The officials from the US immigration had issued an internal memo which was recently brought out to the public. As per this memo, social networking sites were being used to investigate the visa applicants who were applying for a visa to the United States. This memo was acquired by a digital civil liberties group known as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They had obtained it via a request from the Federal Freedom of Information act.

As per the memo, the officials catered to the public profiles of these people which are uploaded on popular social networking sites. This was being done to check whether or not the visa applications were accurate and does not cater to any for of fraudulence. It has been advised to the employees to become friends with these people so that they could access all the personal information in their profiles.

The memo is printed on the letterhead of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. As per the memo, tendencies that are egoistical in nature tend to bring about an urge to have many friends link to the page. Most of them tend to accept internet friends who they don’t know. This caters to an advantage for the FDNS to watch over the daily lives of these beneficiaries and petitions especially when they are suspected of involvement in forgery.

It has also been suggested that these profiles could also be used to check for information such as the marital status of the applicant. The FDNS is provided with an opportunity to identify for fraud. This could be done by browsing through these social networking sites and finding whether or not these beneficiaries and petitioners are in a relationship which could be considered as being valid.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Facebook are some of the social networking sites which have been mentioned in the memo.