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What of those who have virtually no footprint?

Almost the only thing I have is LinkedIn, which is always only as up to date as the last time I changed jobs, which I don't do often.

No Facebook, insta, snap, twitter, tiktok. I subscribe to maybe five channels on YouTube.

My HN account isn't linked to my main 'identity' email address so I could hide it just by having a clean phone (which I do for international travel anyway).

I feel like I'd be suspicious due to the lack of traceability. I've had work colleagues say that they couldn't find a trace of me online (although that was a while ago now, and not colleagues who are adept at online sleuthing).

My age may be just enough to be believably not terminally online.





> What of those who have virtually no footprint?

Those people wouldn't want to travel to a police state anyway.


Some people have to travel for work. For Canadians, lots of international flights connect through the US (especially if you're flying on the cheapest routes), and there's no way to transit through without "properly" entering the country. While the thing in the post doesn't yet apply to Canada (due to us not requiring an ESTA), it very well could become a thing soon. That would be pretty awful for everyone.

Does any country require you to have entry rights for a layover?

US does. You have to clear immigration, exit the terminal and then come back into the terminal just like a local passenger.

This is literally a data collection scam run by US intel / law enforcement to collect biometrics with some “plausible” reason. Now it’s a chance to grab your passwords and private conversations too. Act accordingly,

But they might have to.

I’m on the same boat and told management at work that I won’t be traveling to the US while Trump is in power, which they seem to be fine with, but who knows if that’ll last.


> Those people wouldn't want to travel to a police state anyway.

I fall into this camp (little to no social media besides LinkedIn) and I've had no issues traveling to the EU or UK or really any other police state for that matter. Plan to do more this upcoming year.


Wouldn't an HN account need to be mentioned, once this platform is made visible enough, so that the bozos in charge, in the US, take it seriously? A social media ICE would love to dig into such.

I don’t consider hacker news to be social media… And I wouldn’t expect others to, either.

For what it's worth, HN is on ICE's list of surveilled sites (which it pays a tech contractor to crawl),

https://www.404media.co/the-200-sites-an-ice-surveillance-co... ("The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring")

https://archive.is/Lldzh


Here's the actual list from the article for anyone like me (404media has paywall and archive.is doesn't work from Baltics):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VyAaJaWCutyJyMiTXuDH...


I'd bet the actual list of surveilled sites is far longer, and actually kept secret.

Why not? Anything where user interaction is a primary portion of the site's content is social media. The term "social media" predates algorithmically-driven parasocial feeds, though it does postdate things like BBSes and PHPBB.

If you have advocated for Linux you must be a communist....

"It warns that if any social media information is not listed, it could lead to both current and future visas being denied."

Then just say that. Customs has some list that's automatically generated based on a Google search or something like that, and all they're doing is trying to catch you lying. Like the TSA, this screening is done by the lowest common denominator of government employee to catch the lowest common denominator of terrorist or foreign subversive.

> to catch the lowest common denominator of terrorist or foreign subversive

My guess from the outside, is that none of these actions are actually meant to "capture" or even "detect" any of those things, the methods are likely to inefficient and small to be able to do so.

What they're trying to do, is make those people not even consider going to the US in the first place, because they're scared of getting caught. Same as a lot of the ICE actions and other things going on. They're not meant to be efficiently solving some concrete issue with their action, they're meant to scare the rest of the populace into being docile and accepting more and more control over time.


They have managed to scare me off at least. So I will spend my money elsewhere.

Same here, have had to cancel meetings, conferences, events and more because me and others don't feel like taking the risk of ending up in a detention center and sent to a foreign country. I'm guessing all of this is working exactly as they intended it to work.

Good thing international tourism counts for only about half of a percent of U.S. GDP: https://wttc.org/news/us-economy-set-to-lose-12-5bn-in-inter...

Right on, who needs those puny half percents or the jobs related to them, when we have megacorps covering for the rest of the gdp (and exporting it to Cayman).

A lot of things will be harder for the US to do if everyone in the world hates us. Letting people come here and see that most Americans aren't monsters pays dividends beyond the dollars they spend.

The Trump Administrations actions read like a checklist of things you'd do if you wanted to destroy the US's power to protect itself and its allies and promote the well-being of its people.


> Letting people come here and see that most Americans aren't monsters pays dividends beyond the dollars they spend.

40% of the population still support Trump.

If you have 10 friends and ask them where they want to meet for dinner and 6 say let’s go to a Mexican restaurant and the other 4 say “let’s kill Bob and eat him”, you still need to be concerned about your friend group.


Most of his major policies have approval ratings above 50% https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HHP... (page 23)

53% think he’s doing a better job than Biden (page 18)

His approval rating in his second term is tracking about the same or a bit higher than Obama’s at the same time: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/trump-obama-...


Are you looking at the article you linked to? The Harvard survey says:

- 39% say the country is on the right track

- 36% say the economy is good

- 53% say the economy is weak

- 33% say their personal outlook is improving.

In the survey the only one that reaches 50% are about “values”

A senile old man during better than another senile old man is not exactly a raving endorsement.


Did you look at page 23, which I cited? “Use the National Guard and active-duty military to police American cities and stop crime and disorder” is at 51% and it goes up from there. “Using the U.S. military to target cartel drug smugglers in Latin America” is at 58%. “ Closing the border with added security and policies that discourage illegal crossings” is at 70%.

Yes, people are upset the economy. But I assume the people complaining about “fascism” on here are upset about Trump’s “values,” which, as you note is at 50%, not his failure to meet his stupid promise to turn back the last few years of inflation.


Of course, because Trump is being very careful to target just enough cities with the national guard that didn’t vote for him and most of his voters in red states don’t travel especially to those cities.

What do you think the percentage of people would be in favor of using the national guard would be if they were deployed to rural America to stop the meth problem or they were deployed to Memphis, Houston, anywhere in Mississippi and Alabama?

Don’t you find it surprising that you don’t have the same type of ICE raids targeting the red border states but you have them targeting blue cities?

Why is Trump going to war with Venezuela instead of Mexico and Colombia where the drugs actually are? It’s all optics and meant not to upset his base.

Right now, for instance he is trying to pay off his “socialism bad” base of farmers - who he never targets with ICE raids - who are hurting because of his tarriffs.


he already deployed them in memphis. they are doing ICE raids in red states. they are doing them on farms, too.

https://stateline.org/2025/11/21/trump-allows-more-foreign-a...

And most of his ICE raids on farms were in blue states where he could care less about farmers since because of the electoral college, there votes don’t matter.

https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/11/immigration-californi...

As far as Memphis, the rest of mostly Red Tenessee could care less what happens to black people in Memphis. He was invited in by the governor to save face.

On the other hand, if you expect me to argue that most of America gives two shits about what happens to minorities, you are arguing with the wrong person.

Of course as someone who sees a minority every time he looks into the mirror and he whose still living parents grew up in the segregationist south, I have never had any illusions about the US.

I’ve been able to navigate it quite successfully though


Who said I visit US for tourism?

No it’s meant to make sure you don’t say mean things about people Trump likes.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/15/state-department-vi...


How could this be weaponised against someone you don't like?

How easy is it to set up a <any social network> account under someone else's name, post a bunch of inflammatory opinions, AI some photos of them at a Free Palestine rally, and then sit back and await the inevitable border crossing horror story?

Mental note: Research yourself (and your traveling companions) thoroughly before visiting the US.


Yes, significant potential for such mischief with this system.



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