Once ISIS social media minders become convinced a follower is prepared to kill on their behalf, they switch to an encrypted form of communication, Comey said. It’s hard to untangle which particular source… there are lots of competing poisons out there.
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While James Comey said the pair had been sending direct messages to one another over Facebook before Malik was granted a visa to come to the US, these were not openly visible. Comey confirmed the gunman, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, was inspired by terrorist propaganda.
The messages were recovered by FBI agents investigating whether she and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, had been in direct contact with foreign militant organizations and were directed to carry out the Dec 2 attack in which 14 people were killed, the Times reported.
Twitter Direct Messages aren’t encrypted.
Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik arrive in Chicago on July 27, 2014.
The messages were also, Comey said, general in nature-about a commitment to jihad, rather than about specific plots.
In Malik’s case, though, since earlier background checks did not raise suspicions, no SAO investigation was requested before she was granted a visa to enter the United States as Farook’s fiancée, the us official said.
He said: “We had policies in place regarding consulting social media which in my judgment, particularly in this current environment, were too restrictive”.
In an interview with ABC News, Saira Khan said of her brother, “At this time I feel like he had a double life”.
Comey previously testified that in the messages the Federal Bureau of Investigation was able to recover in the days after the attack, the couple was talking to each other about extremism, but today marked the director’s first reference to the messages being private.
During Tuesday night’s Republican presidential primary debate in Las Vegas, the candidates were dead set on the idea that social media played a major part in the December 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which left 14 victims and its two perpetrators dead. On the day of the shooting, they declared their allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook. And how could the mother do this?She said she and her husband could give the orphaned baby a stable upbringing.For the time being, we want her to enjoy her innocence, she told ABC News.
Comey also used the speech as an opportunity to push his anti-encryption agenda, telling the audience that encrypted messaging makes terrorist “go dark” to law enforcement.
Comey said that some products or services are designed so not even the provider can access the communications, should the need arise.
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“Twitter works as a way to sell books, as a way to promote movies, and it works as a way to crowdsource terrorism-to sell murder”, Comey said.
