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Here's the problem with that authority. I mean, do I want it? In many ways

and no, I don't want it because it's a hot potato. It's incredibly difficult,

but it has to be done. And at the end of day it's our job and so we just have to do it effectively

Effectively in terms of you know preventing violence and threats against our people

also effectively in a way that protects people's privacy

and civil liberties.

And here's the problem.

I mean, when you think about it,

our mission, in fact, our limited mission is to look online for social media that might relate to threats

to the homeland, which is our intelligence space.

And we can only either go to publicly available information

or we have to be overt about it.

So we can't lie about who we are and get into a private chat room. We can't do that.

We're very constrained in where we can go. And the ironic thing is that each one of you can be much more effective in doing this than we can because

you don't have those constraints. Private individuals, private organizations can do

a lot more than we can in the open environment. I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the

Law Fair Podcast.

We are coming to you from the Knight Foundation's informed conference in Miami, Florida.

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