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Comment by iratewizard | Hacker News Reader

There's a huge difference between someone who comes to live permanently in the country and someone who is looking at trees for a week. Do you think the US has the infrastructure available to screen the facebooks of all 75 million tourists who come to the US every year? IMHO this is not an overstep and current US citizens should have at least cursory understanding of who someone is when they are coming to live permanently in our country.

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Yes. I think it does have the infrastructure.

Millions of illegal immigrants roaming the streets seems to indicate otherwise.

Millions on legal American citizens being routinely intercepted and monitored seems to indicate that the us government has all the necessary means.

Considering illegal immigrants don't go through the immigration process, there being millions of illegal immigrants roaming and the US having the ability to monitor all legal immigrants are correlay r. IT ability is not related to how well the US can secure its border physically at this point.

They're 'roaming the streets' because despite the rhetoric, without them, the economy would take a huge hit. Also, there's a different level of effort required to monitor someone you don't necessarily know about versus someone who handed you all their info at the border.

"because despite the rhetoric, without them, the economy would take a huge hit"

I think its important to note that this was Democrats justification of slavery during the civil war as well.

Yeah, that was my point. Illegal immigrants are often exploited in similar ways, absolutely true, that is why officials don't use all the resources available to go after them, despite the rhetoric. It says nothing about their reasoning being just or altruistic, (which it isn't).

The similarity is that the oppression is now done by the state, so its much harder to fight. The difference is that the illegal immigrant does have a choice and prefers to be an illegal immigrant than a legal resident of their home.

"That just sounds like slavery with extra steps"

Lol this is not an overstep? What the hell? A bunch of these people who live long term in the US are going to become permanent residents and/or citizens of the country. Now they can no longer freely express their opinions on social media without fear of offending the authorities.

* Do you think the US has the infrastructure available to screen the facebooks of all 75 million tourists who come to the US every year?*

That's exactly the problem: A queue of charlatans ready to sell Homeland Security bogus analysis of social media posts, with the predictable pernicious results.

That's just over a two a second - doesn't seem that challenging to do some kind of analysis given that Facebook has already done the hard work of collecting and structuring the data for you.

For that matter, US citizens should have at least a cursory understanding of all US citizens that live permanently in our country.

What's good for the goose is good for the panopticon.

US has resources for this and even for much more.

Yup, actually I do think they have the resources to do that. I don't doubt anything, anymore. Wonder why NASA is so defunded? Not to be a conspiracy guy, but realistically thinking if you aren't collecting information that's low fruit such as social media data - what are you going after, then?

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