Last Saturday my old Who magazine mate, Shelli-Anne, came for a sleepover with her fella, Gavin. They’ve lived in Los Angeles for 30 years. She runs multiple businesses, he’s a director of photography whose work you’d know.
While Gavin and I were cooking broccoli pasta, he told great stories about singing lakes five hours’ drive from their place, sequoia forests, hikes in Utah. Poured us a wine: “You and Chris should come for a roadie. Use my van.”
Australian travellers could be forced to provide their social media details to US authorities to enter the country.Credit: Getty Images
Um, yes please! It’s nearly 40 years since I was in the States. And the one time before that, I was 12 and we were on a bus tour. So much left to see. Fantastic, said Gavin. Come next May.
My husband was less geed up than me at the idea of a cool van holiday. The exchange rate, the investing of time and money in a place where you can’t get an abortion everywhere but you can get a gun.
Plus, he said, there’s the stories about tourists turned away on arrival or detained without explanation. What if that happened?
Paranoia, I thought. We’re white middle-class, middle-aged Australians. Nothing more dangerous to declare than a Frosty Fruit habit and the collecting of calendars with firemen holding puppies.
Now, a week on, the van trip is in peril thanks to a proposal from the Trump administration that could lead to travellers to the US asked to provide up to five years’ of their social media posts before entering the country.
Under the plan, anyone applying through the Electronic System for Travel Authorisation would have to cough up their social media history, plus old phone numbers, email addresses and information about family members.
Look, I get it. Nobody wants baddies swanning unchecked across borders. Security matters. But requiring people to hand over their digital past feels not just invasive but wildly optimistic about how stupid villains are.
I’m not convinced too many criminal masterminds post nefarious plans via TikTok reels or that extremist groups work by pinning mood boards on Pinterest, although I’d be interested in seeing them.
A terrific Insta post this week from an account called shebangwoman got more than 200,000 likes for showing the woman thinking about what hackers demanding $20,000 not to leak the photos on her phone would find.
Her photos? Dogs. Snaps of random ingredients. Car park signs. More dogs. More ingredients. More car park signs. So fabulous and so true.
I feel that’s all of us with this new proposal. The border patrol algorithm/goons would spend forever combing shots of Chadstone, groodles and midweek pasta recipes that have never been made.
Imagine being grilled by a bloke scrolling your feed: “Ma’am, explain this 2021 photo where you’re wearing knickerbockers and holding a cocktail bigger than your head.” “Why did you post 16 perimenopause memes in one month?” “What is it with you and pashing in pools?”
It’s a massive time-waster. And it’s a fishing expedition that hands huge power to whomever or whatever is interpreting the “red flags” of ordinary people’s online mundanity.
The part that both delights me and puts a dampener on my lovely van holiday is that my husband is Nostradamus-adjacent. He was right.
Nothing is clear. Do they tell you beforehand if they don’t like the cut of your social jib? Or do they keep you hanging, then on landing at LAX, frog-march you into a basement to justify a post about coriander?
This uncertainty is why I’m hesitating now. The van’s waiting, Gav’s mapped out a route, but I’m wondering if the shots of Chris mixing our homemade mozzie spray in a bucket in the kitchen might set off alarms.
Because everyone knows border control is not where you want suspense.
It’s a strange old time when a country that once symbolised freedom and the open road wants to poke through your posts.
I’d still love to go back to the US one day. But next May? Nah. I’m not risking the holiday being derailed because my 2021 Twitter scrap with a random about Die Hard being a Christmas movie is subversive.
Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.
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