don't care.

Big Brother IS watching you

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/politics/immigration-tsa-passenger-data.html

ICE now gets a running list of every person who is going to be taking a domestic flight inside the United States from the TSA and runs it through their database looking for targets. This explains the Babson College student's arrest.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've been telling my teenagers not to associate their social media with their real names. Nothing good can come of it and their friends know who they are anyway.

I don’t have Facebook, but my dog from 2007 does, RIP.

Does your dog have a different ip address than you?

Even if it does, how about the computer MAC address, and the pattern of website visits that distinguishes each of us?

Even if we are good about using VPNs, how many of us have created a digital fingerprint by visiting this site, a site related to our current neighborhood and a site related to our birthplace regularly? How many of us have fleshed out our profiles by providing advice about travel to our current homes and sticking up for our alma maters?

Ideally, your MAC address should not go out over the wire. That's what the tcp/ip stack is supposed to hide through the operating system.

Obviously screening of anti-American sentiment really just means anti-Israel expression.