The CPB wet dreams | Jay Latta | 21 comments

The US just crossed a line and most people haven’t even noticed yet. CBP wants visa-waiver travelers (yes, Europeans, Japanese, Aussies, Israelis - all of us) to hand over five years of social-media history. Not optional. Mandatory. Plus every phone number and email you’ve used in the last five to ten years. Private, work, all of it. Names, numbers, birthdays, birthplaces of close family. Biometrics. And the ESTA? App-only, no website, no alternative. This isn’t “border security.” This is a dragnet. And it’s retroactive. A US immigration lawyer already called it a paradigm shift: from verifying facts to hunting opinions. Think about that. They’re not just checking who you are… they’re scanning what you think, what you say, who you talk to. Five years back. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warns it straight: this chills speech, crushes privacy, and hits innocent people first. But sure, let’s pretend this is normal. My own ESTA was already revoked, no explanation, no appeal. With this new CBP plan, I’m basically done. The moment this goes live, people like me are finished with the US unless we hand over an encyclopedic dossier of our digital lives. Even if the orange POTUS vanishes, the machinery he built will still be there, humming along, expanding, tightening. Bureaucratic authoritarianism with a friendly UI. To all my US friends: if you want to see me, 𝐡𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐛𝐢, 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐃𝐮𝐛𝐚𝐢. Because US America is building a digital checkpoint that makes visiting feel like onboarding into a surveillance program. And the wild part? This could be implemented as early as spring 2026. Europeans are asleep on this. Most media won’t touch it. But the implications are massive: tourism drop, business friction, political fallout, civil-rights erosion… all baked in. Share this. Bookmark it. Talk about it. This is the kind of policy that becomes permanent because nobody screamed early enough. Five years of your digital life for a 90-day vacation. Welcome to the new normal, unless we push back now. | 21 comments on LinkedIn