The FBI just got its hands on data that Twitter wouldn’t give the CIA

Russell Brandom reports:

The FBI has a new view into what’s happening on Twitter. Last week, the bureau hired Dataminr, a Twitter-linked analytics firm, to provide an “advanced alerting tool” to over 200 users. Twitter owns a 5 percent stake in Dataminr and provides it with exclusive access to the full “firehose” of live tweets, making it a valuable resource for anyone looking for illegal activity on the service.

[…]

However, the FBI contract seems to violate a key clause in Twitter’s Developer Agreement, which specifically forbids using the provided data to “investigate, track or surveil Twitter’s users.” In practice, that has often meant banning third-party companies found to be reselling data.

Read more on The Verge.

h/t, Joe Cadillic