Twitter Subsidiary Caught Giving Surveillance Feeds To Govts, Twitter Backpedals

[grarpamp]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/15/twitter-dataminr-user-data-aclu
http://www.aclunc.org/docs/20160315_dataminr_email_to_jric.pdf
http://www.aclunc.org/docs/20161212_twitter_letter_to_aclu.pdf
https://www.aclunc.org/our-work/legal-docket/gill-v-doj-challenge-federal-suspicious-activity-reporting
https://www.jric.org/

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.

Shell companies to be given same access in the future.