If elected, Clinton said, she would increase social-media surveillance.
CLINTON CALLS ON TECH COMPANIES TO FIGHT ISIS PROPAGANDA
The Democratic candidate says the U.S. needs an “intelligence surge”—and she wants Silicon Valley’s help.
BY
MAYA KOSOFF
JUNE 14, 2016 8:48 AM
From Getty Images.
In the wake of a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 50 dead on Sunday, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is urging tech companies to combat extremist propaganda from the likes of ISIS online.
“As president, I will work with our great tech companies from Silicon Valley to Boston to step up our game,” Clinton said in a speech in Cleveland Monday. She did not offer specifics. “We have to [do] a better job intercepting ISIS’s communications, tracking and analyzing social-media posts, and mapping jihadist networks, as well as promoting credible voices who can provide alternatives to radicalization.” If elected, Clinton said, she would partner with tech companies to increase their counter-terrorism measures, including increased social-media surveillance.
“We already know we need more resources for this fight. The professionals who keep us safe would be the first to say we need better intelligence to discover and disrupt terrorist plots before they can be carried out,” Clinton said. “That’s why I’ve proposed an ‘intelligence surge’ to bolster our capabilities across the board, with appropriate safeguards here at home.”
It’s still unclear how closely the gunman who carried out the Orlando massacre, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, was tied to religious extremism or the Islamic State—witnesses to the terrorist attack report that in a 911 call, Mateen pledged his allegiance to the Islamic extremist network—though F.B.I. director James Comey has said the F.B.I. is "highly confident that this killer was radicalized, and at least in some part through the Internet." (Other people who knew Mateen have said he previously attended the gay nightclub that he later attacked, and that he had used gay dating and chat apps, suggesting self-hate, too, may have been a motivating factor.)
Already, tech companies like Facebook have voluntarily stepped up to add counter-terrorism tools. Silicon Valley companies have met with U.S. spy agencies to discuss ways to assist the government in combatting terrorism online. And Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have agreed to work with the European Union to identify and combat hate speech online. The problem these companies face is that they often heavily rely on users submitting and flagging material. If companies start taking down users’ posts themselves, they run the risk of being seen as self-censoring.
Tech companies are also walking a fine line between aiding the government and implementing privacy technologies that could thwart law-enforcement efforts—an issue that has divided consumers. While it’s not clear whether Mateen used encrypted-messaging services to communicate his intentions prior to his attack Sunday, the use of encryption technology has been controversial in Silicon Valley. Apple found itself in a public, dragged-out dispute with the F.B.I. earlier this year when a federal judge issued a court order that would require Apple to allow the F.B.I. to access encrypted data on an iPhone 5C used by one of the shooters in last year’s San Bernardino terrorist attack.
At the time, Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and Clinton’s primary opponent, called for a boycott against Apple and argued in favor of the United States closing off parts of the Internet to prevent extremist propaganda online. Clinton, however, has not called for blocking content online.
