John Cohen, a former Department of Homeland Security official, told ABC News on Monday that DHS refused in early 2014 to end a policy that “prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media message of all foreign citizens applying for US visas”.
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The Department of Homeland Security tells ABC news it has started pilot programs to search the social media of visa applicants.
The Times said Malik’s Facebook messages indicate for the first time that USA law enforcement and intelligence officials missed warnings on social media that she was a potential threat before she applied for her US visa.
Cohen said officials from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) both pressed for a change in policy.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that USA immigration officials conducted three background checks on Malik when she emigrated from Pakistan but allegedly did not uncover social media postings in which she said she supported violent jihad and wanted to be a part of it.
Farook, the US-born son of Pakistani immigrants, and Malik, a Pakistani native he married past year in Saudi Arabia, were killed in a shootout with police hours after the assault in San Bernardino, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. Records show her visa was approved the day after the interview and she traveled to the U.S.in July 2014.
The second federal official added that Malik had “expressed her desire” to become an Islamic jihadist herself in one of her social media posts.
Wednesday’s San Bernardino, California, shooting occurred at the Inland Regional Center, a facility for people with developmental disabilities. American consular officers are already permitted to appraise candidates’ social media activity in the event in that they think it to be “valuable or necessary”.
Malik had freely posted her radical Islamic views on social media.
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.
Her Department of Homeland Security application, which was checked before the interview, was clean, two senior State Department officials said.
Cohen said that top officials at DHS, including deputy secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, discussed greater social media vetting with representatives at the DHS Office of Civil Liberties and the Office of Privacy. The sources also said that they are beginning to receive complaints from people who knew Farook and Malik and claim they are being unfairly targeted by law enforcement.
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Cohen said the disclosures by Edward Snowden about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance policies fed concern of bad public relations that would affect the USA government’s standing with civil rights groups and European allies.
