New York Times
By Matt Apuzzo, Michael Schmidt, and Julia Preston
December 12, 2015
Tashfeen
Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino,
Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration
officials as she moved
to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had
made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media
about her views on violent jihad.
She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.
American
law enforcement officials said they recently discovered those old — and
previously unreported — postings as they pieced together the lives of
Ms. Malik and her
husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, trying to understand how they pulled off
the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Had
the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out
of the country. But immigration officials do not routinely review
social media as part of their
background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of
Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.
The
discovery of the old social media posts has exposed a significant — and
perhaps inevitable — shortcoming in how foreigners are screened when
they enter the United
States, particularly as people everywhere disclose more about
themselves online. Tens of millions of people are cleared each year to
come to this country to work, visit or live. It is impossible to conduct
an exhaustive investigation and scour the social media
accounts of each of them, law enforcement officials say.
In
the aftermath of terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris, this
screening process has been singled out as a major vulnerability in the
nation’s defense against
terrorism. Lawmakers from both parties have endorsed making it harder
for people to enter the United States if they have recently been in Iraq
or Syria. Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has
said there should be a temporary ban on Muslims’
entering the country.
While
President Obama has cautioned against “a betrayal of our values” in the
way the United States responds to threats, he has ordered a review of
the K-1 visa program,
which allows foreigners like Ms. Malik to move to the United States to
marry Americans, putting them on a pathway to permanent residence and,
ultimately, citizenship.
The
Obama administration is trying to determine whether those background
checks can be expanded without causing major delays in the popular
program. In an attempt to ensure
they did not miss threats from men and women who entered the country
the same way Ms. Malik did, immigration officials are also reviewing all
of about 90,000 K-1 visas issued in the past two years and are
considering a moratorium on new ones while they determine
whether changes should be made.
“Somebody
entered the United States through the K-1 visa program and proceeded to
carry out an act of terrorism on American soil,” the White House
spokesman, Josh Earnest,
said on Thursday. “That program is at a minimum worth a very close
look.”
In
an era when technology has given intelligence agencies seemingly
limitless ability to collect information on people, it may seem
surprising that a Facebook or Twitter
post could go unnoticed in a background screening. But the screenings
are an example of the trade-offs that security officials make as they
try to mitigate the threat of terrorism while keeping borders open for
business and travel.
“We
run people against watch lists and that’s how we decided if they get
extra screening,” said C. Stewart Verdery Jr., a senior Homeland
Security official during George
W. Bush’s administration. “In cases where those lists don’t hit,
there’s nothing that distinguishes them from people we would love to
welcome to this country.”
Ms.
Malik faced three extensive national security and criminal background
screenings. First, Homeland Security officials checked her name against
American law enforcement
and national security databases. Then, her visa application went to the
State Department, which checked her fingerprints against other
databases. Finally, after coming to the United States and formally
marrying Mr. Farook here, she applied for her green card
and received another round of criminal and security checks.
Ms.
Malik also had two in-person interviews, federal officials said, the
first by a consular officer in Pakistan, and the second by an
immigration officer in the United
States when she applied for her green card.
All
those reviews came back clear, and the F.B.I. has said it had no
incriminating information about Ms. Malik or Mr. Farook in its
databases. The State Department and
the Department of Homeland Security have said they followed all
policies and procedures. The departments declined to provide any
documentation or specifics about the process, saying they cannot discuss
the case because of the continuing investigation.
Meanwhile,
a debate is underway at United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services, the agency that approves visas and green cards, over whether
officers conducting
interviews should be allowed to routinely use material gathered from
social media for interviews where they assess whether foreigners are
credible or pose any security risk. With that issue unresolved, the
agency has not regularly been using social media references,
federal officials said.
After
the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, a furor arose over whether
the United States should accept Syrian refugees. Governors in more than
two dozen states balked
at accepting any. But the vetting for refugees is a separate, longer
and more rigorous process than the checks for K-1 and most other
immigrant visas. And there is an extra layer of scrutiny for Syrians,
who are referred to a national security and fraud office
at the Department of Homeland Security for a final look. In that last
step, officers can include a social media search, federal officials
said.
As
part of their investigation into the electronic trail of Ms. Malik and
Mr. Farook, investigators are searching for devices, including a
computer hard drive that appeared
to be missing from their home, and cellphones they might have
abandoned.
On
Saturday, a team of divers from the F.B.I. and the San Bernardino
County Sheriff’s Department continued their search for those devices in
Seccombe Lake in a park about
two miles from the site of the Dec. 2 attack. The divers pulled items
from the murky waters of the lake, which they have been scouring since
Thursday. However, officials would not specify what was found or if it
was relevant to the investigation. They cautioned
that such searches, particularly one in a bustling public park, tend to
dredge up debris from many sources, and that investigators still have
to determine the value of what was found.
Since
its inception in 2002, the Department of Homeland Security has been
trying to find the right balance between security and ease of movement —
a balance that equates
to billions of dollars in trade and tourism each year.
“Compared to where we were 15 years ago, we’ve moved the needle very far to the right on security,” Mr. Verdery said.
Still,
he said, officials have to decide who gets extra scrutiny. Today the
government focuses its attention on people in certain fields or from
certain countries — foreign
scientists, for instance, or young men from the Middle East. As a
woman, Ms. Malik likely raised less suspicion, Mr. Verdery said.
Investigators
are particularly interested in Ms. Malik’s life in Pakistan in the
years before she moved to the United States. They believe that was when
she was radicalized.
From
2007 to 2012, she lived in a university hostel and then with her mother
and sister Fehda at a family home in Multan, Pakistan. While there, Ms.
Malik studied to be
a pharmacist, and she took extra classes at the local branch of a
women-only institute that teaches a strict literalist interpretation of
the Quran, although it does not advocate violent jihad.
In
a brief telephone interview on Saturday, the sister, Fehda Malik, said
Tashfeen Malik was not an extremist, and she rejected the allegations
against her sister.
“I
am the one who spent most of the time with my sister,” she said. “No
one knows her more than me. She had no contact with any militant
organization or person, male or
female.”
She
said her sister was religious, studied the Quran and prayed five times a
day. “She knew what was right and what was wrong,” Fehda Malik said.
She added that the family
was “very worried and tense,” before hanging up the phone.
On
social media, Fehda Malik has made provocative comments of her own. In
2011, on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, she posted a
remark on Facebook beside
a photo of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center that could be
interpreted as anti-American.
Social
media comments, by themselves, however, are not always definitive
evidence. In Pakistan — as in the United States — there is no shortage
of crass and inflammatory
language. And it is often difficult to distinguish Islamist sentiments
and those driven by political hostility toward the United States. At the
time Fehda Malik’s comment was posted, anti-American sentiment in
Pakistan was particularly high; four months earlier,
American commandos had secretly entered Pakistan and killed Osama bin
Laden.
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