U.S. working on including social media scrutiny in visa reviews: report

The Obama administration was working on a plan to include scrutiny of social media posts in its visa vetting process for certain people, local media said on Monday.

Citing a person familiar with the plan, the U.S. daily Wall Street Journal reported that the move represented a new focus on the use of social media in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting carnage in southern California.

No further details about the plan were available at the moment, the Journal said.

Tashfeen Malik, a 27-year-old Pakistani, and her husband Syed Farook, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen, gunned down 14 people and injured 21 more at a holiday party held at a southern California social services center on Dec. 2. According to local police, "some degree of planning" was involved in the horrendous shooting spree.

Federal investigators were now looking for clues in the couple's digital footprint, including Facebook posts and computer records, which could shed light on the motive for the shooting.

According to U.S. investigators, Malik, the female shooter, moved from Pakistan to the United States in July, 2014 on a K-1 visa, the type offered to fiancees of Americans.

However, in his congressional hearing on Wednesday, Director of U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey revealed that both shooters were radicalized at least two years ago, which meant that the current visa vetting process could have failed to detect Malik's radicalization. Endit