Twitter Blocks Government 'Spy Centers' From Accessing User Data (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Twitter has blocked federally funded "domestic spy centers" from using a powerful social media monitoring tool after public records revealed that the government had special access to users' information for controversial surveillance efforts. The American Civil Liberties Union of California discovered that so-called fusion centers, which collect intelligence, had access to monitoring technology from Dataminr, an analytics company partially owned by Twitter. The ACLU's records prompted the companies to announce that Dataminr had terminated access for all fusion centers and would no longer provide social media surveillance tools to any local, state or federal government entities. The government centers are partnerships between agencies that work to collect vast amounts of information purportedly to analyze "threats". The spy centers, according to the ACLU, target protesters, journalists and others protected by free speech rights while also racially profiling people deemed "suspicious" by law enforcement. Records that the ACLU obtained uncovered that a fusion center in southern California had access to Dataminr's "geospatial analysis application", which allowed the government to do location-based tracking as well as searches tied to keywords. That means the center could use Dataminr to search billions of tweets and monitor specific demographics or organizations.

Comments

Unless they make gay wedding cakes

[Anonymous Coward]

Some companies are more equal than others.

No effect really

[Casualposter]

The agencies will simply create a corporation and have it do all of the data mining and then sell the information to the government for a fee. Not going to stop this behavior at all.

Re:No effect really

[admin7087]

Also, people need to understand that if they Tweet or publish anything else on the Internet or mobile phones, their data will be mined by many third parties. If they don't like that, they need to resort to more private p2p means of communication.

Now I'm really worried

[bickerdyke]

Is anyone else slightly worried by this?

Like... if government and law enforcement aren't allowed access to that data, who else are they having as customers at their datamining company?

Re:Now I'm really worried

[gnick]

I don't think people should allow their governments access to their private data without a warrant.

A large part of the debate is what "private" means. If you post it in a social forum, is it private? If you communicate it directly to another user on a social forum, is that private? If you watch "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog" on YouTube, is that private? If you click an ad for ZipLocks, is that private? If you send an e-mail with the phrase, "Meet me at the capitol at noon - I have the guns and explosives - Bwahaha! We'll kill them all!" is that private? It's all worth money to the right buyer - And the companies that collect that data love to sell it.

Stop please

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The American Civil Liberties Union of California discovered that so-called fusion centers, which collect intelligence, had access to monitoring technology from Dataminr, an analytics company partially owned by Twitter.

The English language already has a word for government information gathering fusion aggregation and analysis centers: panopticon.

The most important guiding principle behind the design of the US constitution is not allowing the government to build the tools of tyranny to begin with. If it doesn't exist, it cannot be abused. That is the only principle that seems to work historically, and, more specifically, relying on "the vote" to prevent government from going into the dictatorial weeds has been shown full of failure in various historical democracies. Indeed, said vote more often than not is the end downfall as "emergency powers" are issued to a charismatic demagogue who never relinquishes it.

No panopticons. And no emergency powers to use to build the panopticon's data gathering. Stop giving these things to government.