A small but vocal number of politicians are calling for laws requiring social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to report suspected terrorist activities on their networks to law enforcement, but at least one association said that would be a bad idea.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) are among the political figures who want social companies to actively monitor their networks for suspicious user activity, with Feinstein having recently co-sponsored legislation that would do just that.

But in an interview with San Francisco Business Times, David LeDuc, senior director of public policy for the Software and Information Industry Association, said it would be extremely difficult for social media companies to monitor the vast number of users on their networks.

In addition, requiring monitoring would put social media companies in the tricky legal position of determining what is legitimate terrorist activity and what is simply a show of support for unfavorable political causes.

"Companies could expect to be caught in a no-win legal situation for either failing to identify ‘terrorist activity' or wrongly turning over the identity of an innocent American citizen," LeDuc told the Business Times.

SIIA is not the first association to warn lawmakers they may be going too far in trying combat terrorism by asking for changes that could ultimately harm technology consumers. Last month, the Information Technology Industry Council urged caution when federal officials called on cellphone companies to create "backdoors" that could be used to circumvent cellphone encryption. Criminals could use those backdoors to access cellphone users' private information, ITI warned. http://bit.ly/1NbGCbE

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