# Man-in-the-middle for good?

- Author: Kojin Glick
- Published: 2023-09-20
- Canonical: https://www.kojinglick.com/blog/man-in-the-middle-for-good

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As part of the Invent2Prevent competition, which is a Department of Homeland Security sponsored startup competition with the objective of creating counter-violent-extremism programs or tools, I had the following thought: what if you could set up an HTTPS proxy on youth-owned devices to identify possible extremist content so that parents could broach the conversation before the user got too deep in extremist content?

Obviously, this is a potentially dangerous line of thinking. Designed poorly, this allows parents unfettered access over their child’s web traffic, enabling parents to enact draconian limitations over their child’s growing interests. 

But designed well, this could be a tool that offers a concerned parents, or school counselors a canary in the dark mines of digital extremist recruitment. 

Rather than simply forward web traffic by pushing urls to be checked against some web-hosted database, a more sensitive solution would be to pull a url map of links associated with extremism. And by showing parents only deeply concerning patterns in their child’s consumption of digital media, it would prevent parents from using the tool repressively. 

At the end of the day, the goal of the tool would be to enable genuine conversations between potential extremist recruits and their immediate, trusted and offline social network. But much more planning and clever design will be needed to ensure that this doesn’t simply enter the history books as another repressive internet tool or a back door for nefarious actors. 

Lots to think about.