Tag Archives: visa

Mozilla, wolfSSL, Work

a US visa in 937 days

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Here’s the complete timeline of events. From my first denial to travel to the US until I eventually received a tourist visa. And then I can’t go anyway.

December 5-11, 2016

I spent a week on Hawaii with Mozilla – my employer at the time. This was my 12th visit to the US over a period of 19 years. I went there on ESTA, the visa waiver program Swedish citizens can use. I’ve used it many times, there was nothing special this time. The typical procedure with ESTA is that we apply online: fill in a form, pay a 14 USD fee and get a confirmation within a few days that we’re good to go.

I took this photo at the hotel we stayed at during the Mozilla all-hands on Hawaii 2016.

June 26, 2017

In the early morning one day by the check-in counter at Arlanda airport in Sweden, I was refused to board my flight. Completely unexpected and out of the blue! I thought I was going to San Francisco via London with British Airways, but instead I had to turn around and go back home – slightly shocked. According to the lady behind the counter there was “something wrong with my ESTA”. I used the same ESTA and passport as I used just fine back in December 2016. They’re made to last two years and it had not expired.

Tweeted by me, minutes after being stopped at Arlanda.

People engaged by Mozilla to help us out could not figure out or get answers about what the problem was (questions and investigations were attempted both in the US and in Sweden), so we put our hopes on that it was a human mistake somewhere and decided to just try again next time.

April 3, 2018

I missed the following meeting (in December 2017) for other reasons but in the summer of 2018 another Mozilla all-hands meeting was coming up (in Texas, USA this time) so I went ahead and applied for a new ESTA in good time before the event – as I was a bit afraid there was going to be problems. I was right and I got denied ESTA very quickly. “Travel Not Authorized”.

Rejected from the ESTA program.

Day 0 – April 17, 2018

Gaaah. It meant it was no mistake last year, they actually mean this. I switched approach and instead applied for a tourist visa. I paid 160 USD, filled in a ridiculous amount of information about me and my past travels over the last 15 years and I visited the US embassy for an in-person interview and fingerprinting.

This is day 0 in the visa process, 296 days after I was first stopped at Arlanda.

Day 90 – July 2018

I missed the all-hands meeting in San Francisco when I didn’t get the visa in time.

Day 240 – December 2018

I quit Mozilla, so I then had no more reasons to go to their company all-hands…

Day 365 – April 2019

A year passed. “someone is working on it” the embassy email person claimed when I asked about progress.

Day 651- January 28, 2020

I emailed the embassy to query about the process

Screenshotted email

The reply came back quickly:

Dear Sir,

All applications are processed in the most expeditious manner possible. While we understand your frustration, we are required to follow immigration law regarding visa issuances. This process cannot be expedited or circumvented. Rest assured that we will contact you as soon as the administrative processing is concluded.

Day 730 – April 2020

Another year had passed and I had given up all hope. Now it turned into a betting game and science project. How long can they actually drag out this process without saying either yes or no?

Day 871 – September 3, 2020

A friend of mine, a US citizen, contacted his Congressman – Gerry Connolly – about my situation and asked for help. His office then subsequently sent a question to the US embassy in Stockholm asking about my case. While the response that arrived on September 17 was rather negative…

your case is currently undergoing necessary administrative processing and regrettably it is not possible to predict when this processing will be completed.

… I think the following turn of events indicates it had an effect. It unclogged something.

Day 889 – September 22, 2020

After 889 days since my interview on the embassy (only five days after the answer to the congressman), the embassy contacted me over email. For the first time since that April day in 2018.

Your visa application is still in administrative processing. However, we regret to inform you that because you have missed your travel plans, we will require updated travel plans from you.

My travel plans – that had been out of date for the last 800 days or so – suddenly needed to be updated! As I was already so long into this process and since I feared that giving up now would force me back to square one if I would stop now and re-attempt this again at a later time, I decided to arrange myself some updated travel plans. After all, I work for an American company and I have a friend or two there.

Day 900 – October 2, 2020

I replied to the call for travel plan details with an official invitation letter attached, inviting me to go visit my colleagues at wolfSSL signed by our CEO, Larry. I really want to do this at some point, as I’ve never met most of them so it wasn’t a made up reason. I could possibly even get some other friends to invite me to get the process going but I figured this invite should be enough to keep the ball rolling.

Day 910 – October 13, 2020

I got another email. Now at 910 days since the interview. The embassy asked for my passport “for further processing”.

Day 913 – October 16, 2020

I posted my passport to the US embassy in Stockholm. I also ordered and paid for “return postage” as instructed so that they would ship it back to me in a safe way.

Day 934 – November 6, 2020

At 10:30 in the morning my phone lit up and showed me a text telling me that there’s an incoming parcel being delivered to me, shipped from “the Embassy of the United State” (bonus points for the typo).

Day 937 – November 9, 2020

I received my passport. Inside, there’s a US visa that is valid for ten years, until November 2030.

The upper left corner of the visa page in my passport…

As a bonus, the visa also comes with a NIE (National Interest
Exception) that allows me a single entry to the US during the PP (Presidential Proclamations) – which is restricting travels to the US from the European Schengen zone. In other words: I am actually allowed to travel right away!

The timing is fascinating. The last time I was in the US, Trump hadn’t taken office yet and I get the approved visa in my hands just days after Biden has been announced as the next president of the US.

Will I travel?

Covid-19 is still over us and there’s no end in sight of the pandemic. I will of course not travel to the US or any other country until it can be deemed safe and sensible.

When the pandemic is under control and traveling becomes viable, I am sure there will be opportunities. Hopefully the situation will improve before the visa expires.

Thanks to

All my family and friends, in the US and elsewhere who have supported me and cheered me up through this entire process. Thanks for keeping inviting me to fun things in the US even though I’ve not been able to participate. Thanks for pushing for events to get organized outside of the US! I’m sorry I’ve missed social gatherings, a friend’s marriage and several conference speaking opportunities. Thanks for all the moral support throughout this long journey of madness.

A special thanks go to David (you know who you are) for contacting Gerry Connolly’s office. I honestly think this was the key event that finally made things move in this process.

Work

Two years in

Neither a visa or a rejection yet, exactly two years since I completed my US visa application. Not a lot more to say that I haven’t already said before on this subject.

Of course I’m not surprised that I won’t get an approval in these travel-restricted Covid-19 times – as it would be a fine irony to get a visa and then not be allowed to travel anyway due to a general travel ban – but it also seems like the US immigration authorities haven’t yet used the pandemic as an excuse to (finally) just deny my application.

I was first prevented from traveling to the US on June 26 2017 (on ESTA) but it wasn’t until the following spring that I applied for a visa in an attempt to rectify the situation.

IT Politics, Work

One year in still no visa

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One year ago today. On the sunny Tuesday of April 17th 2018 I visited the US embassy in Stockholm Sweden and applied for a visa. I’m still waiting for them to respond.

My days-since-my-visa-application counter page is still counting. Technically speaking, I had already applied but that was the day of the actual physical in-person interview that served as the last formal step in the application process. Most people are then getting their visa application confirmed within weeks.

Initially I emailed them a few times after that interview since the process took so long (little did I know back then), but now I haven’t done it for many months. Their last response assured me that they are “working on it”.

Lots of things have happened in my life since last April. I quit my job at Mozilla and started a new job at wolfSSL, again working for a US based company. One that I cannot go visit.

During this year I missed out on a Mozilla all-hands, I’ve been invited to the US several times to talk at conferences that I had to decline and a friend is getting married there this summer and I can’t go. And more.

Going forward I will miss more interesting meetings and speaking opportunities and I have many friends whom I cannot visit. This is a mild blocker to things I would want to do and it is an obstacle to my profession and career.

I guess I might get my rejection notice before my counter reaches two full years, based on stories I’ve heard from other people in similar situations such as mine. I don’t know yet what I’ll do when it eventually happens. I don’t think there are any rules that prevent me from reapplying, other than the fact that I need to pay more money and I can’t think of any particular reason why they would change their minds just by me trying again. I will probably give it a rest a while first.

I’m lucky and fortunate that people and organizations have adopted to my situation – a situation I of course I share with many others so it’s not uniquely mine – so lots of meetings and events have been held outside of the US at least partially to accommodate me. I’m most grateful for this and I understand that at times it won’t work and I then can’t attend. These days most things are at least partly accessible via video streams etc, repairing the harm a little. (And yes, this is a first-world problem and I’m fortunate that I can still travel to most other parts of the world without much trouble.)

Finally: no, I still have no clue as to why they act like this and I don’t have any hope of ever finding out.


Mozilla, Work

administrative purgatory

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 your case is still going through administrative processing and we don’t know when that process will be completed.

Last year I was denied to go to the US when I was about to travel to San Francisco. Me and my employer’s legal team never got answers as to why this happened so I’ve personally tried to convince myself it was all because of some human screw-up. Because why would they suddenly block me? I’ve traveled to the US almost a dozen times over the years.

The fact that there was no reason or explanation given makes any theory as likely as the next. Whatever we think or guess might have happened can be true. Or not. We will probably never know. And I’ve been told a lot of different theories.

Denied again

In early April 2018 I applied for ESTA again to go to San Francisco in mid June for another Mozilla All Hands conference and… got denied. The craziness continues. This also ruled out some of the theories from last year that it was just some human error by the airline or similar…

As seen on the screenshot, this decision has no expire date… While they don’t provide any motivation for not accepting me, this result makes it perfectly clear that it wasn’t just a mistake last year. It makes me view last year with different eyes.

Put in this situation, I activated plan B.

Plan B

I then applied for a “real” non-immigrant visa – even though it feels that having been denied ESTA probably puts me in a disadvantage for that as well. Applying for this visa means filling in a 10-something-page “DS-160” form online on a site that sometimes takes minutes just to display the next page in the form where they ask for a lot of personal details. After finally having conquered that obstacle, I paid the 160 USD fee and scheduled an appointment to appear physically at the US embassy in Sweden.

I acquired an “extraction of the population register” (“personbevis” in Swedish) from the Swedish tax authorities – as required (including personal details of my parents and siblings), I got myself a new mugshot printed on photo paper and was lucky enough to find a date for an appointment not too far into the future.

Appointment

I spent the better part of a fine Tuesday morning in different waiting lines at my local US embassy where I eventually was called up to a man at a counter behind a window. I was fingerprinted, handed over my papers and told the clerk I have no idea why I was denied ESTA when asked, and no, I have not been on vacation in Iraq, Iran or Sudan. The clerk gave me the impression that’s the sort of thing that is the common reason for not getting ESTA.

When I answered the interviewer’s question that I work for Mozilla, he responded “Aha, Firefox?” – which brightened up my moment a little.

Apparently the process is then supposed to take “several weeks” until I get to know anything more. I explained that I needed my passport in three weeks (for another trip) and he said he didn’t expect them to be done that quickly.  Therefore I got the passport back while they process my application and I’m expected to mail it to them when they ask for it.

The next form

When I got back home again, I got an email from “the visa unit” asking me to fill in another form (in the shape of a Word document). And what a form it is! It might be called “OMB 1405-0226” and has this fancy title:

“SUPPLEMENTAL QUESTIONS FOR VISA APPLICANTS”

Among other things it requires me to provide info about all trips abroad (with dates and duration) I’ve done over the last 15 years. What aliases I use on social media sites (hello mr US visa agent, how do you like this post so far?), every physical address I’ve lived at in the last 15 years, information about all my employers the last 15 years and every email address I’ve used during the last 5 years.

It took me many hours digging through old calendars, archives and memories and asking around in order to fill this in properly. (“hey that company trip we did to Germany back in 2005, can you remember the dates?”) As a side-note: it turns out I’ve been in the US no less than nine times the last fifteen years. In total I managed to list sixty-five different trips abroad for this period.

How do I submit my filled-in form, with all these specific and very private details from my life for the last 15 years, back to “the visa unit”? By email. Good old insecure, easy to snoop on, email! At least I’m using my own mail server (and it is configured to prefer TLS for connections) but that’s a small comfort.

Is it worth it?

This is a very time and energy consuming process – I understand why this puts people off and simply make them decide its not worth it to go there. And of course I understand that I’m in a lucky position where I’ve not had to deal with this much in the past.

I have many friends and contacts in the US in both my personal and professional life. I would be sad if I couldn’t go there ever again. It would give me grief personally since it’ll limit where I can go on vacation and who out of my friends I can visit, but it will also limit my professional life as interesting Mozilla, Internet, open source and curl related events that I’d like to attend are frequently hosted there.

What’s happening?

So the weeks came and went and on May 29th,  six weeks after I was interviewed at the embassy, I checked the online service that allows me to check my application progress. It said “Case Created: April 17” and the following useful addition “Case Last Updated: April 17”.

Wat? Did something go fatally wrong here? I emailed the embassy to double-check. I got this single sentence response back:

Dear Sir,

You don't have to do anything, your case is still going through administrative processing and we don't know when that process will be completed.

In my life I’ve visited a whole series of countries for which I’ve been required to apply for a visa. None of them have ever taken more than a few weeks, including countries with complicated bureaucracy like India and China. What are they doing all this time?

At the time of this writing, more than 100 days have passed and I have still not heard back from them. I know this is unusually long and I have a strong suspicion this means they will deny me visa, but for some reason they want to keep me unaware for a while more.

No All Hands in the US

I clearly underestimated the time this required so I missed our meeting in SF this year again…

Mozilla has since then announced that a number of the forthcoming All Hands conferences in the coming years will be held outside of the US. Unfortunately several of them are to be held in Canada, and there are indications that having being denied entry to the US means that Canada will deny me as well. But I have yet to test that!

Why they deny me?

Me knowingly, I’ve never broken a law, rule or regulation that would explain this. Some speculations me and others can think of include…

  1. I’m the main author of curl, a tool that is used in a lot of security research and proof of concept exploits of security vulnerabilities
  2. I’m the main author of libcurl, a transfer library that is one of the world’s most widely used software components. It is subsequently also used extensively by malware and other offensive and undesired software.
  3. I use the name haxx.se domain for many of my sites and email address etc. haxx or hacking could be interpreted by some, not as “To program a computer in a clever, virtuosic, and wizardly manner” but as the act to “gain unauthorized access to data in a system or computer”.
  4. It’s been suggested that my presence at multiple conferences in the US over the years could’ve been a violation of the ESTA rules – but the rules explicitly allow this. I have not violated the ESTA rules.

Administrative Processing

It’s been 102 days now. I’m not optimistic.