US Border Agency Wants Virtually ALL Data From Travellers
What is now being prepared in the United States would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
The US border authority has published a proposal to massively expand data collection on travellers under the Visa Waiver Program.
This would affect almost all tourists and business travellers worldwide.
In the future, travellers could be forced to disclose their full social media activity from the last 5 years as a mandatory part of the ESTA application. Until now, this information was officially voluntary.
But this is only the beginning.
According to the proposal, applicants may also be required to provide phone numbers used in the last 5 years, email addresses from the last 10 years, IP addresses and photo metadata, full biometric profiles including facial scans, fingerprints, iris data and possibly DNA, as well as detailed data on family members including names, birth dates, birthplaces and addresses.
This means one single travel request could soon expose a person’s entire digital identity, private network, biological identity and family structure to a foreign government.
🔺Through the correlation of your online activity, your onchain behavior and crypto activity can also be inferred, tracked and profiled across multiple systems.
While conservative circles in the US rage about Elon Musk and X being fined over transparency rules and turn it into a fictional attack on freedom, the country itself is quietly transforming into a surveillance state.
Civil rights organizations in the US are warning of a historic breach of privacy. Social media data can reveal political views, personal beliefs, medical conditions, relationships and lifestyle choices.
Biometric data cannot be changed once leaked. Unlike passwords, your face and fingerprints are permanent.
The US government justifies the expansion with national security.
The argument is that more data helps identify terrorism, espionage and fraud risks earlier. Critics counter that this logic turns billions of innocent travellers into permanent surveillance subjects.
The development fits into a broader pattern. Since 2019, the US already requires social media disclosure for many visa categories.
In mid 2025, this was expanded to international students, who must now even make their profiles publicly visible for review.
Just crazy.
Once such extreme systems exist, history shows only one thing. Data collection always grows. Rules never get looser. And the threshold for misuse always drops.
If the United States continues to intervene this aggressively in fundamental privacy rights purely to extract more data, further international isolation of the country will become unavoidable.
Trust is a geopolitical currency. Once it is burned, borders do not close because of wars, they close because systems are no longer seen as legitimate.
Palantir and the authoritarian algorithmic stack are watching.
Welcome to the age where people defend billionaires breaking the law in the countries where they make their money, while your right to travel depends on exposing your entire life.
Some sources in the second tweet;
