While US president Donald Trump was rolling out the September version of his , officials at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were quietly planning procedural changes .
This will go into the department鈥檚 database containing what it calls Alien Files. By alien, they mean the files of immigrants, current and prospective, not little green creatures from outer space.
From 18 October, all such dossiers and related records are to include 鈥渟ocial media handles, aliases, associated identifiable information, and search results鈥�. The DHS says this is an administrative not a policy change, that it has already monitored 鈥減ublicly-available social media to protect the homeland鈥�.
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It also plans to which will include 鈥減ublic-source data (including information from social media)鈥�.
Like all , the idea that constantly watching large numbers of people will allow computers to magically identify the bad guys and prevent a terrorist attack is fundamentally flawed.
DHS, the other security services and law enforcement simply to chase down every alert a computer system will generate when monitoring millions of people. Even when suspects have been identified, time and again, from 9/11 to the more recent Paris, Brussels, Manchester and atrocities, this has failed to prevent attacks.
But if the DHS has done this before, surely it knows it works? Apparently not. In February, the DHS Office of Inspector General, which oversees its activities, . Concerns included the lack of objective measures of success, let alone attempts to determine the usefulness of the data. Yet now it is going for a full roll-out.
None of this is to suggest that law enforcement and security authorities should not use social media to help them carry out their onerous duties. It would be remiss not to use such a potentially valuable source of intelligence.
It is possible to tell a lot about us from the digital trails we leave: the vast dragnet of who we are connected to, where we go and when, what we read/view/listen to, what our interests, state of health or social or economic concerns might be. But it would be more proportionate and effective to take a targeted approach, based on judicially supervised probable/reasonable cause for having suspicions about specific individuals and groups.
Credit must go to the DHS for being transparent about what it is doing, which is no more than a natural development of the brought in under the Bush administration, normalised and and . In many ways it is less obviously concerning for those on the receiving end than another approach already in place 鈥� .
We should, however, be disturbed about the invasive collection of voluminous digital profiles on the basis of immigration status. In Trump鈥檚 US, where xenophobia, racism and sectarianism seem to have gained a new lease of life, officials may feel under pressure to raise suspicions where none are warranted.
As authoritarian French statesman Cardinal Richelieu said: 鈥淚f you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.鈥�
