Senators revive bill requiring tech sector to report online terror activity

(credit: US Senate)

One of the shooters in last week’s deadly attack pledged her allegiance to ISIS on Facebook the same day she and her husband went on a shooting rampage, killing 14 people in a San Bernardino County government building. In response, high-ranking Senators revived legislation Tuesday requiring the tech sector, like Facebook and Twitter, to report to the authorities suspected online terror activity.

“We’re in a new age where terrorist groups like ISIL are using social media to reinvent how they recruit and plot attacks,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, said in a statement about the legislation she is sponsoring with Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican of North Carolina. “That information can be the key to identifying and stopping terrorist recruitment or a terrorist attack, but we need help from technology companies. This bill doesn’t require companies to take any additional actions to discover terrorist activity, it merely requires them to report such activity to law enforcement when they come across it. Congress needs to do everything we can to help intelligence and law enforcement agencies identify and prevent terrorist attacks, and this bill is a step in the right direction.”

The development comes nearly three months after Feinstein and Burr tabled the legislation because of a dispute with Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who had placed a procedural hold on the bill. Wyden again took issue with the reintroduction of the “Requiring Reporting of Online Terrorist Activity Act.”

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