Twitter Prohibited Intelligence Agencies to Spy upon Its Users

Added: Tuesday, May 10th, 2016

The microblogging service has blocked US national security agencies from purchasing bulk data on its users from a data analytics firm. Previously, American spies like the FBI and CIA were able to query Twitter data from Dataminr, the analytics company in which Twitter owns a 5% stake. Agents could view more tweets by keywords, over a longer period, than what a standard Twitter search would offer. Now Twitter has blocked any future sales, maintaining the power to veto Dataminr’s contracts with its customers.


Twitter and Washington have had a tense relationship as of late, in part because of surveillance of westerners. When it comes to combating extremism, the US tech firms have voluntarily assisted, and Twitter was not an exception. It is not clear why Twitter deems selling data to American spies that it sells to private companies wrong. The microblogging service claimed that it had never authorized Dataminr or any third party to sell data to a government or intelligence agency for surveillance purposes, but a number of current and former US officials confirmed that American intelligence agencies had used Dataminr tools. It is also known that the analytics company is backed by In-Q-Tel, the non-commercial organization serving as the venture capital arm of American intelligence agencies.

In the meantime, Dataminr advertised a public sector product on its website that instantly analyzed all publicly available Tweets for information related to terrorist threats, social and political unrest. It is also known that the analytics company maintains a contract with DHS. As for Twitter, the company admitted that government contracts were acceptable if they do not involve spying upon Twitter users.

Posted by: sam