The investigation on the San Bernardino shooting has included the social media activities of Farook and Malik, hoping that they would get clues on why they mounted the attack and to look if they have made pronouncements supporting terrorist groups in the past in their social media accounts.
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The State Department said that “obviously things went wrong” in the visa background check for one of the San Bernardino shooters, due to a secret USA policy that prohibits immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of foreign citizens applying for US visas.
The Obama administration has directed the Homeland Security and State departments to review the process for screening people who apply for visas and to return with specific recommendations to close security gaps in the USA visa system, said White House spokesman Josh Earnest Monday.
“Immigration, security, law enforcement officials recognized at the time that it was important to more extensively review public social media postings because they offered potential insights into whether somebody was an extremist or potentially connected to a terrorist organization or a supporter of the movement”, said Cohen, who left DHS in June 2014.
Meanwhile, the bodies of Farook and Malik remained at a local morgue late Monday as the couple’s families continue to try to work out the details of their burial.
Under the U.S. “Visa Security Program”, consular officials in American embassies overseas can ask U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stationed in the embassies to produce a “Security Assessment Opinion”, or SAO, before the consulate decides whether to approve a U.S. visa application.
Homeland Security now only checks applicants” social media postings “intermittently’ and as part of several pilot programs.
Malik and her husband, San Bernardino County health inspector Syed Farook, killed 14 people and injured 21 others when they attacked and opened fire on a county office building December 2. It is impossible to conduct an exhaustive investigation and scour the social media accounts of each of them, law enforcement officials say.
“It is unacceptable that Congress has to legislate on this, and that it wasn’t already the Department of Homeland Security’s practice to take such commonsense steps when screening individuals entering this country”, McCain said in a statement. Cohen is now a national security consultant for ABC News.
According to one of the federal officials, the Facebook messages are considered to be Malik’s private correspondence to a small group of her friends in Pakistan and that they were the only ones to receive them.
“We are not opposed to any measure that makes our nation more secure, but measures that target only one faith group, only one ethnic group of people a certain national origin, that raises concerns and it is so counterproductive to our nation’s security”, he said.
In addition to the DHS proposals, Senators Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen.
At the time, USA officials involved in vetting visa applicants were under pressure from the Obama administration to avoid looking at visa applicants’ social media postings out of respect for their privacy and civil liberties, two former DHS officials said.
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And in an era when ISIS uses social media propaganda to recruit, plan, and promote its radical Islamist ideology, why would USA officials not review social media posts?
