U.S. proposal to collect travelers' passwords alarms privacy experts

To better vet foreign travelers, the U.S. might demand that some visa applicants hand over the passwords to their social media accounts, a proposal that’s alarming privacy experts.

“If they don’t want to give us the information, then they don’t come,” said John Kelly, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday.

Kelly mentioned the proposal in a congressional hearing when he was asked what his department was doing to look at visa applicants’ social media activity.

He said it was “very hard to truly vet” the visa applicants from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the Trump administration's travel ban, which is now in legal limbo. Many of the countries are failed states with little internal infrastructure, he said.

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