U.S. screening refugees’ social media accounts

Homeland Security is now trying to screen the social media accounts of Iraqi and Syrian refugee applicants, an agency chief said, as evidence emerges that immigration officers missed potential clues that foreign fighters left in cyberspace about their intentions.

Leon Rodriguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that screens refugees, told C-SPAN in an interview aired Sunday that they now have permission to scour Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites looking for online trails that could expose a security risk from among the tens of thousands of applicants.

But he said it’s unlikely they will be able to check social media accounts of all 8 million immigration applicants the agency receives a year, so they’ll have to target only specific programs and countries where they see a risk.

“We’re ramping up basically toward using social media vetting across that entire area of activity for us,” Mr. Rodriguez told the “Newsmakers” program. “There are reasons to be thinking about how we use those tools at least in those cases where there’s a flag of concern.”

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