https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-foreign-student-visas-hamas
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is launching an AI-fueled “Catch and Revoke” effort to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups, senior State Department officials tell Axios.
Why it matters: The effort — which includes AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts — marks a dramatic escalation in the U.S. government’s policing of foreign nationals’ conduct and speech.
The reviews of social media accounts are particularly looking for evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, officials say.
Officials plan to examine internal databases to see whether any visa holders were arrested but allowed to stay in the country during the Biden administration.
They say they’re also checking news reports of anti-Israel demonstrations and Jewish students’ lawsuits that highlight foreign nationals allegedly engaged in antisemitic activity without consequence. The State Department is working with the departments of Justice and Homeland Security in what one senior State official called a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”
How does an entity like the Trump monarchy US federal government use “AI” to determine which online accounts are your accounts, assuming that you aren’t doing anything illegal per se that can provoke active investigation (CSAM, dealing drugs, etc.)? I see this as certainly an overreach of power and proof that PRISM is never dead.
Obvious identity linking methods I can think of: Voluntarily (or maybe not so voluntarily) submitting your social media handles during the visa application; IP address, email addresses, phone numbers, browser fingerprint consistency between real-name websites (Facebook, LinkedIn, banking, university application platforms) and pseudonymous websites (X, Reddit, 4chan, this forum); hidden backdoors in closed-source OSes like Windows, iOS, where they log all accounts you’ve signed-in to in browsers, link them to the OS account and send the log to government;
What is your opinion on this news?
My online activity habit: Brave browser with the Privacy Guides recommended Shields settings, separation of accounts (irl accounts go to Gmail while pseudonymous ones go to DuckDuckGo Email protection that forwards to Proton Mail; duck.com and proton.me addresses both don’t contain my name), and I always use online SMS services when I need to pass phone verification. Do you think this usage habit is only sufficient to partially defeat commercial tracking, or is it enough to protect me from this government “AI”?