This won't help feds a bit to fight terrorism. Since no terrorist will give his social media ids. Just like the questionnaires which ask you directly if you are a terrorist. This won't help fight terrorism. The only two things that it could possibly change are: people who don't give they're social media ids are treated as if they were guilty and the government knows even more about innocent people.
Someone who purposely enters wrong information in the field could be prosecuted for that reason.
That could be helpful to a prosecutor trying to get a known terrorist where there's not enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for the other crimes.
If you create a new crime for the purpose of going after people who you can't prove committed a different crime, you are doing something (morally) wrong.
This kind of thinking pushes us even farther along this dangerous path than we are today: where nearly everything is illegal, so we simply trust the all-powerful prosecutors and their discretion as the sole arbiters of what is punished and what is allowed, who is a criminal and who is innocent. And it may change in an instant at the whim of a few powerful men and women.
Don't forget that ESTA is the enormous form that everyone traveling to the USA from countries not required to obtain visa has to complete and have approved before leaving. And it asks for wonderful stuff like: "Have you been a member of a terrorist organization?" with helpful footnote: "Answering yes to any of these questions (there are a few more such gems there) is not a ground for automatic entry refusal." (paraphrased from memory). These questions are pretty much the same that are/used to be on the visa application forms too.
Submitting the form isn't free neither - you have to pay a processing fee.
What is worse, you can be denied entry with no explanation even if you are not a terrorist and have done all the paperwork, no prosecution needed. Either because your ESTA form submission was rejected for some unknown reason (then good luck obtaining a visa - pretty much denied by default) or on arrival, even though you had everything approved.
What a wonderful system that really makes everyone safe and secure :(
Aside from the fact that this will not help to legitimately identify terrorists at all, the change is also estimated to cost nearly $300 million annually to administer. Not just useless, but insanely expensive too.
If you want to give them a piece of your mind, you'll have to mail a physical letter to U.S. Customs and Border Protection in DC before August 22.
> The 26-year-old bar manager wrote a message to a friend on the micro-blogging service, saying: "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America."
If the extra initial scrutiny is perceived to streamline the process and avoid further hassles, many will hand it over without giving it a second thought.
For example, many people have voluntarily submitted fingerprints in order to enroll in TSA's PreCheck.
That's a very good example, but on the other hand fingerprints aren't likely to accidentally "incriminate" you.
Coming into the USA, if I saw that on a form my first instinct would be that not providing it reduces the risk of accidentally getting flagged for something ridiculous. I'd hate to be pulled aside for extra screening because a tweet from 6 years ago included the word 'explosion' in it.
All the people who think that if a form field exists, they have to fill it out. I bet they'll harvest an extraordinary amount of data by having this optional field.
I could imagine that a good LinkedIn or GitHub profile might help support an O-1 or P-1 visa application by providing some evidence that the applicant is well-regarded in their field.
It's voluntary so largely absurd. "Largely" since it's often unwise to take advantage of such choices -- you're better off not exercising your right to decline.
Any bad guy will just make a burner account. It need not even be obvious: a person who mostly uses vKontakt can just make a legit, if empty Facebook account.
This is a complete and utter non-issue. If you're filling out paperwork for the US government to "vet" you for something (admission, duration of stay, whatever) then you might want to provide places where they can learn more about you. That might be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like where your past history of advocating violent overthrow of governments may be relevant, or it may be on other "social" sites like the StackExchange family where your past history of hundreds of accepted answers on $Programming_Language may give credibility to your request for a visa to enter for a conference.
Seriously, this is adding some lines to a form and doing it in the most bureaucratic way possible because that's how governments do things.
a) not seen the ESTA and visa applications forms (the content and questions are very similar) for traveling to the US.
b) not have one of these denied for an arbitrary and opaque reason (the applicant is not told the reason).
c) not have had your personal information stolen and abused yet.
If Americans had to go through this sort of BS whenever they travel to Europe there would be an uproar. But in reverse it is OK, because, obviously, the people on the other side of the pond (which is the majority of who the ESTA system applies to) are somehow more of a threat.
I suspect that this is put forward so that they can claim that nobody is actually filling it out -- so they can subsequently require entrants to sign in to a DHS Facebook app that extracts all your information.
