Trump Calls for Internet Restrictions to Stop ISIS Recruiting Efforts

During his Pearl Harbor Day rally on the USS Yorktown in South Carolina, Donald Trump said a lot of controversial things that the media has been eating up ever since. Right now they’re mainly focused on his comments about temporarily banning all Muslims from entering the US until “our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” However, they shouldn’t overlook what he has in mind for the Internet.

After discussing ISIS’ ability to convince young and impressionable Westerners to join their ranks, he told the audience that we have to restrict the Internet for ISIS in a way that will stop their recruiting efforts. “We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet and we have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them, maybe in certain areas closing that Internet up in some way.”

Somebody will say, ‘oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people… we’ve got to maybe do something with the Internet because they are recruiting by the thousands, they are leaving our country and then when they come back, we take them back.

How this could be technically feasible, or how it could be done exclusively for terrorists, is not clear. And in any case, don’t we already have the NSA’s sprawling surveillance apparatus watching and recording everything we do? What we should really be asking ourselves, is why haven’t they been able to stop any of the latest terrorist attacks, or prevent people from joining ISIS? Will giving the government more control over the internet (which I’m assuming is what he is proposing), really make us safer?