San Bernardino terrorist harbored jihadist desires

DHS’ Office of Civil Liberties also came under fire last week when Phil Haney, a former U.S. Customs and Border Protection official, conducted an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly in which he said that an investigation he was conducting into an Islamist group with ties to Farook’s mosque was shut down because of political correctness.

In an interview with NBC on Sunday, Mr Kerry suggested that while “social media has placed a whole new burden” on the visa security process, it should be possible to review the activity going forward.

John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security official, told ABC News on Monday that DHS refused in early 2014 to end a policy that “prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media message of all foreign citizens applying for US visas”.

The Facebook messages indicate for the first time that US law enforcement and intelligence officials missed warnings on social media that Malik was a potential threat before she applied for her USA visa.

The federal agency initially declined to comment on whether the items are related to the mass shooting that left 14 people dead, but the law enforcement source said later the three-day search yielded nothing useful to the investigation.

WASHINGTON-The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is working on a plan to scrutinize social media posts as part of its visa application process before certain people are allowed entry into the nation, a person familiar with the matter said. The date that these types of reviews began is not clear, but it was after Malik was considered, the source said.

San Bernardino terrorist Tashfeen Malik sent at least two private Facebook messages to a group of friends in Pakistan months before she arrived in the USA, pledging her support for Islamic jihad and expressing hope she could someday join the fight against the West, according to a published report. The page was under an alias. The official reportedly said that the messages “went only to this small group in Pakistan”, adding that they were written in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan. They couldn’t even spot Malik and her social-media declarations with five government agencies from two countries which are nominally stable and friendly to the US.

Cohen said officials from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) both pressed for a change in policy. This is a pointer that the debate might just turn out in favor of social media checks on immigration before visas are granted. Authorities do not believe that Marquez had any direct knowledge of the later plot by Farook and Malik.

DHS’ Catron told ABC News that the department is still “actively considering” ways to use social media in its vetting process while still protecting privacy.