|
 White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough led a high-level
government delegation that held talks with representatives from some
of the country's biggest technology companies, including Apple CEO
Tim Cook.
It was the latest effort by the Obama administration to cajole tech
firms to be more cooperative with the intelligence community
following a rift prompted by former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden's disclosures, which detailed government
surveillance.
The talks, at a government complex next to San Jose City Hall, were
described by a senior administration official as a “technological
brainstorming meeting” to look at ways to make it harder for violent
extremists to use the Internet to recruit support or to plan
attacks.
"We explained our policies and how we enforce them - Facebook does
not tolerate terrorists or terror propaganda and we work
aggressively to remove it as soon as we become aware of it," a
Facebook spokesman said after the meeting, which lasted two hours
and 15 minutes.
 Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo and LinkedIn were also planning to
send senior executives as President Barack Obama works to reassure
the public that his administration is succeeding against Islamic
State in the wake of recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino,
California.
A 2015 Brookings Institution report found that Islamic State, which
controls large areas of Syria and Iraq, had operated at least 46,000
Twitter accounts during a three-month period in 2014.
Security was surprisingly light around the San Jose venue and local
media posted pictures on Twitter of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh
Johnson and McDonough walking down the street to get coffee ahead of
the meeting.
ENCRYPTED COMMUNICATIONS
Several social media companies have updated their terms of service
within the last 18 months to take a tougher stance against content
that can incite violence, but some are reluctant to appear too
cooperative with the government because of privacy and commercial
concerns.
Twitter, long maligned for being less cooperative than other
companies such as Facebook, updated its policies last week to
explicitly prohibit “hateful conduct.”
Law enforcement’s struggles to crack encrypted electronic
communications used by criminal and terrorism suspects was also on
the agenda but was not expected to be a central focus, sources said.
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Intelligence officials and some lawmakers have complained that the
growing prevalence of strong encryption on email, call and messaging
platforms, such as iMessage or WhatsApp, hamstring their ability to
monitor communications between criminal suspects.
The Obama administration abandoned a push last year for legislation
that would force U.S. companies to build so-called “backdoors” into
their products to allow investigators access to encrypted data, amid
concerns from technologists and privacy advocates. The meeting was
not expected to prompt a change in the White House's official
stance.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey and
other senior officials also attended the San Jose talks.
As part of the online efforts against jihadists, a new group known
as the Countering Violent Extremism Task Force will "integrate and
harmonize" government efforts to prevent violent extremism in the
United States, White House national security spokesman Ned Price
said.
Some of the changes appear largely bureaucratic, however, and
reflect the government's ongoing struggles to address the Islamic
State's presence online.
The task force will involve the Department of Homeland Security and
the Department of Justice and other federal and local agencies.
In addition, the State Department said it is revamping how it
delivers anti-propaganda on sites like Twitter with the formation of
a new Global Engagement Center. It will shift away from a heavily
criticized campaign that included producing English
counter-propaganda content and toward assisting allies in creating
more targeted anti-militant communications.
(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton and Julia Edwards in
Washington; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Alistair Bell)
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