The current Republican regime has embarked upon creating a new cyber market, less than a month after taking office.
Samatha Dean (Tech Times) reports:
Planning a visit to the U.S.? Your passport is not the only thing you may have to turn in at the immigration counter, be prepared to relinquish your social media account passwords as well to the border security agents.
That’s right! According to a new protocol from the Homeland Security that is under consideration, visitors to the U.S. may have to give their Twitter and Facebook passwords to the border security agents.
The news comes close on the heels of the Trump administration issuing the immigration ban, which resulted in a massive state of confusion at airports, where several people were debarred from entering the country.
John F. Kelly, the Homeland Security Secretary, shared with the Congress on Feb. 7 that the Trump administration was considering this option. The measure was being weighed as a means to sieve visa applications and sift through refugees from the Muslim majority countries that are under the 90-day immigration ban.
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I say burner Twitter/Facebook accounts, if you plan on making a second trip to the US, you will need to have the burner accounts maintained over the years.
The need for burner Twitter/Facebook accounts, ones you can freely disclose to border security agents, presents a wide range of data science issues.
In no particular order:
- Defeating Twitter/Facebook security on a large scale. Not trivial but not the hard part either
- Creating accounts with the most common names
- Automated posting to accounts in their native language
- Posts must be indistinguishable from human user postings, i.e., no auto-retweets of Sean Spicer
- Profile of tweets/posts shows consistent usage
I haven’t thought about burner bank account details before but that certainly should be doable. Especially if you have a set of banks on the Net that don’t have much overhead but exist to keep records one to the other.
Burner bank accounts could be useful to more than just travelers to the United States.
Kudos to the new Republican regime and their market creation efforts!