Applying for U.S. Citizenship? Be Careful Who You "Friend"

According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the U.S. government is busily tracking social networks in a number of ways, including using sites like Facebook to monitor people who are applying for U.S. citizenship.

According to a May 2008 memo by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS [Office of Fraud Detection and National Security] to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.”

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In other words, social networking sites give the government an opportunity to reveal potential fraud by friending people who are applying for citizenship, then monitoring their activity to see if they are being deceptive about their relationships. “In essence,” says the memo, “using MySpace and other like sites is akin to doing an unannounced cyber “site-visit” on a petitioner and beneficiaries.”

Social Networking Surveillance

As the EFF points out, there are good reasons that law enforcement be able to use all the tools at their disposal to identify fraud and other illegal conduct. But the memo doesn’t indicate that immigration officials should have any other indications about suspicious behavior before conducting social networking surveillance.

The memo also doesn’t say that officials need to be forthright about their real identities when “friending” immigrants, “leaving open the possibility that agents could actively deceive online users to infiltrate their social networks and monitor the activities of not only that user, but also the user’s friends, family, and other associates.”

As EFF notes, this sort of surveillance is predicated on the assumption that users of social networking sites are posting things that are a true and accurate reflection of their offline lives – that what we post (or don’t post) about our relationships on Facebook really means something.

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