The Internet is the first and often the last resource for learning about people we don’t know.
When a passable candidate applies for a job at your company, you can bet that your boss or someone tasked by him goes online to check that person’s social media history.
When novice political candidates run for office, one of the first things journalists and opposition researchers do is to vet their old Facebook and Twitter postings.
When parents become concerned about their children’s behavior, they check their Facebook accounts to see if it suggests that they’re somehow up to no good.
This is all simple common sense. Social media apps have not only given average people an outlet for their thoughts, feelings and frustrations, they have also created an entirely new public square that can be checked. And check them we do. It’s common sense and due diligence to do so.
It is therefore astounding that the Department of Homeland Security has failed to do this due diligence by checking into people who apply to visit or immigrate to the United States.
Four years ago, MSNBC reported this week, DHS considered a specific proposal that would have added checking visa applicants’ social media pages to the routine vetting process. President Obama’s senior officials killed the idea. It was not merely not added to routine screening but was, effectively, forbidden. Social media sites are blocked on the entire network at DHS, as a measure to prevent employees from goofing off at work, and there are no exceptions for using these sites to do their jobs properly. Federal personnel performing the screening of visa applicants are also explicitly forbidden from using their own personal computers or phones to do due diligence on visa applicants.
For sheer asininity, this surely takes first prize.
It doesn’t take a national security expert to explain how stupid this is. People voluntarily testify against themselves online all the time. Criminals have been convicted and jailed because they bragged about their crimes on social media. High-ranking politicians have even been bounced out of office after their own injudicious use of Twitter exposed their sleazy private lives.
The ban on checking social media accounts is one facet of the left-liberal view that America is always its worst self when it acts in its own national interest. This country owes foreigners nothing, certainly not the right to enter the United States without officials checking information already in the public domain.
All foreigners applying to enter the country should be checked. It’s not just a matter of keeping out terrorists, although that is the most important goal. Why should we let their sympathizers in either? It is a privilege to come to the United States, and the government’s obligation to protect its citizens supersedes any obligation it has toward those seeking that privilege. This is why a bipartisan consensus exists in Congress to start checking applicants’ social media history.
It has become a matter of controversy in recent days whether Tashfeen Malik, the female half of the murderous San Bernardino Islamist couple who massacred 14 people, had been posting online about her support for Islamic terrorism before she immigrated. The FBI now denies earlier reports that she had done so, in postings that had supposedly been removed from Facebook.
Either way, the terrorist sympathies of some visa applicants will surely be detected by DHS if the policy changes, as will previously undetected criminal activity by other applicants. That is, if the agency simply does what every sensible person on earth does and checks.
