The US border surveillance expansion has global implications

We’ve been asked a lot lately about whether it is safe to travel, particularly to the US. And it’s not surprising why: the US Government is increasing their cruelty at borders.

Border management today is fueled by our data, but government officials want more. They want as much data as they can get to catch you out. They’ve reportedly detained or deported people based on their free speech activities, denying entry on tenuous grounds like having the wrong photos on phones (including in in the ‘deleted’ folder). This data is even being used beyond the border, as we’ve seen with peaceful protestors being arrested and detained.

At the US border, your social media and your devices are at risk, making you a target. It wasn’t always this way.

Creeping to this moment

We’ve been working on border surveillance since 9/11, when governments began tracking you ahead of travel, profiling you at the border, and grabbing your fingerprints. Countless new databases were developed with a plethora of methods to harvest our data. This was led by the Bush Administration in the US, and after initial resistance, others around the world followed suit.

Every few years governments ratchet up their ambitions. In 2016, the US Government piloted requesting social media identifiers, adding them to application forms for US visas and ESTA forms. Russia then did the same with their visa programme.

In 2017 we objected when the US Department of Homeland Security planned to expand immigration records to include social media, your internet history and other forms of data companies held about you. Then in 2018 we objected when the US Department of State sought access to social media data for immigration purposes, requiring social media identifiers from the last five years.

Data grab

This slow burn of requesting and collating data has become a wholesale data grab. This is now being driven by the Trump Administration Executive Order 14161, which targets ‘aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes’, to the ‘maximum degree possible’ for any person seeking a visa or ‘immigration benefit of any kind’.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Service is seeking to expand its use of social media identifiers to help ‘inform identity verification, national security and public safety screening, and vetting, and related inspections’.

The US Department of State is also launching a ‘Catch and Revoke’ programme that uses 'AI' to scan the US Government student database to monitor for arrests or suspension from schools. It also reportedly seeks to revoke visas for people who ‘appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups’. ‘More than’ 300 people had been reportedly targeted in the 3 weeks after its launch.

This is all based on loose language of ensuring that non-citizens ‘do not bear hostile attitudes to US citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.’ 

What started as managing 'visitors' in 2016 is now being extended to permanent residents. 

Device grab

The US Government is also seeking access to devices at the border. They can ask you to provide access to your phone, tablet and laptop; and they can also seize it to forensically analyse. This is exploiting the idea that people have fewer rights at the border to then gain access to some of the most expansive and intimate data a person has. If they’re able to directly access a personal device, they can scroll through everything: social media accounts, emails, messaging, files, photos.

They can also use extraction tools that could provide access data spanning years, including ‘deleted data’ and in some cases can even access data in the cloud or on social media.

Every government has this obsession

Many governments follow the US’s lead on border surveillance. European governments are trying to launch their registration programme for visitors that will include vast data collection, all at a cost to travellers. They’re also copying the US by collecting fingerprints of all visitors.

It’s an opportunistic and cruel reality that advances in government surveillance often start at borders. Governments take advantage of supposed legal loopholes to reduce everyone’s rights. At that border you rarely have a real choice. Comply or not travel.

As the Trump administration is putting on clear display, governments keep shifting the rules. They assume we don’t care about what happens at borders. But increased surveillance here affects us all - border and beyond, US and worldwide.

What’s the answer?

When the US Government first started fingerprinting visitors in 2004, the government of Brazil protested, and retaliated by fingerprinting Americans. Subjecting people to retaliatory surveillance is not the solution, even if that’s how governments often behave, because we all end up losing.

The real answer is simple.

First, people deserve rights wherever they are. This is why human rights are universal, and bills of rights curtail the power of governments. Fundamental protections and safeguards should apply to all people, not determined by a variety of statuses, particularly at borders where we are categorised in so many ways. Governments should be calling out these abuses, protecting us from this treatment, and in turn living up to these commitments.

Second, it is essential that our devices and the services we all rely upon should be designed with strong security and reduced attack surfaces. Companies must protect their users. They must limit access and prevent their users’ data from being exfiltrated and exploited. And governments should be ensuring that this is the case.

The currently dominant sides of governments and companies currently want access to every bit of our personal data. They also have a duty to protect us from these very same threats. They must live up to this promise too.