The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has approved a request by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to require all individuals applying for or associated with applications for US visas, visa-free entry, residency, or citizenship to identify all social media accounts they have used in the last five years.

The new “generic clearance” approved by OMB spares USCIS from having to justify the purpose, relevance, and legality of demanding social media account information separately for each USCIS form or web page on which this information is demanded.

This approval by the current White House expands on the demand for social media identifiers first approved by OMB as one of the last actions of the Obama Administration.

Along with some other agencies, USCIS has adopted a new format for its analysis and response to comments on its regulatory proposals. The summary of comments appears to have been generated by an artificial intelligence chatbot. Unlike previous responses to comments that typically ignored or distorted many of the objections to agency proposals, the summary provided by USCIS to OMB is surprisingly accurate and complete. But rather than actually responding to the objections raised by the Identity Project and others, USCIS simply regurgitates a summary of its original claims about the proposal.

For example, in response to comments pointing out that collection of social media postings violates the Privacy Act’s prohibition on collection of information about acts protected by the First Amendment without explicit statutory authorization, USCIS merely repeats the conclusionary claim that, “Consistent with the requirements of the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a(e)(7)), DHS does not maintain records ‘describing how any [citizen of the United States or alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence] exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, unless expressly authorized by statute or by the individual about whom the record is maintained or unless pertinent to and within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity.'” There’s no meaningful engagement with the comments or explanation of the basis for claiming that postings on social media aren’t protected by the First Amendment or that collecting this information is expressly authorized by any statute — which it isn’t.

The USCIS summary acknowledges our comments that social media surveillance violates US obligations pursuant to international human rights treaties. But in response, USCIS merely summarizes the statutes it claims implicitly authorize these actions — which of course says nothing about whether those statutes comport with US treaty obligations.

The response to comments also repeats the false and conclusionary claim that that, “Social media involves publicly available information that is accessible to anyone without a warrant”, even though in fact the identification of an individual with an anonymous or pseudonymous social media account isn’t otherwise accessible without a warrant.

We urge other countries not to follow this bad example of the US government.