Obama team weighs cyberwar options on Islamic State

After the massacre at San Bernardino, President Obama's national security advisers are re-examining when to ask Internet companies to take down jihadi propaganda and social media accounts, according to U.S. officials.

The issue is not new. Al-Qaida and its franchises have used the Internet systematically for more than a decade. But the Islamic State has flooded social media like Twitter and Facebook to provide future recruits all over the world a steady stream of slickly produced material that encourages the kind of do-it- yourself terrorism that has plagued Europe and the United States in recent years.

The problem for U.S. policymakers is whether to treat this flood of social media as a cancer that must be eradicated or a source of valuable intelligence on the plots and techniques jihadis use to attack the West.

"There has always been a tension in the intelligence community between the intel side that wants to exploit the information from social media and the operational or the policy community that wants to do something to shut it down," Mike Flynn, who directed the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, told me. "The intelligence community often says: 'Oh, no. We don't want to give up that good intelligence.'"

Because of this tension, current and former U.S. intelligence officials tell me there is usually a kind of ad hoc approach to jihadi social media. Facebook, Twitter and other social networking companies have taken down accounts at the request of the U.S. government. But there has been no concerted effort to deprive these groups of this online space.

On Sunday, Hillary Clinton called on the government and the tech sector to do just that. The Democratic presidential candidate said it was time to deprive "jihadists of virtual territory, just as we work to deprive them of actual territory."

But this approach has risks. "The cyber-world presents the same situation you see in many intelligence operations," Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Republican member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me. "One has to make a decision when to shut the intelligence operation and take down the target, knowing that when you do this, you have exposed to the target the knowledge you have and you are no longer able to develop the knowledge surrounding the network."

The FBI made a similar calculation this year when it began to capture more terrorism suspects, rather than monitor them.

A senior administration official told me Obama's national security team will be "intensifying" its review of policies to track and combat the caliphate online. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, vented frustration last month on this issue after the terror attack in Paris when she told reporters that she has personally lobbied technology executives without success to take down web pages that explain in detail how to make a bomb at home.

Part of the problem facing U.S. counterterrorism officials is that the Islamic State has become very good at setting up mirror accounts that crop up almost as soon as one account is taken offline. Some estimates say the Islamic State today controls as many as 46,000 Twitter accounts. Michael Smith, the chief operating officer for Kronos Advisory, a firm that tracks jihadi activity online, told me the volume of online communications coming from the Islamic State is "deafening." "They are overwhelming the system in terms of the capability to review all threat-specific communications," he said.

Nonetheless, the U.S. government has tried to attack the problem in other ways. U.S. counterterrorism officials told me that Obama has targeted Islamic State leaders who have coordinated the group's online propaganda efforts. For example, in August a U.S. airstrike killed Junaid Hussain, who is described in a recent White House fact sheet as both a "senior leader" and an "online recruiter" for the Islamic State. And as terrifying as the Islamic State's online propaganda is, what really scares U.S. counterterrorism officials is when a recruit is lured into "dark spaces" enabled by encrypted communications that cannot be easily penetrated. The FBI director, James Comey, has pleaded with technology companies to come up with a way for the FBI to crack this encryption for law enforcement investigations, but so far that has not happened.

With Clinton's call to action, the debate has now shifted, from the hidden spaces of digital communications to the jihadi sites and accounts that are out in the open for all to see.

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Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about politics and foreign affairs. He was previously the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast. Lake also covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI, and was a contributing editor at the New Republic.

Previously:
• 11/20/15: After the Paris attacks, Bush whiffs on his war speech
• 11/18/15: What Obama's incoherence and anger at post-Paris press conference reveals
• 11/17/15: Dems begin to embrace 'regime change' --- again
• 11/13/15: Hurt feelings, unsafe spaces and other Israeli crimes
• 11/09/15: Egyptian leader seen as target of jihad
• 11/04/15: How Ahmad Chalabi survived his war to free Iraq
• 10/26/15: Now we know: AIPAC and the Dems who supported Iran deal
• 10/21/15: GOPers at Hilary hearing taking cues from Dems?