The move leaves government officials without a valuable tool. Somewhat less clear is what sort of stand, if any, Twitter is taking.

Big Bad Data

There are a few threads to untangle here, and plenty of unanswered questions. Dataminr has been in business since 2009, and its main gig is scouring social media for patterns that might indicate breaking news, using algorithms to give those patterns a context and identity, and delivering the result in the form of a real-time breaking news alert. It's like when you get NYT news alerts on your phone, but on big-data steroids, and only available to clients with a big enough checkbook.

Until recently, according to the Journal, various US defense agencies were among those clients.

"From the government perspective, it's a good tool, because it gives real-time alerts to things that are happening before anyone really knows what's going on," says Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism expert and current adjunct professor at American University. "We want to allow law enforcement and the intelligence services to know bad things are happening in real time."