
German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages - Navarr
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.derwesten.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Fdigital%2Fus-beamte-schickten-deutsche-nach-facebook-mails-zurueck-id8041896.html
======
ChuckMcM
Just a note of caution, a friend of mine wanted to send their daughter over to
visit the US during the summer before she headed off to college. We were of
course happy to let her stay at our place which is a good west coast starting
point for things California.

Somewhere in correspondence where she was trying to ask nicely if she could
stay at our place she said "I could watch the kids or something" and later in
that same correspondence we had said, "no worries, its no trouble for you to
stay here." Based on that one statement she was refused entry at SFO and sent
back on a plane to Paris and subsequently refused entry into the US for the
next 5 years. It was insanely stupid.

~~~
Bramble
So ridiculous! Why are they cracking down on this? Are young French and German
girls really posing such a risk to US employment rates? I have offered the
same thing while asking if I could stay with relatives in other US cities (I'm
American). Next, are they going to go around accusing 16 year old American
girls of tax evasion since their bank accounts "fit the profile" for someone
who's done babysitting?

Sorry, but the living standards are high enough and tuition costs low enough
in France and Germany that I'm not really sure why any French/German college-
aged kids would be sneaking into this country for real jobs.

~~~
radio4fan
It's reasonably straightforward au-pairing legally in the US. You just need to
be represented by one of the officially sanctioned au pair agencies, and you
get a J1 visa.

So I guess they're miffed that girls are trying to cheat the official (rather
inflexible IMO) system.

There are huge numbers of American girls in Europe doing a similar thing --
legally and illegally -- and in some countries you'd get the same hard-assed
attitude.

In Germany, au pairs don't need a visa at all.

France, being France, they require a work permit (unless you're from CN, NZ or
AU).

Spain is easy (just apply to the nearest consulate and it's rubber-stamped)
and you can work there for up to two years.

In the UK, it's super-complicated. The UK authorities simply don't want non-EU
workers under any circumstances (but what's the point in au-pairing in another
English-speaking country?).

However, French and German girls are awesome, so please keep it up and with
any luck, more will come here to Spain.

;-)

------
wtvanhest
This story seems highly unlikely to be true given the following 4 assumptions:

1) The US Government wanted to maintain the secrecy of the program.

2) Giving the data to a large number of border guards would have increased the
chance of its dissemination.

3) It would be unnecessary to show her the data to refuse her admission to the
US and showing her would violate #2.

4) She would not be a valuable enough target to expose the fact that the US
had the data.

Additionally:

It is much more likely that if the border guards were using the NSA data, they
would simply receive lists of those that could not enter. She would have
probably been a target for that since she was trying to obtain work in the US
illegally.

Alternatively, and even more likely, boarder patrol could have searched public
websites for her name and seen her occupation and the rest could have been an
exaggeration.

~~~
notahacker
The publicly viewable Facebook message theory sounds more plausible given that
(i) plenty of people seem to have little concept of what is and isn't private
in Facebook and (ii) the US does have a track record of denying people entry
based on public social media posts:
[http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-
tweets-...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/31/british-tourists-tweets-get-
them-denied-entry-to-the-u-s/)

Chances are they got a tipoff or she got caught by profiling or a random check
as I doubt anyone bothers to check the Facebook profile pages of every
foreigner entering the US.

~~~
smartician
An 18 year old entering the country with the intent of staying longer than a
few weeks alone will raise eyebrows at the border. Next question will be
regarding available funds. How can she afford to travel that long? Staying
"with friends" is also suspicious, especially when she hasn't met them in
person before.

------
nostromo
It's unclear to me who provided the print-out of Jana's private messages.
Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not
Homeland Security.

I hired a Canadian once under a TN NAFTA "visa" and he had to bring some
correspondence from me to the border. We had to be very careful to word things
correctly and not to use specific words that could prevent him from coming to
the US. It seems that this is similar to what this young woman experienced.

~~~
rl3
Data acquisition methods in order of highest probability:

1\. ^ This.

2\. Was actually public information; story details lost in transmission or
translation.

3\. Her phone was still logged into Facebook.

4\. They gained access to Facebook via links in e-mail.

[...]

10\. Normal federal law enforcement powers.

11\. Special federal law enforcement powers, e.g. Patriot Act.

[...]

100\. NSA data that requires TS/SAP + full-scope poly to access.

~~~
smartician
They probably have a semi-automatic data collection system where you can type
in a name, and it collects all sorts of public data in real time. To a non-
technical person, this can look like they have a file on you, when in reality
this crawler just compiled all the data in a few minutes.

~~~
marcosdumay
I use one of those tools at work. It's called Google :)

~~~
smartician
Right... It's probably more sophisticated like that. Similar to what many HR
departments use to screen future employees.

~~~
rdouble
HR departments just use Google...

~~~
smartician
There are subscription services that do all the dirty work for you. Like
beenverified.com (However that explicitly "forbids" its users to use it for
employment verification. Pinky promise!)

------
jcomis
Perhaps she posted her intent to work illegally in a public facebook post and
not only via PM? Or perhaps her host family was under the impression she was
official and triggered some sort of alert when they were arranging things (if
she for example, listed them as a contact when she got to customs). The
typical au pair process from Germany is quite strict and time consuming to get
a visa for a 1 year stay, I've had a few friends come to the US to do it. You
most definitely need a work visa to be an au pair and she was attempting to
violate her tourist visa in two ways, by overstaying the 90 days allowed, and
by working. A lot of things could be going on here.

~~~
jmacd
My thought as well. My guess is she or he had posted something on her publicly
visible wall and they just printed that off.

Hardly takes a genius. A couple pages of FB wall would take you back a few
weeks as well, the agent probably just hit Print.

------
sauravc
Is this the only news outlet with this story? How credible is this
publication? Before I get worked up about this story, I'd like to know it's
not bullshit.

~~~
kriro
Der Westen/WAZ is usually pretty credible.

However I think it's likely that they misconstructed the story (not on purpose
but because they made some bad assumptions). Pretty likely that this is yet
another "routine check sniffing through social media etc. after the person
acted suspicious in some way" ... which in itself is noteworthy but pretty
different.

Not unlikely that the sources reported the story a tad wrong.

~~~
lukashed
I don't agree on the credibility part. In my opinion they quite often write
sensational judgemental stories, at least on local topics.

Also they rarely indicate their sources. Same with this article. No source,
nothing.

If a viral story (though there's no direct mention of Prism, the NSA etc, the
'related articles' are all about this and it's clear that it's the same topic)
was their aim: Mission accomplished. Not only the massive traffic from HN, but
also more than 3 times as many Facebook shares for this article as the next-
most-shared-one.

There are some critical comments on the site, which are blocked and removed
quickly by the moderators (have seen this a couple of times now).

------
ColinWright
Yes. When asked the reason for her visit she said it was to visit family,
friends, and do an English course. Her Facebook "private messages" showed that
she was there to be an _au pair_ , which means to do housework and child-
minding in return for money.

In short, she was lying and got caught. And after all the recent _brouhaha,_
are you surprised that the authorities had access to her "private" Facebook
messages?

 _Added in edit, since most of the replies to this comment are saying the same
thing, so I may as well reply to you all at once by adding my reply here: I
put the word "private" in quotation marks. What's the odds that at least of
what she posted was, in fact, public? Just how careful was she about privacy
settings? Just how careful was she not to post_ anything at all _that was
publicly viewable? I 'm not at all surprised that she was stopped, and given a
second interview, nor that they checked social media._

 _I guess next time I put something in "scare quotes" I should spell out
explicitly that it's a term that just might not be literally true._

~~~
Tenoke
I'm surprised that the authorities are using their access to her facebook
messages for something so trivial and this openly (if they actually did).
Additionally, she was not even an american citizen or resident.

~~~
magic_haze
> Additionally, she was not even an american citizen or resident.

In all probability, it's /because/ she's not an american citizen or resident.
The fourth amendment doesn't apply for non-persons.

~~~
jrockway
Actually, the Constitution does apply to people that are not US citizens.
However, it's the "law of the land" and the border (and other countries) is
not part of that land.

------
Vivtek
And here's the flip side of Google Translate. German doesn't react well to
n-gram statistics; too many long-distance dependencies. Also translating the
city of "Essen" as "Food" is hilarious.

~~~
fhars
I prefer the transpation of "Würzburg" as "peppering castle" that babelfish
did when the web was still young...

------
llamataboot
When my partner (who is from the EU) got to the US this most recent time (she
visits here for 90 days at a time, as allowed under VWP rules), immigration
pulled her aside with a printout of (public-facing) facebook pages on their
desk. Interesting only in that her face book is not under her official name.
They had pages and pages of printouts that they thought proved she wasn't
simple a tourist, and that she was working here, etc. Note, it was all public
(or semi-public with a lot of crawling around under alternate emails, leading
to other names, etc etc) so nothing "intercepted". But still a bit worrying
when you get pulled aside and someone has a folder ready full of pictures of
you, your business website (freelancer), your facebook posts, your tweets, etc

~~~
smartician
Interesting. Any theories on how they linked that FB profile to her real name?
Maybe through the WHOIS record of her website, that got linked from that
Facebook page often enough to imply a relationship?

~~~
llamataboot
Probably not even anything that difficult. If you search for her last name and
city, her freelance site comes up. If you go through the freelance site you
get an email. Under a search for that email, I think there is a livejournal.
In livejournal info there is a link to the facebook page. Etc etc. Something
like that. Just google search a few things and play "follow that link"

Worthwhile not because of super spy tactics, nothing any of us couldn't do in
10 minutes of looking for a person, but because its a reminder of how much
info people leave out in the open even if they are semi privacy conscious, and
also whether you think it is valid or not (I don't obv) immigration is going
to get anything they can to figure out why you are here if you are a "frequent
tourist" and seemingly from all of our interactions with them, the thing they
are most concerned about, to the point of being fanatical, is whether or not
you are making any money while you are in the US.

In the age of telecommuting, multinational clients, etc this makes no sense.
(My partner can of course hire American clients when in Europe, but can't even
work for European clients when in the US) but not exactly the first time
bureaucracy is dragging behind the way we are actually living.

------
valdiorn
"Finally, the officials baffled Jana submitted a printout of the entire
Facebook correspondence with their host-father. "

Maybe something is lost in translation, but could the officials just have
received the correspondence from the family she was coming to visit??

~~~
tombot
Does anyone have a link to a human translated version of story?

~~~
Vivtek
Essen. Anyone interested in traveling the US to experience everyday life there
as an intern or an au pair should be careful with their correspondence. The
staff of the immigration authorities appear to be happy to read along on
social networks like Facebook. Two young women were put onto the next plane
back to Germany right after landing.

After completing high school, Jana H. wanted to go abroad to the land of
unlimited opportunity – the United States of America. She organized her own au
pair exchange. Found a nice family she wanted to work for and live with for a
year. For agreed-upon daily spending money, Jana would take care of the
children. At the same time, she wanted to take a language course to improve
her English. She had regular contact with her host father through Facebook.

When the high school graduate finally landed in the US, she was taken to the
side and questioned at the passport control in the airport. The officials at
the American immigration agency wanted to know the reasons for her travel and
how long she wanted to stay.

Wrong answers

Jana was ready for this kind of question. She wanted to visit friends of her
parents and take an English course. Was she sure of that? was the next
question. Yes, she was sure. Really, really sure?

Finally, the officials presented the astounded Jana with a print-out of the
entire Facebook correspondence she had had with her host father. Their
accusation: The young woman wanted to work in the States illegally. The
authorities had obviously read along in Jana's private messages on the social
network Facebook for weeks. Jana was not allowed to enter. The next airplane
brought the 18-year-old back to Germany.

It wasn't an isolated incident. The dream of another youth of an internship on
a horse ranch in the US also never came to fruition due to snooped Facebook
messages – he, too, ended up right back at the airport after the flight over
the pond.

291 words.

------
manish_gill
Heh. Saw a story where some Britishers were refused entry to US simply because
they tweeted something like "2 weeks till I destroy America on my vacation".
They were specifically asked stuff like "How do you plan to destroy America?"

Srsly?

------
oyho
A similar case is surfacing in Norway aswell, only here it is for a top
lawyer:
[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=n&prev=...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=no&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vg.no%2Fnyheter%2Finnenriks%2Fartikkel.php%3Fartid%3D10104089&act=url)

------
ivv
DHS CIS (immigration authorities) has been using Facebook and other social
networks to detect relationship fraud in citizenship applications. EFF foia-ed
a memo on the subject:
[https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/social_network/DHS_Custom...](https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/social_network/DHS_CustomsImmigration_SocialNetworking.pdf)

------
runjake
The United States is not going to blow the operational security of a Top
Secret program to bust a teenaged nanny. There's more to this poorly-
translated story.

~~~
Beltiras
Or as it turns out: less.

------
roin
Should we infer that the NSA or some other government organization used a FISA
request to read a German girl's Facebook messages about her upcoming au pair
work in the US? This seems very unlikely, and I believe would be a clear
violation of FISA unless they also thought she was a terrorist or spy.

------
trendspotter
I found this story several hours ago, as well. I found the news to be a
possible sensationalist story and didn't even think about posting it on HN.
Yes, it is a very interesting story. But it a speculative story. You never
know if the media did their research properly or if they just wanted to have
more readers. There are other more reputable and trusted news sources in
Germany than this one. I don't say it is made up, but some facts could be
wrong.

------
KenL
I know I'm reading a Google translation, but the story seems weak.

It's a real newspaper, but we've got an article with an unknown source, about
a girl with no last name, landing in an unnamed city on an unnamed date.
There's no statement from any authority and no way to corroborate any part of
this.

It's one step above this story that I heard from my best friend, whose
cousin's mom totally said ...

------
gcb0
I think this is a case of a $5 wrench and not big brother
[http://xkcd.com/538/](http://xkcd.com/538/)

when you are taken for questioning they may put you in a cell while they go
trhu your stuff.

In that little cell, you are not allowed even you shoe laces!!!!

so they probably got her, unlocked her iphone (either she had no password or
they have backdoors) and got the messages.

------
aaron695
I find it quite unbelievable people are buying into this story.

Border guards have access to private email to catch people who possibly might
work on the wrong visa, sure....

And boarder guards have kept this secrete for years but the leak came from
within the NSA.

What is wrong with people. This is why the governmenat walks all over you,
there's just no common sense amongst the masses.

------
benmmurphy
Maybe the border agents were in possession of her laptop and used that to get
access to her private messages.

~~~
WalterSear
Maybe 'private messages' actually refers to public wall posts.

------
INTPenis
My sister moved to America about 7-8 years ago and the school where she got a
job as a teacher found her website hosted here in Sweden, under a fake name.
They demanded that she take it down because she posted about something the
schools lawyers objected to. I'm not sure if it was amazon links or about her
BDSM hobbies. Either way I was amazed by the fact that they found it, and
traced it to her. She didn't even have a computer at the time so she had to
call me who worked at the hosting company where it was hosted for free, just
so I could take it down for her.

It's interesting how much personal image speaks to character in some
societies. I'm not saying this is unique to the USA, it's just interesting how
we judge people superficially.

------
kken
It seems as if she lied to the immigration officers. From the story it is not
quite clear how it was discovered, but it seems probable that the story is
biased and that there are no secondary sources. Also the comments suggest
that. So ??

~~~
youngerdryas
So? America is horrible. Especially how they won't let us in.

------
pyre
Rings of this incident with UK tourists and Twitter:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3533270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3533270)

------
kleiba
The whole story doesn't seem to add up, I have a feeling that some crucial
information is missing.

Apparently, the reason she was sent home was that she gave wrong information
about her reasons to enter the country. That's why she was confronted with
contradictory information in her messages (she claimed she wanted visit
friends of her parents, while she was really going there to work). So was she
actually trying to enter illegaly and was sent back because of that? That
sounds like a visa issue to me (tourist vs. work visa).

Certainly the NSA or Homeland Security or whoever weren't reading every
facebook message just so they could check if the girl would state a matching
reason for entering the country.

To me it looks like something else must have triggered all of this, something
that is not mentioned in the article. I understand that the main point here is
that Immigration had access to her facebook chats. I just wonder: at what
point in time did they decide to access her chats. Was it when the girl was
already at Immigrations? Was it as a (random?) background check when she
applied for her visa or ESTA? Or was it after something, e.g. keywords, in her
chats triggered a check?

(Please understand that I'm not in the slightest trying to defend that customs
had access to the FB chats, I just find the article a bit lacking.)

------
csense
I've read that laptops can be searched at the border. I wonder if her laptop
was suspended with Facebook active, or had saved login cookies to Facebook,
allowing customs guys to log onto the machine [1] to see what she's been up
to.

I decided long ago, when there was the initial flap about post-9/11 laptop
border searches, that if I ever travel internationally, I'll wipe the HD of
any laptops I'm taking with me before I cross any national border, and just
use scp to transfer files as needed.

If I need to use large files that are too large to upload or download with the
time and bandwidth available, this strategy becomes...problematic. But that
scenario's pretty unlikely since I'd be going as a software developer/tourist
mostly working with Git repos, still photos and short video clips, not a
documentary filmmaker producing hours of high-definition video.

[1] Or pop the hard drive out and put it in another machine (assuming it's
unencrypted). Which is what they should be doing if these procedures were ever
reviewed by a competent lawyer (less chance of accidentally destroying
evidence or the user's data this way).

------
RockyMcNuts
Would you like to share this status update with

    
    
      - everyone?
      - just friends and the CIA?
      - just close friends and the CIA?
      - just the CIA?

------
tessellated
As a native German speaker, I just wanted you to know, that the provided
translation wouldn't make any sense, if you at least didn't have a basic gasp
of the German language. The original German article does not provide any
information about how HS dept got to read the Facebook messages. Further, it
seems a rather badly researched article out of an insignificant tabloid.

------
swalsh
The bigger revelation here to me is that it would appear the information
access is shared beyond the NSA for more than security purposes.

~~~
nahreally
The whole story is suspect. Why now? If the US government were to use this
kind of intel to address issues as small as this, and this is at the level of
shop lifting, wouldn't such incidents have made it to international news
several times by now?

------
krautsourced
First of all, the only thing that makes this story interesting is whether or
not the officers had access to the _private_ FB messages, as compared to her
public profile. Her being sent back for lying about her intentions to work was
a correct decision. As it is, the story (I'm reading the native German
version) is very vague on the Facebook issue. I find it rather unlikely that
immigration officials are sitting at every point of entry into the US with a
massive folder of facebook printouts of everyone arriving on a plane. I'm
almost certain there's more to this story (like, maybe she applied for a
Student or Work Visa, which was refused for some reason, and then again
applied as a tourist immediately after, which caused her to be flagged).
Without that info, and without knowing what kind of data they actually got
from Facebook, this whole discussion is moot.

------
exDM69
Here is a similar story from one year ago:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-
Buntin...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Bunting-
Leigh-Van-Bryan-UK-tourists-arrested-destroy-America-Twitter-jokes.html)

This case was public twitter messages and not private facebook conversations,
but otherwise similar.

There's a lot of skeptics in this thread whether the US immigration would
actually snoop through social networking sites. But if these two cases are
true as reported, it seems there's some level of semi-automatic filtering of
social media accounts for people entering the country.

~~~
mehwoot
_There 's a lot of skeptics in this thread whether the US immigration would
actually snoop through social networking sites. But if these two cases are
true as reported, it seems there's some level of semi-automatic filtering of
social media accounts for people entering the country._

That is completely different to what is being alleged, especially in light of
events this week, that they had access to private facebook messages.

------
smsm42
I'm kind of confused - if US immigration authorities are so powerful and
omnipresent that they read Facebook feeds of every random German girl in case
they ever want to come to the US, how comes we still have illegal immigration
problem in the US? Or was there something special about this particular girl
that triggered the attention of the law enforcement well in advance of her
visit? Or they just took her laptop, logged in to facebook and clicked
"print"? Kind of unclear what exactly happened.

------
DanBC
Here's a story from 2012 where a UK subject made a twitter comment about
"destroying america" and was subsequently denied entry to the US.

([http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/30/this-is-what-
happen...](http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/30/this-is-what-happens-when-
you-joke-about-destroying-america-on-twitter/))

Obviously, tweets are public. But still, this kind of stuff isn't unknown.

------
frankblizzard
Honestly, this seems to me (German) like a very lurid headline. Article seems
like more entertaining then a serious press release and does not belong on top
of hacker news imho.

------
inquist
I haven't heard this mentioned yet: Do we really think facebook "private"
messages are in any way private, or even billed by facebook to be private? I
am reading the facebook privacy policy and they do mention that they "... may
use the information we receive about you: ...to protect Facebook's or others'
rights or property..."

So we have rights to free speech, do we also have rights to private speech?

------
brown9-2
It's hard to know which depiction of the NSA to believe:

* Amazingly competent agency that is secretly reading all SSL-encrypted Internet traffic and thoroughly concerned with the messageboard postings of average Americans

* Amazingly incompetent agency that develops ground-breaking technology and shares it with low-level Customs officials to bust 18-year old au pairs

------
mattront
It could also be that her Facebook profile was public and she posted public
status updates (default FB privacy setting) about what she plans to do in the
US. No PRISM necessary for that, just a FB account.

Just try a search on FB for a random name and open a couple of profiles. It is
baffling how much personal information is publicly available.

------
piqufoh
I can't believe this is factually accurate. Providing a hard copy of private
facebook messages seems like a rather dumb thing to do as this would confirm
that US agencies are checking up on foreign nationals intentions. Even if they
checking up, implicating themselves with such a daft move seems implausible.

I call bullshit!

------
hoffsam
It's not totally clear to me that these were private messages.

I know that the Canadian Border services agency will look things up that are
posted publicly on the internet to verify stories. My guess is that the
messages were public and the immigration staff just looked them up and
happened to see them.

------
olsn
She was planing to get a "salary" and didn't tell the immigration office about
it and didn't have the right visa for that. -> She didn't play by the rules,
so why should this be any more outraging than any other illegal immigrant?

------
bayesianhorse
The US is spending billions on immigration control, and still have several
millions of illegal immigrants. For me this is a sign that restrictions on
immigration as they now exist don't work, don't benefit society and should be
rethought.

------
mehmehshoe
I don't think Customs needs any help from the NSA. Search incoming passenger
manifests for anyone with a return ticket more than 5 months from arrival,
then just search twitter and facebook pages for anyone on that list. Voila!

------
suyash
If you want to come to US and work illegally and get caught, what do you
expect?

~~~
smalltalk
Why was this voted down? No one other than US citizens has a right to enter
the US.

~~~
suyash
The girl wanted to work illegally. That is my main point of concern in case
you didn't get it.

------
pekk
Isn't this an outrage. We should only be denying entry to hispanics, Muslims
and darkies who we suspect of wanting to overstay their visas.

But you know, we don't have enough border security and we need more.

------
laurentoget
Whether this is true or not this is certainly not good PR for the US tourism
industry and the US in general. Germans were not so long ago the people in the
world who had the best image of the US.

------
systematical
Google translate needs some work on translating. It doesn't seem to understand
the differences in how sentences are constructed (order of operations) in
different languages.

------
ryan-allen
Well, I was going to one day visit the US, but I'll never risk entering with
the kind of inane (but possibly incriminating) crap I've bantered with friends
over chat.

What a sham.

------
mariuolo
I wonder if this is part of a plan to deincentivise immigration.

------
Eva_Peron
Well I guess the guns and gates will still hold Nikita in. :(

------
namank
I question the authenticity of this article.

------
theojapa
Translation there no good hard read to.

------
galaktor
quite ironic that the (German) site shoves a "like this on FB" prompt in my
face as I read

~~~
qwertzlcoatl
You might want to look into some anti-tracking software that disables that.

------
dhenzel
Is this a Aprils fools joke? If not this would be unreal.

------
stackedmidgets
From a German perspective, it probably doesn't matter at all whether or not
this story is even true or how the messages were retrieved if it is true. The
US has earned the mistrust of the world.

