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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.
Note how they didn't shut the operation down, they just cut off a few of the data subscribers. The analytics company is still running doing exactly the same thing and giving out exactly the same information.
The article states Dataminr was in volition of Twitter's ToS. Was Dataminr blocked? Sued? Taken to court for the federal crime of unauthorized computer access (which happens to individuals when they break someone's ToS)? Nope. Dataminr and Twitter are still close friends. Twitter still gives it a live feed of all its data. Why care about laws then you're buddies with the people who decide how selective their selectively enforce will be? Something you do is illegal but you're friends with high people? No worries, you'll never be targeted. Those laws aren't for you while I stay in charge, best you help keep me here.
As someone who used to work in this industry, Twitter (through their third party data brokers) will happily sell this data directly to law enforcement and Homeland Security. They already do. The news here is that they cut off a third party who is buying the data, analyzing it, and selling results. There are many more vendors offering similar services, and the model will probably shift to get the data through the government instead of directly from Twitter as a result.