“In order to comply with the January 2025 Executive Order 14161 (Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats),” US Customs and Border Protection informed the public in a December 10 Federal Register entry, “CBP is adding social media as a mandatory data element for an ESTA application.”
ESTA — “Electronic System for Travel Authorization” — is used by tourists coming to the US for short stays from countries with which the US government has “visa-free” arrangements.
ESTA travelers will have to share five years of social media history with CBP snoops if they want to visit the Grand Canyon or catch Keanu Reeves’s turn as Estragon in Waiting for Godot on Broadway.
Travelers who have to request visas (students and workers, for example) have been required to set their social media profiles to “public” for “a comprehensive and thorough vetting” since June.
Even assuming a need or authority on the US government’s part to “vet” travelers — an assumption I reject — the idea’s kind of silly for two reasons.
First, how much does CBP really need to know, other than that a traveler isn’t toting a suitcase nuke or an aerosol can full of smallpox virus?
Second, how long will it take for bad actors start manufacturing — even retroactively — false social media histories, leaving them free to travel while adding yet another layer of useless inconvenience for everyone else?
Worse, from what one might think of as an “America First” point of view, how long before the “national security” state’s bureaucratic camel gets this same nose under the domestic tent?
Don’t tell me it can’t happen here. I’m not THAT old, and I’m old enough to remember when the process of boarding an airplane in the US was as simple as running your bag through an X-ray machine and showing a boarding pass.
These days, you have to show a Very Special Important Federally Approved ID Card (as late as the 1990s, “conservatives” opposed “national ID” schemes) and budget an extra hour or more for body scans (with, potentially, “enhanced” manual groping) just to get from New York to LA in a timely manner.
America’s already crawling with creepy wannabe cops demanding — Third Reich or Soviet Union style — that people “show their papers” as a condition of going just about anywhere or doing just about anything (including their jobs if the ICE gang happens to drop in on a workplace).
If you think they won’t eventually escalate to browsing through YOUR shared memes, photos of cats and memories with your significant others, etc., think again.
As a practical matter, all this snooping just gums up the works of everyone’s life so more government employees can collect more paychecks. It doesn’t protect “America” and it doesn’t protect you.
As a moral issue, let me phrase this as a question and answer:
Q: Who do they think they are?
A: They think they’re your masters.
We shouldn’t tolerate that attitude, or this nonsense. Neither at, nor within, the border.
Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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