The unlikely part is not that the US government agencies could get the private messages, it's that they'd jeopardize the whole system by letting regular border officers use it directly (instead of, for example, data-mining and send out no-entry-lists) and show proof of its existence to (foreign!) citizens.
I mean, I don't know why Snowden bothered to leak the info, if they're just telling any 18-year-old German girl about it.
To be fair, the NSA outcry was largely over the scale of the monitoring and the lack of warrants. However that doesn't mean that (other) government organisations couldn't approach Facebook with a warrant and request specific data, such as private messages from a suspect.
Assuming for the moment that this story did happen exactly as we're lead to believe (and I'm only making that assumption for the sake of playing devils advocate - I'm firmly on the fence with this story due to how sketchy the details are), then it would be very easy for the NSA to cover up how they had such data: "We'd been investigating her for a few weeks - here's a warrant"
I doubt they would even need a warrant, I expect facebook will roll over for even an administrative subpoena (which are signed by clerks of the court rather than judges and are essentially pro forma).
The real reason it seems unlikely is not about whether they were able to access Facebook messages (though the scope of PRISM is still unclear). It is more that it seems unlikely the NSA or other groups who may be able to get access to private messages care about German teenagers attempting to work in America. Alternative explanations (they got it from the host family, it was actually public, etc.) + vague reporting is just much more probable.
> It is more that it seems unlikely the NSA or other groups who may be able to get access to private messages care about German teenagers attempting to work in America.
Playing devils advocate here; there maybe more to this teenager than we're aware of. She might be an active protester or have left vocal remarks on other locations online that triggered closer inspection.
I'm not trying to say that your explanations are wrong or less plausible though, just that assumptions are being made on both sides of the argument.
Certainly a possibility. But the assumption that she was a person of interest to intelligence agencies is much greater than the assumption that the newspaper report is either misleading or being misinterpreted.
I expect we will learn that the NSA turned their eye of sauron on occupy protestors, if not within the US then certainly on protestors outside of the US. If this young woman had any involvement with the protests she could well have ended up on a list of those that are regularly monitored.
I'm not saying that is what happened, there are other plausible explanations too. I am just saying that such a scenario is entirely plausible.
We already know that the NSA has access to information specifically requested by an individual either by showing probable cause if they are a U.S. citizen or using some other specific request if they aren't.
It doesn't seem likely a low level border agent would have access to this. If this is standard operating procedure, don't you think we would have heard about it from other people who were presented with printouts of their facebook messages when arriving at the border?
Or more likely, this is FUD that leaves out specific facts (border agents don't have broad access to facebook messages) to give the impression it is linked to a big trending news story.
they didn't have access to all private messages from Facebook and I doubt the turnaround time would have been fast enough to retrieve messages at customs.
