Re:What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at t...
by bitJericho on Thursday February 16, 2017 @08:57PM
(#13665327)
In one breath you say the government would coordinate sharing fb data, in the other you say they don't. Which one is it?
Re:What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at t...
by PeterisP on Thursday February 16, 2017 @09:33PM
(#13665498)
Where does it look like I am I saying that multiple agencies would coordinate sharing FB data? I feel that the parent post was needlessly worrying about a risk of e.g. border teams using unlocked phones as a routine way to harvest data and hand it over to e.g. NSA or whatever "evil government" snooping agency they'd be worried about, because (a) NSA doesn't need this assistance because they are likely to have better mass collection methods on their own, and (b) they wouldn't coordinate this with a large number of DHS grunts, neither by asking them to gather data nor by providing them with a list of all data that they have. DHS is likely to have a lot of data themselves, but anyway unlocking a phone provides extra information in a simple&practical manner.
I do believe that immigration services look at your account exclusively for their goals of evaluating immigration. They ask you to unlock your account because for them it's objectively simpler to ask that information from you than to get it from the other government agencies that have that information but won't disclose it because formally they shouldn't have it. There's no "the government", it is an amalgamation of many organizations that have conflicting goals and don't coordinate, so it's reasonable to expect that "the government" has some information and at the same time "the government" (i.e. other parts of it) don't have it and need to request it from you or do without.