By David Gauthier-Villars And Sam Schechner
PARIS--French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve heads to
Silicon Valley this week to enlist a new force in his fight on
terror: U.S. tech giants.
Weeks after deadly terror attacks in Paris, and days after
apparent copycat shootings in Denmark, France's top cop plans to
meet on Friday with senior executives at Apple Inc., Google Inc.,
Facebook Inc., and Twitter Inc.
His message: U.S. tech companies and social networks must do
more to rid their services of extremist postings, and should open
up encryption to ease government surveillance.
"We are facing a new threat," Mr. Cazeneuve said in an interview
ahead of the trip. "We need tech companies to realize that they
have an important role to play."
Mr. Cazeneuve's West Coast tour--coming after a layover
Wednesday and Thursday in Washington to attend a summit on
terror--raises European pressure on U.S. tech companies over how
best to use the Internet to fight terrorists.
Executives say it thrusts them into a tricky dilemma--how to
support their users' privacy and free-speech rights while also
being tough on terrorism.
In Paris and other European capitals, government officials say
Islamic State and other insurgencies have succeeded in harnessing
social networks to rally scores of young Europeans to their cause,
and lure hundreds of converts to the battlegrounds in Syria and
Iraq. Online videos showing the beheading of U.S. reporter James
Foley and other hostages by Islamic State are terrorism propaganda
that must be censored, they say.
But until recently, some of the same European governments were
assailing some of the same companies for allegedly being overly
cooperative with the U.S. National Security Agency, U.S. tech
executives say.
"Internet companies find themselves caught in the middle," said
Eduardo Ustaran, a privacy lawyer for Hogan Lovells who represents
some tech companies. "On one hand, there is a need to make sure
these horrible attacks don't recur. But they feel extremely
uncomfortable about being obliged by governments to spy on their
own users."
Tension with tech firms on the issue has been building from
before the Paris attacks.
At a gathering of European law enforcement representatives in
Luxembourg last October, U.S. companies including Google, Facebook,
Twitter and Microsoft Corp. pledged to help governments.
But in meetings since then, the European officials and company
representatives have sparred on important issues, such as whether
the companies can or should pre-emptively filter their services for
terrorist content, or respond only when it is flagged by
governments, people familiar with the meetings said.
Mr. Cazeneuve, who has dealt with U.S. companies over tax issues
during his one-year stint as budget minister until last spring,
said he expects them to step up their effort in censoring content
that could be regarded as hate speech.
"What would be the interest of tech companies in broadcasting
hateful images that incite terrorism?" he said.
When it comes to terror, U.S. tech executives respond that they
already cooperate extensively with governments, particularly in
emergencies like the ones France and Denmark recently endured, both
by removing content from terrorist groups, and by turning over user
data.
On January 7, when videos proliferated of masked gunmen shooting
a French policeman at close range, Google's YouTube was able to
remove copies of the footage in minutes, French officials said. The
company says it removed 14 million videos in 2014 for featuring
gratuitous violence, incitement to violence or hate speech.
That same day, Microsoft Corp. says it was able to turn over
content from email accounts linked to the Kouachi
brothers--suspected of being the killers--within some 45 minutes.
The request came through an emergency channel from French
prosecutors to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Microsoft
said.
But people within the companies also say that they will only go
so far, given the pressure they still feel to fight government
surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks.
"Over the last three years, first Edward Snowden and now
[Islamic State], we have seen the political debate about government
access to information swing from one end of the spectrum to the
other," said Rachel Whetstone, Google's global head of public
policy, in a speech to the Bavarian parliament earlier this
month.
Ms. Whetstone is among the Google executives Mr. Cazeneuve is
set to meet on Friday, his office said.
One flash point on the agenda is encryption. Politicians and
law-enforcement officials in the U.K., France, and U.S. have said
that encrypted communications on apps like Facebook's WhatsApp or
Apple's new iPhone pose a problem because companies say they don't
have the ability to unlock them even when they receive valid
law-enforcement requests.
Mr. Cazeneuve says he plans to push the topic in California. "It
is a central issue," he said.
Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook defended the company's
stance last week, saying weakening privacy controls could "risk our
way of life." Other companies argue that creating back doors to
encryption would give a leg up to criminal hackers, and weaken
security for all Internet users.
"Given most people use the Internet for the reasons it was
intended, we shouldn't weaken security and privacy protections for
the majority to deal with the minority who don't," said Google's
Mr. Whetstone.
Write to David Gauthier-Villars at
David.Gauthier-Villars@wsj.com and Sam Schechner at
sam.schechner@wsj.com
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