Twitter blocks legitimate avenues of surveillance. With around 500 million tweets every day, it is very difficult for any organization, including sophisticated government agencies, to analyze its valuable information.
This could help to better understand critical events, such as terrorist attacks, but also people's feelings on important issues at a given time.
Apparently, Twitter doesn’t have such analytics services. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has blocked Dataminr, a company that provides analytics and identifies patterns in every tweet posted. Twitter’s ban is reportedly because US intelligence agencies use Dataminr.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, the WSJ reported that Dataminr executives recently told intelligence agencies that Twitter had ended its partnership with the company.
A senior executive confirmed Twitter's move and said the company "appeared to be concerned about how close the data is to US intelligence agencies."
Twitter appears to have very tight control over its APIs and the data it exposes. According to the WSJ, Dataminr, which owns a 5% stake in Twitter, was the only service with access to the network's full real-time stream of current and past tweets. So the US government doesn't have many alternatives to closely monitoring the network.
Dataminr, a service used by private businesses in areas such as finance, news, corporate security and crisis management, said it notified its clients about the Brussels attacks in March 10 minutes before the media, and has provided early warnings about ISIS attacks in Libya and the Brazilian political crisis.
Twitter is an incredibly powerful source of information about what's happening every day and what's about to happen, so you understand how important it is for government agencies.
According to Mashable, the company's latest transparency report showed that the number of data requests to the US government increased by 65 percent in the last six months of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014.
The problem with Twitter's decision to stop intelligence agencies from accessing Dataminr is that it reduces their ability to seek information about potential threats through legitimate methods.
