The government wants Silicon Valley to build terrorist-spotting algorithms. But is it possible?

[Commentary] Government types are freaked out about the role of technology in how groups like ISIS recruit members and plan attacks. They think the heads of tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Google can do more to help them keep the world safe. And so counter-terrorism officials got tech executives to spend a day with them in San Jose (CA) recently.

Among the topics on the agenda were consumers’ access to encrypted communications that aren’t easily intercepted by the government (a horse that’s so beaten to death that it’s been zombified) and a new idea posited by the policymakers: some kind of technological system that could detect, measure, and flag “radicalization.” A terrorist-hunting algorithm isn’t a completely off-the-wall idea. Financial companies have proposed scanning Facebook postings to help determine people’s credit worthiness. There are already products for police departments that dole out “threat scores” to individuals based on scanning public social media activity and looking for key words; one police department’s use of a “beware algorithm” was recently revealed by the ACLU of Northern California. But this proposal that tech companies might give their own users “radicalism scores” is more novel, and comes on the heels of the San Bernardino (CA) shootings, after which law enforcement discovered that one of the shooters had posted to Facebook advocating jihad.