As the government around the world is facing the threat of extremism, the former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says tech companies have the responsibility toward the society, and therefore they should regularly inspect the elements featured on their platform.
In his statement the National Press Club in Canberra, Australia, he said that companies should effort to go as far as possible to filtering their news feed and if possible opening encryption access to law enforcement.
“I do think there is a role to play here in some screening and filtering of what appears in social media,” he said.
“In the same way that these companies very directly capitalise on the information that we make available to them and exploit it, it seems that that same ingenuity could be applied in a sensitive way to filtering out or at least identifying some of the more egregious material that appears on social media.”
Here it is important to highlight that Clapper is not the first one to raise this issue, in fact, big leaders around the world such as Putin, UK Prime Minister Theresa May have suggested these tech companies for exercising tough measures to confide extremist content on their platform. In past several terrorist attack victims have sued Facebook, Twitter, and Google for allowing terrorist activities to take place on their network.
However, Clapper did not stop here; he suggested tech companies should cooperate with law enforcement.
He said “I hear the argument about if you share once with one person and it’s forever compromised. I’m not sure I really buy into that,” he said.
“I think there needs to be a very serious dialogue about giving criminals, terrorists, rapists, murderers et cetera, a pass. I would hope that, at some point, our technology industry would use all the creativity and innovation and energy that they apply to create such miraculous technological things as iPhones… to figuring out a way that both the interests of privacy as well as security can be guaranteed.”
