The White House Is Meeting With Silicon Valley Execs Tomorrow to “Disrupt”

The White House is using a new weapon to battle terrorism: Silicon Valley.

The meeting is said to be centered around the ability of terror groups to use social media and other online platforms to radicalize individuals. The meeting will include some major tech names, including Alphabet Inc., Facebook, and Twitter; executives from companies providing Internet-based services, such as Dropbox and Microsoft Corporation, are also expected to attend.

The White House will ask executives how to “disrupt paths to radicalization to violence, identify recruitment patterns, and provide metrics to help measure [their] efforts”.

At Friday’s session, government officials plan to brief industry leaders on how terrorists use technology, including encryption.

While Apple has publicly opposed recent moves by the US government to weaken encryption, Reuters’ sources claim that today’s meeting will focus on social media rather than the controversial encryption debate, however a separate report from the The Washington Post claims that encryption will be discussed, but only as a secondary issue.

They’ll also explore ways to promote alternative messages to counter IS and make it easier for law enforcement to thwart attacks.

Some of those goals may lead to thorny discussions. One of the technology executives quoted by The Guardian said this felt like “bait and switch”, referring to the government’s original supposed focus on social networks and online recruitment.

And particularly after the revelations two years ago about widespread data-gathering by the National Security Agency, tech companies are concerned about making sure that customers around the world don’t see them as agents of the US government.

Following the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Silicon Valley has come under increased pressure by USA officials and members of Congress to do more to aid American law enforcement.

Confronting the Islamic State on the Internet has raised hard questions for USA policymakers about how to balance counterterrorism against privacy, civil liberties and the hands-off tradition that has fueled the Internet’s growth.

Social media and encrypted apps have been used by radicalist groups to disseminate propaganda and recruit potential terrorists. That issue has divided the administration, with the tech and economic policy agencies supporting the use of widespread encryption and law enforcement and national security agencies concerned that such a trend is aiding terrorists and criminals.