As a whole, the world around us is built on many laws, most of which are mandated and some of which are just no brainers for everyone to coexist peacefully together, like the golden rule to name one. Every now and again we get people or certain grouped organizations who challenge these laws specifically aiming to hurt others in its path. ISIS is one of these terror organizations that has been on everyone’s radar with obviously no one excluded. These recent attacks on many countries raise many questions and concerns that underline a serious problem we all might have. Many of these terror groups are gaining access to very sensitive and important information across the world using many forms of online services like Facebook or Twitter. They use these social platforms to specifically design attacks while gaining information from whoever and whatever they want. They recruit, plan, and execute many of their operations under everyone’s nose using these social outlets that everyone from kids to the elderly use on a daily basis, sometimes more. So it’s very warming to hearts when we hear things like the top executives from Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter meeting with the senior White House officials to discuss measures of countering militant groups from using social media for recruitment and spreading propaganda.
According to sources, among the many attending this much-needed meeting are Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, White House Cheif of Staff Denis McDonough, presidential counterterrorism advisor Lisa Monaco, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers. Along with these people attending, executives from Google, Mircosoft, Dropbox, Facebook, and Twitter are also finding room to sit and discuss solutions. In an agenda obtained by The Washington Post, it indicates that among the many things that will be discussed, the center of the meeting will lie around the ways to make it more difficult for terror organizations to exploit the internet to radicalize followers. Discussing and devising solutions to use technology to identify recruitment patterns among these social platforms is of an utmost importance in this meeting.
Encryption will be one of the main hot topics that’s discussed during the meeting. Considering there are many companies and organizations that have clearly conveyed their reluctance on weakening encryption, which could very well put many people’s personal data out in the open for hackers and other criminals of sorts, it should make for a very interesting meeting to say the least. I think we can all conclude that no matter the outcome, these major companies along with the White House are taking terror organizations that are using media outlets for their operations, very seriously.