The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of USA will ask all those wishing to consider their visa for details of their social media accounts.
We should mention that the ministry wishes to request not only recent social network accounts but all those that have been used in the last five years, as well as: telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and all international tripa carried out by the interested parties during this period.
If the bill is adopted, it will extend the control regime for every applicant, from immigrants but also simple business travelers or tourists.
The Ministry published his decision on Friday, and the public consultation process before approval will be completed on 29 May of 2018.
The announcement explains that the Foreign Ministry wishes to extend the amount of information it collects by adding a few questions to its Immigrant Visa and Alien Registration application (DS-260).
The electronic form will have a list of social network platforms (presumably the most important ones) and will “require the interested party to provide any identifiers data which he used on these platforms during the last five of the date submission of the application".
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that the form "will be submitted electronically through an encrypted link to the competent Department".
Please note that some Russian hackers had managed to penetrate the Foreign Office system, 2014 and 2016, at the Office of the Inspector General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (OIG).
The Foreign Ministry estimates that the revised visa procedure will affect about 710.000 applicants trying to enter the US.
Of course we do not know if the new measures will deter those who want to travel to the US. What is certain is that the United States, stamped by the Foreign Ministry, validates a xenophobic attitude that we tend to see in very authoritarian regimes.
