And here is the chilling effect in action, folks.

Enjoy your freedom of speech.

To play devil's advocate, it's pretty easy to claim that the reason you don't want to detail something as personal as your treatment at the hands of the TSA after claiming it was so horrid that it discouraged you from traveling, is that the TSA will somehow find your online Hacker News profile and single you out next time you try and fly. But it's also possible that maybe the poster doesn't want to reveal something personal, or that the treatment might not be considered as severe as the first comment implied by others, or a myriad of reasons.

> , is that the TSA will somehow find your online Hacker News profile and single you out next time you try and fly.

Not hacker news, but my "anonymous" online postings that were anti-TSA most certainly affected my travel experience. And I'm not talking radical activist postings. Just real world bs postings about my continued bad experiences, and my personal opinions such as the one in my original post.

Really? How did they connect your "anonymous" postings to you at the border? Did they go through your web history?

So there is this thing called internet tracking, then there is this other thing called google or is it facebook or is it nsa ? well I don't really remember[1] but they are really good at it. One my friend was interviewed at the border, asked if she was coming to work, answered no, been show her private facebook message saying she would be looking for a job there, got denied entry and put on a special list.

[1]: was it carnivore? echelon? five eyes? man my memory is not so good.

I cannot believe it is possible to actually access private messages in social networks such as facebook in such a willy nilly manner - that is not to say I do not believe you, but can you give some form of proof?

Did they force her to open her account or did they have access beforehand? How did your friend react?

But he explicitly said it's better notbto poke the beat that much online, so your whole reply doesn't make any sense. Unless your whole point was to call GP a liar. Devils advocate my ass.

He or she isn't calling the GP a liar. The GP may legitimately have these fears, but if we don't know the story we can't tell anything about what they mean.

> somehow find your online Hacker News profile and single you out next time

pretty sure they don't know what hacker news is.

Pretty sure they don't have to. It's a big dragnet, and bots to analyse public text are cheap like dirt. But yes, I'm sure they know any place a hacker is likely to hang out quite well. Oops, used the h-word there. Hi bots!

Actually what I meant was the GP said it was an anonymous post, I don't think automatically correlating random usernames to real people is that cheap except in specific cases where username = real name.

Metadata includes the time. And for the internet (as opposed to phones) they trace the whole routing through the net of each message to be sure they have the real origin, and then store that. There's a reason NSA buildings are so big.

Well, you could tell the story of someone you knew who had such and such experience...