This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, August 10th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The FBI wants to engage in more surveillance of social media to generate red flags from users

who may want to get violent. Facebook is under fire from the FTC for failing to

properly secure user data.

What's a giant surveillance operation to do?

Cato's Matthew Feeney comments.

The FBI wants to monitor social media for potential red flags for people who may become

killers particularly mass killers but Facebook one of the companies that would necessarily be involved in one way or another

in this kind of surveillance, has another problem with the government over privacy practices so thread that

needle or discuss why this conflict has arisen. The conflict I think arises if you're Facebook because you of course want to look as if you're participating in useful content moderation and also cooperating with law enforcement while also

protecting privacy and the interesting thing about the FBI solicitation

which went out in July is that it requires collection of social media data in order to try and

prevent terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and other other threats. The problem though for Facebook as well as other social media

sites is they explicitly ban the use of data for surveillance purposes.

Facebook in particular, I imagine would not want to look

anywhere, look to be seen anywhere close to this kind of effort in large part because they are dealing with a recent privacy settlement from the FTC,

fined $5 billion, and as part of that are trying to take steps and to be part of data protection programs.

So certainly Facebook I imagine are rather concerned about this.

It seems like this is a fight that ought to be just between agencies of the federal government, like if the

FBI or NSA or some other agency wants to do surveillance seeking out

cooperation from these companies like Facebook and others shouldn't seem

...