11 ms·

Twitter Bars Intelligence Agencies from Using Analytics Service

218 points by bootload 10y ago

chrissnell 10y ago
Weren't Twitter's employees being threatened by ISIS? If my employees were being threatened by a transnational terrorist group, I wouldn't hesitate at providing firehose-style data to a gov't agency, especially considering these are public tweets that we're talking about here.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
Will this in any way actually impede intelligence agencies from getting that information if they want it?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- samstave 10y ago
  This is a great question! Facebook on the other hand built a Washington DC office and hires ex-secret service people as a matter of course. This should be the number one reason people should drop using FB.... But everyone is already fucked. You have no privacy, again, ever.
  - flyt 10y ago
    I downvoted your comment but please keep in mind that Facebook is a large company that needs to lobby the federal government on a variety of issues, which necessitates a presence in DC. Also, the Secret Service employs some of the smartest and most capable people in the federal government. Any company is lucky to hire ex-USSS agents. Using these two points as evidence that humanity collectively has "no privacy" is not only false on the surface but dishonest when closely examined. There are valid critiques of both the US Government's use of the Internet and, separately, Facebook, but these two are not intellectually honest.
    - neurobuddha 10y ago
      Facebook is a large company that needs to lobby the federal government on a variety of issues, which necessitates a presence in DC. What a ridiculous statement. I wish I had enough karma to downvote you.
    - ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
      "Also, the Secret Service employs some of the smartest and most capable people in the federal government"-the plethora of stories in the past several years about the SS fucking up on many, many levels would indicate that they probably hire mediocre, middle of the road candidates (at most). They aren't superhuman, or caricatures from a Tom Clancy novel.
- elbear 10y ago
  Well, intelligence agencies have the resources to build their own versions of this product, if they really want to. At the most, it will slow them down.
npx 10y ago
I'm not convinced that the goal here is actually to obstruct intelligence agencies, I think they'd just use a shell company or flatly demand access if they wanted it. As far as I'm aware, the Library of Congress is archiving all tweets. It feels like a cheap way to generate press portraying Twitter as a staunch defender of liberty. I'm not sold.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  LOC was archiving in 2010, but that project is no longer going forward: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-twitter-archive-119698.html http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-tw...
  - mratzloff 10y ago
    I have to continually remind myself not to read comments, but, ugh, it's a bad habit. The ones on Politico are really terrible. They're essentially indistinguishable in content from YouTube comments. Everyone thinks of themselves as funny, clever, or insightful, but they're just not. Jesus. If these archival tweets were around for several hundred years, perhaps they might be interesting to historians in the same way ancient Roman graffiti is. But it seems far more likely to me that this project, even if it does get off the ground, would shut down well before that. I'm not sure Politico comments are that far removed from a lot of tweets... and based on the Politico comments, maybe shutting down that project wouldn't be a bad thing.
- ihsw 10y ago
  Well, you're probably right that the goal isn't simply to obstruct intelligence agencies. I am guessing that the idea is more than likely to tell them to quit being too demanding and start acting like just another client. Plus, being involved with the government usually involves all kinds of regulatory nonsense and (sometimes) having their personnel on premises for whatever reason. In summary it's probably a cost cutting measure to keep legal and engineering teams from getting preoccupied with government nonsense requests, but hey they can spin it as giving a big middle finger to the government so why not.
awalton 10y ago
So Palantir's business gets better? What about any of a thousand front companies these Intelligence Agencies run for plausible deniability purposes? This move does pretty much nothing.
gesman 10y ago
...ok ... How much?
aioprisan 10y ago
Is this any more than a way for Twitter to claim the moral high ground while having no actual impact on what these agencies do or if/how they use Twitter's data? At the very least they'll use a company like Palantir. Is a third party's use similarly regulated, so that Palantir couldn't simply relay that data themselves? If not, then this was clearly not thought out (unlikely) or it's been thought out but a choice was made to still allow for that use case (more likely).
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  It is not 'taking the moral high ground' to stop intelligent agencies from dutifully doing their jobs of protecting our safety and interests, so long as this is actually the case. I suggest were you to have the opportunity to sit in on Mr. Obama's daily security briefings, you might have your eyes widened as to the scope of the violence that threatens us. In Canada, where I live, our young Prime Minister had a rather negative tone about such things during the election, but the moment he was elected, and had visibility into the actual goings on, he changed his tune pretty quickly and the bills he was supposed to quash will remain intact. Of course, lazy policemen wanting Twitter to do their work for them notwithstanding.
- nl 10y ago
  Is a third party's use similarly regulated, so that Palantir couldn't simply relay that data themselves? Yes, third part use is regulated by Twitter too. I realize Palantir has demoed similar functionality, but they require you to source your own data subscription.
ErikAugust 10y ago
Full article was behind a paywall, but: The subheadline here is actually: "Social media firm cuts access to Dataminr, a service used to identify unfolding terror attacks, political unrest" So, Dataminr is a startup that had the firehose to do that kind of analysis. All this could be is them putting a company that is built on top of Twitter out of business. They have done this plenty of times. Seems pretty heavily spun to make it sound like they are taking some sort of moral high ground.
- nemothekid 10y ago
  Very odd that this is branded as cutting off intelligence agencies then - this seems more like they are cutting off another company from the firehose like they did to DataSift when they acquired Ginp. Dataminr didn't provide access to the firehose, iirc, but had a really good event detection product. I had actually heard of them because I heard CNN was a very happy user of the product. EDIT: >The move doesn’t affect Dataminr’s service to financial industry, news media or other clients outside the intelligence community. The Wall Street Journal is involved in a trial of Dataminr’s news product. Read the article, and it seems media companies still have access. I guess Twitter is telling another company who their customers can and can't be.
  - ErikAugust 10y ago
    Right - maybe just re-cut the government deals with itself down the line.
- x5n1 10y ago
  Yeah probably Twitter for three letter agencies for a multi-million dollar contract is coming out soon is why.
- pcr0 10y ago
  Google the article to get around the paywall.
  - ludamad 10y ago
throwaway99998 10y ago
This accomplishes nothing. Palantir provides this same service on top of GNIP data. Here's a live demo from one of Palantir's own conferences: https://youtu.be/h2NA48iypME?t=559 https://youtu.be/h2NA48iypME?t=559
- nl 10y ago
  You need to supply your own Gnip subscription to use this though.
kabdib 10y ago
Twitter must be such a popular target for the Intelligence crowd that I wonder how the heck they coordinate all those NSLs and whatnot. Is there a clearing house in the USG that handles that? "Look, that's like the fifteenth request for the 'Whole Banana' this week. We're gonna have to --" (telephone murmurs) "Fine, so you have a nosebleed level pay grade. Sir. But there's more Twitter bandwidth going to you folks in DC than there is to all of the /real/ users of Twitter. It's embarrassing. Why can't you just go down the street and ask the CIA?" (angry murmurs) "Or the FBI. I hear they have a special on faking evidence with parallel reconstruction this week. Want the promo code?"
spenvo 10y ago
> Twitter said it has a long-standing policy barring third parties, including Dataminr, from selling its data to a government agency for surveillance purposes. The company wouldn’t comment on how Dataminr—a close business partner—was able to provide its service to the government for two years, or why that arrangement came to an end. So why was the exception made to this policy? > In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital arm of the U.S. intelligence community, has been investing in data-mining companies to beef up the government’s ability to sort through massive amounts of information. In-Q-Tel, for example, has invested in data-mining firms Palantir Technologies Inc. and Recorded Future Inc. > U.S. intelligence agencies gained access to Dataminr’s service after an In-Q-Tel investment in the firm, according to a person familiar with the matter. > When a pilot program arranged by In-Q-Tel ended recently, Twitter told Dataminr it didn’t want to continue the relationship with intelligence agencies, this person said. VC funds led by US agencies that operate on a quasi-legal and opaque basis is the worst form of crony capitalism Open version of the article http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-agencies-from-using-analytics-service-1462751682-lMyQjAxMTE2MzAwODUwNzgzWj http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-a...
- misiti3780 10y ago
  coming from someone who worked as a govt consultant, In-Q-tel is a scary entity
  - chillacy 10y ago
    How so? I've pitched them in the past. They behaved like a VC firm with government interests.
    - MacsHeadroom 10y ago
      >a VC firm with government interests That right there. That's the scary part.
      - jonnybgood 10y ago
        And why is that scary?
gamebak 10y ago
Why do you people upvote articles where we have to pay to read them ?
- vog 10y ago
  It's okay if there are workarounds for the paywall. From the HN FAQ: > Are paywalls ok? > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. > In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    But there is no workaround for the paywall that works outside the US.
    - vog 10y ago
      I live in Germany and the web search workaround (click on "web" link below title) worked perfectly for me.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        I live in Germany and the web search workaround only gives me the paywalled article again.
        vog 10y ago
        Do you have a privacy browser extension which suppresses the Referer header? (which is really all this workaround is about)
- SyneRyder 10y ago
  If you click the "web" link underneath the main link at the top, you can find a workaround to read the full article. Some people here would also be subscribers though.
ManlyBread 10y ago
This is a PR move, they won't be able to stop them completely.
neurobuddha 10y ago
Twitter is infamous for censorship and shadowbanning non-politically correct views. Lately they have been suppressing Bernie Sanders supporters[1] and anti-Hillary activists[2]. Twitter is a truly two-faced Orwellian enterprise that is completely in the back pocket of Big Brother. [1] https://www.change.org/p/petition-request-twitter-not-to-suppress-bernie-sanders-activists-on-its-social-media-platform https://www.change.org/p/petition-request-twitter-not-to-sup... [2] http://www.vocativ.com/290811/twitter-accused-of-censoring-anti-hillary-hashtag/ http://www.vocativ.com/290811/twitter-accused-of-censoring-a...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
beshrkayali 10y ago
What is this, a joke? As if any intelligence agency would request access to Twitter analytics service under official intelligence agency business name...
known 10y ago
Not plausible due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
deadtofu 10y ago
Anyone have a non-paywalled link?
- marksomnian 10y ago
  Try http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-agencies-from-using-analytics-service-1462751682-lMyQjAxMTE2MzAwODUwNzgzWj http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-a...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hawleyal 10y ago
Mirror http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-agencies-from-using-analytics-service-1462751682-lMyQjAxMTE2MzAwODUwNzgzWj http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-a...
crusso 10y ago
Shouldn't HN have a policy against posting articles that are behind a paywall? Yes, I know that you can jump to google and search for the article to try to avoid the paywall - but shouldn't a news aggregator make a statement about letting paywalled news sources be on their own?
- ikeboy 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
ikeboy 10y ago
https://archive.is/Tr7Xg https://archive.is/Tr7Xg

218 points by bootload 10y ago

Weren't Twitter's employees being threatened by ISIS? If my employees were being threatened by a transnational terrorist group, I wouldn't hesitate at providing firehose-style data to a gov't agency, especially considering these are public tweets that we're talking about here.

Aelinsaar 10y ago

Will this in any way actually impede intelligence agencies from getting that information if they want it?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
samstave 10y ago
This is a great question! Facebook on the other hand built a Washington DC office and hires ex-secret service people as a matter of course. This should be the number one reason people should drop using FB.... But everyone is already fucked. You have no privacy, again, ever.
- flyt 10y ago
  I downvoted your comment but please keep in mind that Facebook is a large company that needs to lobby the federal government on a variety of issues, which necessitates a presence in DC. Also, the Secret Service employs some of the smartest and most capable people in the federal government. Any company is lucky to hire ex-USSS agents. Using these two points as evidence that humanity collectively has "no privacy" is not only false on the surface but dishonest when closely examined. There are valid critiques of both the US Government's use of the Internet and, separately, Facebook, but these two are not intellectually honest.
  - neurobuddha 10y ago
    Facebook is a large company that needs to lobby the federal government on a variety of issues, which necessitates a presence in DC. What a ridiculous statement. I wish I had enough karma to downvote you.
  - ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
    "Also, the Secret Service employs some of the smartest and most capable people in the federal government"-the plethora of stories in the past several years about the SS fucking up on many, many levels would indicate that they probably hire mediocre, middle of the road candidates (at most). They aren't superhuman, or caricatures from a Tom Clancy novel.
elbear 10y ago
Well, intelligence agencies have the resources to build their own versions of this product, if they really want to. At the most, it will slow them down.

npx 10y ago

I'm not convinced that the goal here is actually to obstruct intelligence agencies, I think they'd just use a shell company or flatly demand access if they wanted it. As far as I'm aware, the Library of Congress is archiving all tweets. It feels like a cheap way to generate press portraying Twitter as a staunch defender of liberty. I'm not sold.

greglindahl 10y ago
LOC was archiving in 2010, but that project is no longer going forward: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-twitter-archive-119698.html http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/library-of-congress-tw...
- mratzloff 10y ago
  I have to continually remind myself not to read comments, but, ugh, it's a bad habit. The ones on Politico are really terrible. They're essentially indistinguishable in content from YouTube comments. Everyone thinks of themselves as funny, clever, or insightful, but they're just not. Jesus. If these archival tweets were around for several hundred years, perhaps they might be interesting to historians in the same way ancient Roman graffiti is. But it seems far more likely to me that this project, even if it does get off the ground, would shut down well before that. I'm not sure Politico comments are that far removed from a lot of tweets... and based on the Politico comments, maybe shutting down that project wouldn't be a bad thing.
ihsw 10y ago
Well, you're probably right that the goal isn't simply to obstruct intelligence agencies. I am guessing that the idea is more than likely to tell them to quit being too demanding and start acting like just another client. Plus, being involved with the government usually involves all kinds of regulatory nonsense and (sometimes) having their personnel on premises for whatever reason. In summary it's probably a cost cutting measure to keep legal and engineering teams from getting preoccupied with government nonsense requests, but hey they can spin it as giving a big middle finger to the government so why not.

awalton 10y ago

So Palantir's business gets better? What about any of a thousand front companies these Intelligence Agencies run for plausible deniability purposes? This move does pretty much nothing.

gesman 10y ago

...ok ... How much?

aioprisan 10y ago

Is this any more than a way for Twitter to claim the moral high ground while having no actual impact on what these agencies do or if/how they use Twitter's data? At the very least they'll use a company like Palantir. Is a third party's use similarly regulated, so that Palantir couldn't simply relay that data themselves? If not, then this was clearly not thought out (unlikely) or it's been thought out but a choice was made to still allow for that use case (more likely).

jomamaxx 10y ago
It is not 'taking the moral high ground' to stop intelligent agencies from dutifully doing their jobs of protecting our safety and interests, so long as this is actually the case. I suggest were you to have the opportunity to sit in on Mr. Obama's daily security briefings, you might have your eyes widened as to the scope of the violence that threatens us. In Canada, where I live, our young Prime Minister had a rather negative tone about such things during the election, but the moment he was elected, and had visibility into the actual goings on, he changed his tune pretty quickly and the bills he was supposed to quash will remain intact. Of course, lazy policemen wanting Twitter to do their work for them notwithstanding.
nl 10y ago
Is a third party's use similarly regulated, so that Palantir couldn't simply relay that data themselves? Yes, third part use is regulated by Twitter too. I realize Palantir has demoed similar functionality, but they require you to source your own data subscription.

ErikAugust 10y ago

Full article was behind a paywall, but: The subheadline here is actually: "Social media firm cuts access to Dataminr, a service used to identify unfolding terror attacks, political unrest" So, Dataminr is a startup that had the firehose to do that kind of analysis. All this could be is them putting a company that is built on top of Twitter out of business. They have done this plenty of times. Seems pretty heavily spun to make it sound like they are taking some sort of moral high ground.

nemothekid 10y ago
Very odd that this is branded as cutting off intelligence agencies then - this seems more like they are cutting off another company from the firehose like they did to DataSift when they acquired Ginp. Dataminr didn't provide access to the firehose, iirc, but had a really good event detection product. I had actually heard of them because I heard CNN was a very happy user of the product. EDIT: >The move doesn’t affect Dataminr’s service to financial industry, news media or other clients outside the intelligence community. The Wall Street Journal is involved in a trial of Dataminr’s news product. Read the article, and it seems media companies still have access. I guess Twitter is telling another company who their customers can and can't be.
- ErikAugust 10y ago
  Right - maybe just re-cut the government deals with itself down the line.
x5n1 10y ago
Yeah probably Twitter for three letter agencies for a multi-million dollar contract is coming out soon is why.
pcr0 10y ago
Google the article to get around the paywall.
- ludamad 10y ago

throwaway99998 10y ago

This accomplishes nothing. Palantir provides this same service on top of GNIP data. Here's a live demo from one of Palantir's own conferences: https://youtu.be/h2NA48iypME?t=559 https://youtu.be/h2NA48iypME?t=559

nl 10y ago
You need to supply your own Gnip subscription to use this though.

kabdib 10y ago

Twitter must be such a popular target for the Intelligence crowd that I wonder how the heck they coordinate all those NSLs and whatnot. Is there a clearing house in the USG that handles that? "Look, that's like the fifteenth request for the 'Whole Banana' this week. We're gonna have to --" (telephone murmurs) "Fine, so you have a nosebleed level pay grade. Sir. But there's more Twitter bandwidth going to you folks in DC than there is to all of the /real/ users of Twitter. It's embarrassing. Why can't you just go down the street and ask the CIA?" (angry murmurs) "Or the FBI. I hear they have a special on faking evidence with parallel reconstruction this week. Want the promo code?"

spenvo 10y ago

> Twitter said it has a long-standing policy barring third parties, including Dataminr, from selling its data to a government agency for surveillance purposes. The company wouldn’t comment on how Dataminr—a close business partner—was able to provide its service to the government for two years, or why that arrangement came to an end. So why was the exception made to this policy? > In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital arm of the U.S. intelligence community, has been investing in data-mining companies to beef up the government’s ability to sort through massive amounts of information. In-Q-Tel, for example, has invested in data-mining firms Palantir Technologies Inc. and Recorded Future Inc. > U.S. intelligence agencies gained access to Dataminr’s service after an In-Q-Tel investment in the firm, according to a person familiar with the matter. > When a pilot program arranged by In-Q-Tel ended recently, Twitter told Dataminr it didn’t want to continue the relationship with intelligence agencies, this person said. VC funds led by US agencies that operate on a quasi-legal and opaque basis is the worst form of crony capitalism Open version of the article http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-agencies-from-using-analytics-service-1462751682-lMyQjAxMTE2MzAwODUwNzgzWj http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-a...

misiti3780 10y ago
coming from someone who worked as a govt consultant, In-Q-tel is a scary entity
- chillacy 10y ago
  How so? I've pitched them in the past. They behaved like a VC firm with government interests.
  - MacsHeadroom 10y ago
    >a VC firm with government interests That right there. That's the scary part.
    - jonnybgood 10y ago
      And why is that scary?

gamebak 10y ago

Why do you people upvote articles where we have to pay to read them ?

vog 10y ago
It's okay if there are workarounds for the paywall. From the HN FAQ: > Are paywalls ok? > It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. > In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
- kuschku 10y ago
  But there is no workaround for the paywall that works outside the US.
  - vog 10y ago
    I live in Germany and the web search workaround (click on "web" link below title) worked perfectly for me.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      I live in Germany and the web search workaround only gives me the paywalled article again.
      - vog 10y ago
        Do you have a privacy browser extension which suppresses the Referer header? (which is really all this workaround is about)
SyneRyder 10y ago
If you click the "web" link underneath the main link at the top, you can find a workaround to read the full article. Some people here would also be subscribers though.

ManlyBread 10y ago

This is a PR move, they won't be able to stop them completely.

neurobuddha 10y ago

Twitter is infamous for censorship and shadowbanning non-politically correct views. Lately they have been suppressing Bernie Sanders supporters[1] and anti-Hillary activists[2]. Twitter is a truly two-faced Orwellian enterprise that is completely in the back pocket of Big Brother. [1] https://www.change.org/p/petition-request-twitter-not-to-suppress-bernie-sanders-activists-on-its-social-media-platform https://www.change.org/p/petition-request-twitter-not-to-sup... [2] http://www.vocativ.com/290811/twitter-accused-of-censoring-anti-hillary-hashtag/ http://www.vocativ.com/290811/twitter-accused-of-censoring-a...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

beshrkayali 10y ago

What is this, a joke? As if any intelligence agency would request access to Twitter analytics service under official intelligence agency business name...

known 10y ago

Not plausible due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

deadtofu 10y ago

Anyone have a non-paywalled link?

marksomnian 10y ago
Try http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-agencies-from-using-analytics-service-1462751682-lMyQjAxMTE2MzAwODUwNzgzWj http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-a...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hawleyal 10y ago

Mirror http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-agencies-from-using-analytics-service-1462751682-lMyQjAxMTE2MzAwODUwNzgzWj http://www.wsj.com/article_email/twitter-bars-intelligence-a...

crusso 10y ago

Shouldn't HN have a policy against posting articles that are behind a paywall? Yes, I know that you can jump to google and search for the article to try to avoid the paywall - but shouldn't a news aggregator make a statement about letting paywalled news sources be on their own?

ikeboy 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

ikeboy 10y ago

https://archive.is/Tr7Xg https://archive.is/Tr7Xg