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Twitter Blocks Feds From Data Mining Service (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader cites a report on USA Today: Online social media company Twitter has reportedly blocked U.S. intelligence agencies from access to a widely used data mining service it partly owns. Twitter told Dataminr, the business partner that sifts through and provides access to the full output of the San Francisco-based firm's social media postings known as tweets, that it didn't want the service provided to government investigators, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Twitter made the decision because the company did not like the "optics" of appearing too close to U.S. spy agencies, the Journal reported, citing an unidentified intelligence official. The issue could further escalate the public privacy vs. government security tensions between high tech firms and the federal government as investigators seek access to social media and other electronic data in an effort to detect and avert suspected terrorist plots. Newsweek's Kenneth Li said: "This makes no sense. So, dataminr's hedge fund customers are ok, but not the government?"
Do they really mean what they say or did they "block them" from this service while giving them an all you can drink tap right at the source? What's to stop the Feds from accessing the service under a fictitious name or via a legitimate company?
I really am turning into a conspiracy theorist. :/
It's hard to tell these days.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
...and hit up the consumers of the data for that information. "Give us all of the information about this Twitter account that you have and tell no one." Meanwhile it'll be 3rd party advertising firms who don't care/have an image to maintain and are incompetent enough to hand the Feds the keys to ALL of the information. Twitter at least could siphon what information it releases.
It's a PR stunt, it literally does nothing to curtail information flow. If you want to be anonymous, quit using the internet.
"pay us. we're not doing this for free."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
...um, Twitter....lol
So, ISIS using Twitter is tolerable, but US government — no, that's just wrong?
Ah, well, they started to go after "violent extremism" too now, finally. The "optics" must've gotten really bad...
Unfortunately, they don't distinguish between terrorists and, for example, Ukrainians defending their country.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I take it the cheque bounced?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Newsweek's Kenneth Li said: "This makes no sense. So, dataminr's hedge fund customers are ok, but not the government?"
Plus, what's to stop the gov't from hiring some university or industrial researchers and telling them "go mine Twitter, here a few pointers to the sorts of things that interest us, and let us know if you find anything"?
It doesn't even have to be that obvious. There are plenty of more sublte (devious?) ways of accomplishing the same thing.
Newsweek's Kenneth Li said: "This makes no sense. So, dataminr's hedge fund customers are ok, but not the government?"
Plus, what's to stop the gov't from hiring some university or industrial researchers and telling them "go mine Twitter, here are some pointers on the sorts of things that interest us, tell is if you find anything, and if anyone asks we were never here"?
It doesn't even have to be that obvious. There are plenty of other sublte (devious?) ways of getting the information.
How will the Feds know when I take my next poo, now?
At least the corporations using this data-mining are being honest about what they're using it for. The government? "Hey, we need to look at this. For reasons. And you can't tell anyone."
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
hey big gov... pay us like all the other clients for our data.
they can just ask the library of congress. they keep every single tweet.
Newsweek's Kenneth Li comment that: "This makes no sense. So, dataminr's hedge fund customers are ok, but not the government?" Itself makes no sense.
Is Mr. Li living in a cave? Does he work under a rock? Is he unaware of the current security environment and the tension between the Three Letter Agencies and the tech community?
Maybe it makes no sense to Mr. Li but it makes perfect sense to me.
And yes, this could be pure optics and PR for Twitter. Or it could be an entirely real effort to limit the scope of government snooping (the effectiveness of that would be in question).
The TLA's did this to themselves. They are reputationally damaged and under suspicion of constitutional violations. The whole "don't worry, we are experts, trust us, we'll never betray you" line they have been subliminally broadcasting has worn thin and lots of people no longer believe it.
I've often wondered if someone could set up a black-list of government-owned computers.
This could be set up and managed much like the SPAM black lists or the AdBlock lists - managed by an interested party, using information submitted by the public. Execute "sudo apt-get install govblock", and your system automatically sends a 404 response to requests from government computers.
Now, anyone with an inkling of how the net works will realize that this is trivial to get around, but consider it from the point of view of the (for example) FBI: you are the IT director for the building, and you need a way to route these requests through an external computer somewhere not in the building.
That's an enormous amount of work for the FBI, and it could come to naught if someone figures it out and puts the external computers on the black list. It's easy for an individual to do, not so much for an organization.
You could automatically block all access within, say, 35 miles of Pennsylvania Ave in Washington. That would cover the FBI and pretty-much *all* of its employees. This means that an employee can't even browse from their home and send the results to the office.
A handful of 35-mile blocked geolocated areas would put a big damper on government intrusions. The loss in viewership would be minimal.
Just a thought.
It's only a matter of time before the public steps in and solves the surveilance problems once and for all.
The feds already have at least two scraping services extant. The old one was called Large Scale Internet Extraction (LSIE), the current one is K2, Everest, Ranier, or Kilimanjaro. They don't need dataminr
Newsweek's Kenneth Li said: "This makes no sense. So, dataminr's hedge fund customers are OK, but not the government?"
Yeah, Ken, let me see if I can break it down for you a little bit ... hedge funds don't put people in jail ... does that help?
"This makes no sense. So, dataminr's hedge fund customers are ok, but not the government?"
It makes perfect sense, the worse hedge fund customers can do is try to sell you something. The government can send armed people to your door who can shoot you for next to no reason and suffer no meaningful consequences. And before someone says "well they're going after bad people" I suggest you look up SWATing, misuse of tactical teams (Berwyn Heights assault on mayors home) and police overreactions (Boston "bomb" scare).
How? The NSA is obviously allowed to spy on US soil. Assuming they've got the raw feed (via mass surveillance) and don't want to do their own analytics, a classic intelligence operation is in the offing: Find an insider, persuade/pay/blackmail him to install spyware, business as usual. The NSA doesn't need to attack Twittr directly, spying on 3 or 4 of their customers will provide the same data.
Once again, the intelligence organisations want to suck in more data for their push-button answers. This lot is pre-processed, which is a step in the right direction but it's still worthless without human analysts to filter it.