Twitter has reportedly cut off access to a service that allowed U.S intelligence agencies to analyze the contents of hundreds of millions of daily user posts on the site.
The social networking giant reportedly asked Dataminr, a private company that mines public Twitter feeds, to stop providing the data to government agencies. The move was described on Sunday by an unnamed senior intelligence official who spoke with the Wall Street Journal.
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Dataminr’s software, which detects patterns in messages and user interactions, allowed agencies to search for terrorists using the site. Dataminr in March notified U.S. officials about a terrorist attack in Brussels 10 minutes before reports appeared in the media, the company said, and provided similar alerts about a November attack in Paris and additional attacks in Libya.
Though Twitter’s action aims to tamp down on the the appearance that it collaborates too closely with the intelligence community, the company said in a statement that the move should not substantially harm counterterrorism efforts. It said the data is “largely public,” and said the “U.S. government may review public accounts on its own, like any user could.”
It remains to be seen whether that will hold true. Members of the Islamic State have been particularly prolific on social media in recent years: Twitter in February said that it had shut down 125,000 accounts affiliated with the group since mid-2015.
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That revelation came as the site faced growing criticism for failing to do enough to combat terrorists on its network. A California woman in January filed a lawsuit against Twitter on that basis, saying that its use as a “tool” by the Islamic State had contributed to the shooting death of her husband in Jordan.
Though some in the intelligence community have criticized the latest move by Twitter, others insist the intelligence community is not going to be impeded. “It’s going to be very hard for Twitter to police who is accessing their data and what uses they are making of it,” said Leo Taddeo, a former special agent in charge of the FBI’s cyber division in New York. “Intelligence agencies are quite skillful at creating ‘cut-out’ to mask their activity.”
“I would bet that the USIC, and other services, such as intelligence agencies in China, Russia and Iran are already accessing much of this data through friendly marketing companies who act as proxies,” Taddeo added.
