Obama, Cameron: Terrorists will not ‘muzzle’ free speech

President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron vowed in a joint op-ed published Thursday that they would not allow terrorists to “muzzle” free speech following last week’s terror attack on a French satirical newspaper.

Writing in a joint op-ed published in the London Times ahead of Cameron’s two-day visit to the White House, the leaders said that, with attacks on free expression, “our voices will only grow louder.” 

{mosads}“Whether we are facing lone fanatics or terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda, Islamic State [in Iraq and Syria], or Boko Haram, we will not be cowed by extremists,” the pair wrote. “We will defeat these barbaric killers and their distorted ideology, which tries to justify the murder of innocents, whether children attending school in Peshawar, or girls forced to become suicide bombers in northern Nigeria.”

The leaders also vowed to “recommit” to counterterrorism operations.

But while the leaders pledged unity ahead of the meetings in Washington, Cameron was expected to press Obama to pursue controversial new policies governing American technology firms.

According to reports in the Daily Mail and Financial Times, Cameron planned to ask Obama to push technology companies like Twitter and Facebook to more closely monitor their content and share potential terror threats with government intelligence agencies.

“The prime minister’s objective is to get US companies to co-operate more,” Downing Street said in a statement to the Financial Times. “That will be his approach in these discussions: how do we work together to get them to do so?”

That could be a tough sell — and one it’s not clear the president wants to make.

Technology companies have criticized the Obama administration for its efforts to mine social media networks and email for intelligence information in the wake of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures of the scope of NSA monitoring.

And while President Obama has aggressively sold new cybersecurity legislation in recent days, his bills have included privacy protections that did not exist in Republican-backed versions of similar legislation.

Cameron is also expected to press Obama to return Shaker Aamer, the former British resident held in Guantánamo Bay, to the United Kingdom.

On Wednesday night, the Pentagon announced it had sent four detainees to Oman, and another to Estonia, reducing the number held at the controversial facility to 122.

But the president might feel a heightened pressure to show a united front with Cameron after receiving heavy criticism for skipping a unity march with world leaders last weekend in Paris. Dozens of presidents and prime ministers — including Cameron — participated in the event, although no senior U.S. officials did.

Earlier this week, the White House conceded that it had erred in not sending a more senior official.