Clinton wants Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to help fight Islamic State

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton called on major technology companies including Facebook and Google to join the fight against the Islamic State as evidence comes to light about the San Bernardino shooters' use of social media.

"We're going to need help from Facebook and from YouTube and from Twitter," the former secretary of state said during an interview on ABC's This Week. "They cannot permit the recruitment and the actual direction of attacks or the celebration of violence by the sophisticated Internet user."

"They're going to have to help us take down these announcements and these appeals," she added.

Later in the day, speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Clinton elaborated on her thinking, telling a forum convened by Saban Capital Group president and CEO Haim Saban, a major fundraiser for her campaign and donor to the pro-Clinton Priorities USA Action super-PAC, that "what we see right now I think is just the beginning of directed attacks and self- radicalization that leads to attacks like what we think happened in San Bernardino."

The tech industry can help stem the tide by finding ways to "deny online space - just as we have to destroy their would-be caliphate - we have to deny them online space," she said.

Clinton acknowledged that "this is complicated - you're gonna hear all the usual complaints: freedom of speech, etcetera." Still, she said, "if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we've got to shut off their means of communicating."

Encrypted communications pose even more complicated challenges for tech and government, Clinton said.

"I have to believe that the best minds in the private sector, in the public sector could come together to help us deal with this evolving threat," she said on ABC. She added that she knows "what the argument is from our friends in the industry" and also understands "what the argument is on the other side from law enforcement and security professionals" and wants to see the two sides "get together and try to figure out the best way forward."

Clinton has previously warned about Islamic State's skill in harnessing social media and encryption for recruiting and messaging, and urged that tech and government work together. Last month, during a major speech on the threat delivered at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, she said that Silicon Valley should "not ... view government as its adversary."

She has not, though, been as aggressive in calling out companies by name, as she did not only during her TV appearance but while speaking at Brookings.

Terrorists "communicate on very ubiquitous sites - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook," she said at the Saban Forum. "The woman jihadist in San Bernardino posted her allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi and ISIS on Facebook."