Not every decision is going to be entirely rational, especially when it comes to giant corporations with thousands of stakeholders and various internal incentives that may not be visible to outside observers.
E.g., sometimes companies do stuff simply because it's helpful for someone's upcoming performance review. Apple probably has a team responsible for trademark protection and these people have to regularly demonstrate activity to justify the budgets.
Do the intelligence agencies actually agree on this as unanimously as you're saying? Here's a quote from the testimony of James Clapper on Russia/Wikileaks connection:
That was from a month and a half ago. It seems more likely that he's changed his mind or seen new information than that the DHS and FBI are putting out joint press releases that contradict the beliefs of the DNI, but who knows, maybe the DHS/FBI leadership is involved in some kind of squabble with Clapper or something....?
What's the inverse of this? "If we cut welfare, the homeless will go somewhere else." Seems legit, but not everyone thinks it's right to export your problems like that. Especially when your problems are poor, sick human beings.
Some people see a system that attracts the poor and the sick as, if not a fait accompli, at least a damn good start. Now we could talk about the problems SF has with paying for everything, but that's the opposite of homelessness.
"reading" doesn't necessarily have to be done by a human. As PRISM has shown, the government has capabilities we weren't aware (or at least sure) of. Would it be that ridiculous that they would have algorithmic scrapers running through all the FB data they have available? They say they aren't, but they've already proven we can't trust them farther than we can throw them. Even if they aren't, she's a foreign national, who they have almost no restrictions on investigating, so they may have been "reading" her messages, even if those of US citizens were left intact (which I personally doubt).
Long story short, it wouldn't necessarily waste much time to go through her records, and it would probably be completely legal.
The part that seems unlikely to me is that they would show their hand by using PRISM for such a small thing, unless there is some bigger reason they want her out of the country. It's hardly a sure argument, though.
Even if there is a bigger reason for wanting her out, there is no reason for them to expose PRISM that way. Immigration officers already have rights to deny anyone without explanation.
I just don't find anything about that article logical.
This particular case, if true, may have nothing to do with PRISM. A simple search of communications between the person and only her US contacts would probably result in a small amount of data to search, which could probably be obtained by DHS or CBP via the providers directly.
I disagree, It's already well documented how the US government follows social networks and decline people entry over comments made[1].
Where this case differs is that the comments were over private messages - which means that the intel would have been collated covertly. So the real question is whether this is another piece of the PRISM jigsaw or just a sensationalist article cashing in on the hysteria that the NSA leaks have generated.
Schmidt already tried telling people this would happen:
"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
Instead of praising him for honesty, people started taking his quote out of context. "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."
