ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Status: Busted For Green Card Marriage
The Department of Homeland Security has been mining social networks to find fake "green card" marriages between U.S. citizens and immigrants - like the sham marriage between Sen. Harry Reid’s now ex-press secretary Diana Tejada and Lebanese national Bassam Mahmoud Tarhini, who ultimately pleaded guilty to a fraudulent marriage to evade immigration laws and was deported.
Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under a Freedom of Information Act request, “are telling (if not damning) comments on the ways people expose themselves through social media,” reports Social Media & Marketing Daily:
For example: "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 [the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security] to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities." …
While all the techniques described in the memo appear to be legal, EFF points out there is a significant risk for "mission creep" leading agents to begin monitoring other individuals besides the target of the investigation - classic "social surfing" behavior, which acquires rather menacing overtones, however, when it's federal agents doing the idle clicking.
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