Tokyo Rose 2.0: White House Asks Silicon Valley For Terrorism Help

theodp writes: While past U.S. Presidents have had to contend with radio propaganda, President Obama also has to worry about online propaganda. On Friday, U.S. national security officials met with leaders in Silicon Valley seeking ideas for ways to curtail terrorists' use of social media and to use technology to "disrupt paths to radicalization to violence." The closed door meetup, which included Apple CEO Tim Cook and top execs from Facebook, Twitter and Google, occurred on the same day the White House also announced the creation of the Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, which will focus on using social media to counter online propaganda by Islamic State and other terrorist groups, and the State Department promised to revamp its online counter-messaging campaign.

Comments

Opening line...

[Dan East]

Obama's opening line of the meeting. "Gentlemen, how much privacy and how many rights of your users are you willing to sacrifice in the name of patriotism and the fight against terrorism?"

Re:Opening line...

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing I'm always concerned about is when up front they claim it's to counter Middle Eastern Terrorists like the Daesh, Taliban, whatever you want to call them, maybe Saudi's and the CIA. But then the gov uses their resources to try and counter any one who opposes the agenda of the Corporate, Government, and Banker Tyranny. People who want to live in peace, have clean water, air, healthy food that's not polluted with toxins, etc. which often puts them at odds with all kinds of large interests get treated as terrorists.

Re: Opening line...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much this. Look around. People communicating freely bothers every government everywhere. It doesn't matter the type or how noble their propaganda makes them seem.

As to actual terrorists, the number of which is vastly overestimated: we could, you know, maybe stop helping multinational corporations exploit other countries for their resources and stop overthrowing elected governments in the pursuit of American profits. That would work. Nothing else will.

Footnote: The number of terrorists is provably overstated by the simple fact that the number of terrorist incidents is small. Since nobody has ever actually stopped a terrorist plot that they didn't themselves create (looking at you, FBI) it's vastly easy to carry out an attack, even in the presence of all the rights depriving security theater we have to put up with. There aren't many attacks because there aren't many terrorists. It has nothing to do with the 'brave men and women of law enforcement' you always hear lauded in the media.

Second, most Americans would not and do not condone stealing other people's stuff and interfering in other people's lives. That's why American interference overseas is the most under reported story in all history. Those of you in other countries: your average American has no clue what's done in their names abroad thanks to no reporting by our corporate media. Remember that when getting in an argument with one.

Re:Opening line...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at the facts and you will see. Nuclear is the safest form of power generation in terms of dead people per kWh, including all the victims of Tshernobyl.

Re:Obama not a fan of 1st nor 2nd amendment ...

[microTodd]

Huh? It took like 5 minutes to find former students who TALKED about his lectures and in fact showed reporters notes from lectures he gave.

Here's one example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07...