The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a rule that should have sent shock waves through every newsroom in the country: visitors entering the United States under visa-waiver programs may soon be required to hand over five years of their social-media history before boarding a plane. No context, no criminal suspicion, no triggering event, just a mandatory reveal of your digital life, tied directly to your passport.
On paper, the justification looks familiar. DHS presents the change as a security upgrade, a harmless modernization of screening tools to help identify threats. They repeat the same vocabulary Americans have been conditioned to accept for nearly twenty-five years: risk assessment, extremist detection, foreign influence, and national security, the same language now used to justify everything from online censorship programs to federal ‘misinformation’ monitoring teams.
The phrases sound responsible until you remember that the people most capable of harming the United States do not use traceable social-media accounts under their own names, and never will. The only individuals who will comply are ordinary travelers, the exact population governments always survey first, because they won’t fight back.
The United States is building the skeleton of a social-credit system, one that looks different from China’s on the surface but functions with the same relentless logic: link identity to digital behavior, evaluate individuals not by what they do but by what they have said, and create a permanent record that can be used to grant or deny access.
China didn’t begin with “social credit.” It began with real-name online registration, mandatory platform disclosure, automated behavioral analysis, and the normalization of state-monitored digital footprints. America is following the same path, only faster, and with more sophisticated technology and far fewer safeguards at its disposal. Because, unlike China, America has no legal framework at all to limit algorithmic judgment. Once the system exists, nothing restrains how far it expands.
There is a reason nearly every modern surveillance expansion starts with travelers, not citizens. The border is the one place where constitutional protections thin out, where courts almost always defer to executive power, and where the American public feels the least obligation to defend individual rights. A tourist from Belgium or Australia cannot vote, cannot call a senator, cannot challenge DHS in federal court, and cannot mobilize the media when their data is mishandled or archived without consent. They are the ideal testing ground because they have no political cost.
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