Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a rule that should have sent shockwaves through every newsroom in the country: visitors entering the United States under visa-waiver programs may soon be required to hand over five years of their social-media history before boarding a plane. No context, no criminal suspicion, no triggering event, just a mandatory reveal of your digital life, tied directly to your passport.
On paper, the justification looks familiar. DHS presents the change as a security upgrade, a harmless modernization of screening tools to help identify threats. They repeat the same vocabulary Americans have been conditioned to accept for nearly twenty-five years: risk assessment, extremist detection, foreign influence, and national security, the same language now used to justify everything from online censorship programs to federal ‘misinformation’ monitoring teams.
The phrases sound responsible until you remember that the people most capable of harming the United States do not use traceable social-media accounts under their own names, and never will. The only individuals who will comply are ordinary travelers, the exact population governments always survey first, because they won’t fight back.
The truth is simple. This proposal has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with infrastructure. The United States is building the skeleton of a social-credit system, one that looks different from China’s on the surface but functions with the same relentless logic: link identity to digital behavior, evaluate individuals not by what they do but by what they have said, and create a permanent record that can be used to grant or deny access.
China didn’t begin with “social credit.” It began with real-name online registration, mandatory platform disclosure, automated behavioral analysis, and the normalization of state-monitored digital footprints. America is following the same path, only faster, and with more sophisticated technology and far fewer safeguards at its disposal. Because, unlike China, America has no legal framework at all to limit algorithmic judgment. Once the system exists, nothing restrains how far it expands.
There is a reason nearly every modern surveillance expansion starts with travelers, not citizens. The border is the one place where constitutional protections thin out, where courts almost always defer to executive power, and where the American public feels the least obligation to defend individual rights. A tourist from Belgium or Australia cannot vote, cannot call a senator, cannot challenge DHS in federal court, and cannot mobilize the media when their data is mishandled or archived without consent. They are the ideal testing ground because they have no political cost.
Washington has always used travelers as the proving ground for systems it later applies to everyone else. Fingerprinting began at ports of entry and eventually swallowed the entire criminal and civilian identification system. Biometric entry-exit scans were introduced quietly for foreign nationals and are now a routine part of returning home for millions of U.S. citizens. Warrantless device searches were justified as a border-specific power but have steadily drifted inward, shaping domestic law enforcement norms.
REAL ID followed the same script: introduced as an anti-terror upgrade for travel documents, it has slowly morphed into a de facto domestic ID system, expanded through federal pressure and state compliance, even though full enforcement has never formally taken effect. Every one of these expansions was introduced as a measure targeting “others” and ended as a measure governing “all.”
The proposed social-media requirement fits the same pattern. It begins with harmless-seeming travelers who have no political protection and ends with a permanent architecture of behavioral monitoring that will not stop at the airport.
Once Americans accept that the government may inspect and archive the digital history of tourists, the next phase becomes inevitable: the same logic will be applied to anyone who moves through federal systems at all. It starts at the border, then reaches passport renewals, background checks, federal employment, security clearances, certain industries, domestic travel, and finally the everyday movement of citizens. They will never call it social credit. They will call it compliance, screening, safety, responsibility, whatever language keeps the machinery running. The vocabulary will shift, but the intention will not.
Both political tribes are already doing their part to normalize the idea. The American Left frames digital surveillance as a public-health measure against misinformation, hate speech, and online extremism. The American Right frames it as a national-security necessity to identify radicals, hostile foreign actors, and ideological threats to the homeland. The rhetoric is different, but the mechanism is identical: your digital behavior becomes a government metric. The two sides of the coin argue with each other, but the coin itself never leaves DHS’s pocket.
And the examples proving where this is headed are already visible. Federal agencies have spent years developing automated models that evaluate travelers by analyzing patterns like movement history, purchasing behavior, prior associations, and communication trails. These systems already generate quiet internal “risk scores” that affect everything from screening intensity to detainment decisions.
Social-media history is the missing component that turns those models from logistical tools into behavioral judgments. Once a traveler’s political commentary, religious views, or personal disputes enter the same data stream as their travel logs and background checks, the United States will possess a digital profile more intimate than anything a human interrogation could reveal.
The threat isn’t what this rule does today. It’s what it makes possible tomorrow, at a moment when trust in institutions is collapsing, censorship is rising, and governments are increasingly intolerant of dissent. America is not drifting toward China. It is building its own version, one optimized not for collectivism but for compliance, one enforced not by a party but by an unaccountable digital bureaucracy that evaluates citizens with stunning precision.
And once that door opens, it no longer matters who holds office. The machinery will exist. A nation built on God-given rights cannot survive a system that ranks individuals by ideological acceptability. The moment the state decides that your beliefs, your associations, or your words determine your access to ordinary life, the Constitution becomes decoration. The danger is not the airport; it is the principle that the government may weigh your worth before granting you freedom of movement. That principle, once accepted, does not retreat.
The government’s motivations do not matter. The Left’s fears and the Right’s fears do not matter. The slogans they use to justify the tool do not matter. What matters is that once a system exists to judge people by their past words, the only question left is: who gets judged next?
Both sides tell the same story. But the people holding the power are never the ones being evaluated.
