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What Role Should Silicon Valley Play in Fighting Terrorism ?
On Friday, January 8, several high-level officials from the Obama administration—including the attorney general, the White House chief of staff, and the directors of the FBI and the NSA—met at a federal office in San Jose with senior executives from Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Apple (including CEO Tim Cook himself). On the agenda for the discussion, according to a one-page memo widely leaked to the press, was this question: “How can we make it harder for terrorists to [use] the Internet to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence?”
For the previous month, since the ISIS-inspired shootings in San Bernardino, California, President Obama, as well as some of the candidates vying to succeed him, had been calling on Silicon Valley to join the government in this fight. As Hillary Clinton put it in a campaign speech, “We need to put ‘the great disrupters’ at work disrupting ISIS.” In one of the Republican presidential debates, Donald Trump said he would ask “our brilliant people from Silicon Valley” to keep ISIS from using the Internet—a notion that reflected a misunderstanding of how the Internet works but also a widespread desperation for Silicon Valley to do something.
But what do Obama, Clinton, Trump, and the other politicians have in mind? How would the executives respond, and how should they respond? Many tech entrepreneurs—libertarian in leanings and especially leery of open collusion with Washington since Edward Snowden’s revelations—question whether government has any business putting private industry to work on such a venture, which could rub up against the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. And if some coöperative strategy could be mounted, quite apart from any philosophical considerations, would it have much effect ?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600760/what-role-should-silicon-valley-play-in-fighting-terrorism/ [technologyreview.com]
What do Soylentils think ? Would you cooperate with the government and the TLAs ?
