President Obama said Friday that his administration is exploring the technical, legal and moral possibilities of accessing the private social media accounts of suspected terrorists.
The issue is now front and center after a Muslim couple communicated privately over social media just before attacking a holiday party in San Bernardino, Calif., killing 14 people. The government has since acknowledged that it doesn’t routinely check social media posts while processing visa applications for foreign nationals.
In his end-of-year press conference, Obama said it’s not as easy for intelligence agents to examine private messages.
“Our law enforcement and intelligence professionals are constantly monitoring public posts and that’s part of the visa-review process,” he said. “But if you have a private communications between two individuals, that’s harder to discern.”
To get around that, he said the government is engaging with high-tech community to figure out how law enforcement can track more readily private messages of potential terrorists, he said. Americans have to “recognize that no government is going to have the capacity to read every single person’s texts or emails or social media if it’s not posted publicly,” Obama said.
But Obama said this also “raises questions about our values.”
“Only a couple years ago… we were having a major debate about whether government was becoming too much like Big Brother,” he said. Obama added that he thinks the U.S. “has struck the right balance” on privacy versus enabling law enforcement to keep the country safe.
“We’re going to have to really review what we can do, both technically, as well as consistent with our laws and our values, in order to try to discern more rapidly some of the potential threats that may be out there,” he said.
Obama also said the issue has been “garbled” in the press because it’s much harder to monitor private posts.
Obama told reporters that 2015 was a year of accomplishments in which a lot of decisions made “early on have paid off.”
He cited steps he took when he entered office to pull the economy out of recession and his signature healthcare law, as well as efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are promoting new clean-energy businesses globally and led to the landmark international climate agreement reached in Paris recently.
“As I look back on this year so much of our steady, consistent work is paying off,” he said.
He also said 2015 was a success for his administration as the U.S. led a six-nation effort to strike a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program and the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that concluded but still needs congressional ratification.
“Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter and we’re only half-way through,” Obama said.
He thanked Congress for passing a long-term highway bill and rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law. He also commended lawmakers for passing an omnibus spending package funding the government for the rest of fiscal 2016.
“I’m not wild about everything in it” but it was a necessary bipartisan effort needed to keep the government running, he said.
