This is an on the media podcast Extra.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

This week, after the massacre in Orlando, Hillary Clinton renewed her call to the tech

industry to help catch terrorists in the process of radicalization.

We have to do a better job intercepting ISIS's communications, tracking and analyzing social media posts, and mapping jihadist

networks, as well as promoting credible voices who can provide alternatives to radicalization.

The same call went up after the San Bernardino shooting at the end of last year, and in January,

a delegation of top U.S. officials,

including FBI director James Comey and Secretary of Homeland Security, Jay Johnson,

met with the executives of Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies to discuss

battling terrorism online. One idea was an algorithm that could crawl social sites for signs of radicalization and assign people a risk value, like a credit score.

The government would then, in theory, use that information to monitor the riskiest subjects. But is that legal?

In January, Bob spoke to Karen Greenberg,

director of the Center on National Security

at Fordham University School of Law.

So let's just say that the tech companies

were able to put together some sort of algorithm

that was actually quite good at crawling only the public spaces

of the social web and somehow able to see the juxtaposition of certain words, whether it's

jihad or explosives or broccoli, that gives a pretty good profile of intent to commit a terrorist act, let's just say.

And some Joe Blow triggers the radicalization monitor. What could the companies and the government

do with that high credit score legally?

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