As first reported by Buzzfeed, the Trump administration plans to change policy next month and start collecting social media information, including “social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results,” from immigrants and naturalized citizens, with a privacy and free expression expert saying that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) move would also “affect U.S. citizens who communicate with these immigrants.” Does this include a president who uses his Twitter account to threaten both U.S. citizens and hostile nations? ThinkProgress:
The goal of the policy, which seeks to update the Privacy Act of 1974, is to “streamline immigration recordkeeping” so that the DHS agency can consolidate official records into one immigration record. The policy will allow the agency to pull new sources of information into that record including “social media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results.” The new policy will not just affect recent immigrants to the United States — but permanent residents and naturalized citizens as well.
“The shooting in San Bernardino, California in 2015 turned a spotlight on culling social media postings out of national security concerns,” noted ThinkProgress, but even a report from DHS’s own Office of Inspector General found that pilot programs digging into social media information found they weren’t really all that effective. And, the administration’s fearmongering over refugees has been baseless and to serve a nativist agenda—refugees already undergo up to two years of vetting, certainly much more than Trump cabinet members.
Of course, the Trump administration is doing its best to ignore the reality that hostile forces used social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to usher in this president in the first place. “We see this as part of a larger process of high tech surveillance of immigrants and more and more people being subjected to social media screening,” said Adam Schwartz, the privacy and free expression expert. “There’s a growing trend at the Department of Homeland Security to be snooping on the social media of immigrants and foreigners and we think it’s an invasion of privacy and deters freedom of speech.”