Tech CEOs to Meet With White House Officials on Combating Terrorism

The United States government officials and intelligence authorities will meet executives from top Silicon Valley companies on Friday to discuss ways to restrict the use of social media by militant groups, Reuters reported.

The White House hopes a Friday summit between senior government officials and Silicon Valley tech leaders will find common ground on ways to work together to combat extremism and radicalization.

Leaders at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and Twitter will be meeting with federal law enforcement officials such as Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, the Journal said.

On this front, the agenda doesn’t contain the word encryption but says: “How can we make it harder for terrorists to use the internet to mobilize, facilitate, and operationalize attacks, and make it easier for law enforcement and the intelligence community to identify terrorist operatives and prevent attacks?”

The officials look at this as a session to learn how they could use technology to disrupt the paths to violence and radicalization as well as identify the patterns of recruitment and to measure efforts to countering all radicalization. Along with the social media purveyors, software and storage providers Microsoft and Dropbox are also expected to attend.

Indeed much of the White House’s focus may actually be upon the issue of encryption online and on devices.

But those same firms are often reluctant to appear too cozy with government investigators a concern that grew after Edward Snowden disclosed wide government surveillance. Facebook has been the most aggressive in this area, adopting a zero tolerance policy that calls for removing posts related to terrorist organizations. Indeed, Comey’s participation in the meeting was conditioned on encryption being on the agenda, an official said.

The talks come amid mounting frustration in Washington that the Islamic State group, Al-Qaeda and other groups have been able to use publicly available technology to build their influence and hide their activities from even the most advanced USA intelligence operations. Twitter, on the other hand, revised its abuse policy past year to remove tweets that are “threatening or promoting terrorism”.

In Congress, lawmakers have introduced legislation requiring social media companies to report online to law enforcement any terrorist activity they detect, such as planning, recruiting or distribution of terrorist material.