I had a family member go through this. Proof of travel, photos of trips, phone bills, so many phone bills, etc.
But I can easily see how it'd go wrong. If you spend your visits impersonating rabbits, what proof do you have? If you spend more time on snapchat than the phone, what proof do you have?
There's an old trope of "yes, I do have a girlfriend. you wouldn't know her, she's from another school." She lives in another city, she's from Canada, etc. How do you expect your friend to prove their claim? Now replace the playground with INS/USCIS.
It ends up being a very vague question because there's no set limit of what level of evidence you need to reach, you just need to "satisfy" whoever opens that file.
So it will be interesting when you say that you don't have any social media accounts, or point to some essentially empty accounts.
Immigration officer: "This bjelkeman-again account on Hacker News isn't your?"
Me: "No sir, it isn't"
Officer: "But it has your name."
Me: "Sorry, I don't know who that is. Somebody impersonating me perhaps?"
Officer: "Hand me your phone. An unlock it."
Me: "Here it is. But it is empty. I load it from a downloaded encrypted image when I arrive at my destination. The key is given to me when I have arrive. For company security reasons."
I think lots of people on this thread are missing the point. This won't necessarily detect a determined spy who's done their homework. It's not meant to. It's a quick and effective sanity check to make sure that a person hasn't fudged their visa credentials and they're well in their rights to ask and exercise their discretion. They've been doing it for years.
I doubt a perfect answer to their trivia question is required. If it's in your field you'll be able to say something halfway intelligent in response, if you've lied on your visa it will become obvious pretty quickly.
Outrage about confiscating phones and demanding passwords is justified. This, on the other hand, seems pretty reasonable.
>How exactly? Require a government issued ID? What if it's fake? How would you validate that the ID is authentic? Even if it is authentic, how do you ensure that person has proper righgts
There is an infinite list depending on how strict you want to be. They could require government ID. They could require a notary. They could require a court order.
There will always be a balance between ease of takedown for legitimate claimants vs fighting false claims.
So what are they supposed to do if they have no satisfactory way to verify your identity? They may have all kinds of information on you but not your passport number. Some people eligible to file requests may not even have a passport number. They may not even have your name (and multiple people share the same name anyway).
Without any reasonable way to distinguish between legitimate requesters and attackers, their options are to not provide the information to someone who may be the right person or to provide it to someone who may be the wrong person. If both of those are illegal that implies it's impossible to comply with the law.
How hard is it for Federal employees to authenticate themselves to each other?
> accused of providing Secret Service officers and agents with rent-free apartments — including a penthouse worth over $40,000 a year — along with iPhones, surveillance systems, a drone, flat screen television, a generator, gun case and other policing tools, according to court documents.
Are we to assume this kind of thing is so common as to not raise suspicions? Don't they have to fill out forms to get this stuff, usually?
What kind of utter chuckle fuck operation are they running?
If this was a state-actor (which it definitely looks like it) then what validation are you going to do? They can probably manufacture legitimate papers for anything.
Driver’s license, SSN, national ID, passport, etc. If the government is in on it then there’s no limits.
The only way would be to require physical presence in a trusted location. (Hopefully in a jurisdiction that doesn’t belong to the attacker…)
So, the moral of this story, as I see it, is something like:
Start the process of creating a false identity (or two or three or ten) right now, if you think you may ever be in a position to need to flee across international borders. Obtain multiple sets of credentials, including passports and related documents.
I know this isn't an easy process, but it's at least theoretically possible. Neil Strauss gets into it a bit in his book Emergency[1], and there are dozens of other books[2][3][4][5][6] out there on how to obtain a new identity, forge documents, etc.. And if it takes a little "black hat" hacker action as well... well, so be it.
What good would a photo ID be, really? It's not like they have an existing copy to compare it to, and a photo-copy quality copy of an average ID would be pretty simple to fake.
Such a fake passport is not the same as a complete fake identity. There is more to that than a passport and a lot of it you categorically cannot fake.
A fake passport can trick some people some of the time but not all people all of the time. As such those $15k do not represent a full fake identity. Your history of enhancing with the state in some way, paying taxes, requesting a new passport, getting your drivers license, whatever, serves as defense in depth.
States are pretty good at this, actually.
Also, you account is worthless. Hard or impossible to replicate, sure, but if there is no buyer it‘s worth zero.
But I can easily see how it'd go wrong. If you spend your visits impersonating rabbits, what proof do you have? If you spend more time on snapchat than the phone, what proof do you have?
There's an old trope of "yes, I do have a girlfriend. you wouldn't know her, she's from another school." She lives in another city, she's from Canada, etc. How do you expect your friend to prove their claim? Now replace the playground with INS/USCIS.
It ends up being a very vague question because there's no set limit of what level of evidence you need to reach, you just need to "satisfy" whoever opens that file.
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