Top White House officials, along with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, are meeting Friday afternoon with tech officials from Silicon Valley on ways to disrupt the Islamic State’s activities.
The White House was tight-lipped on whether it is asking for specific assistance in cracking terrorists’ use of mobile encryption apps, or asking social media sites such as Twitter to do a better job at shutting down users who try to recruit and radicalize jihadists through their posts.
The goal of the meeting is “to work more closely with the technology community to fight terrorism,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.
“I do think there is an opportunity for there to be a robust discussion about ways we can make it harder for terrorists to leverage the Internet to recruit, radicalize and mobilize supporters to carry out acts of violence,” he said.
Given the way technology works today, Earnest added, “we can have a discussion about ways to create, publish and amplify content from credible sources that counteracts the radicalizing messaging from ISIL and other extremists.”
“There surely are ways that we can disrupt paths to radicalization, to identify recruitment patterns and to provide metrics that allow us to measure the success of our counter radicalization efforts,” he said.
The meeting is being held in Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area, and some officials are teleconferencing in from Washington.
Earnest noted that White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; Lisa Monaco, the president’s top counterterrorism adviser; and Megan Smith, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer are participating, along with other senior national security officials.
The National Security Council on Friday announced new initiatives to improve international and domestic efforts to counter violent extremism, including a joint effort by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to establish the Countering Extremism Task Force, a new organization that aims to “integrate and harmonize” counterterrorism efforts.
The State Department will establish a Global Engagement Center to allow national security officials to intensify their focus on “empowering and enabling the voices of international partners, governmental and non-governmental, and shift away from direct messaging.”
The gathering with tech firms is taking place just hours after the FBI announced the arrests of two radicalized Iraqi natives living in the United States and federal authorities confirmed that a self-described jihadist confessed to shooting a cop seated in his patrol car in Philadelphia Thursday in the name of Islam.
Apple, Facebook and Twitter told USA Today they would have representatives at the meeting. Other possible attendees include Google, YouTube, Dropbox and Microsoft.
Twitter has faced increasing scrutiny over the last year over its failure to swiftly respond to extremists’ use of the social media platform to incite violence and attacks.
FBI Director James Comey last fall issued a detailed warning about Twitter’s terrorism problem before a Senate Judiciary Committee. Comey said the Islamic State is routinely and easily using Twitter and mobile-encryption applications to recruit tens of thousands of new followers and issue kill orders to them.
The Islamic State, Comey said, is a nimble, social media-savvy foe that uses Twitter as its go-to propaganda platform to incite jihad in Syria, Iraq, Africa, Europe and the United States.
“ISIL is totally different,” he said, referring to another name for the Islamic State. “ISIL is reaching out primarily through Twitter to about 21,000-now English language followers.”
“There’s a group of tweeters in Syria, and their message is two-pronged: Come to the so-called caliphate and live the life of some sort of glory or something, and if you can’t come, kill somebody where you are. Kill somebody in uniform, kill anybody, if you can cut their head off, great. Videotape it. Do it, do it, do it,” he said.
Comey also issued a dire warning about federal authorities’ inability to penetrate the dark world of terrorists mobile communications because they cannot crack the encrypted applications, many of which are developed by Silicon Valley companies.
