Article Image

IPFS News Link • Privacy Rights

The FBI just got access to every one of your tweets -- and the TSA already had it

• rare.us

Of course, many of these posts are public and thus were already accessible to any FBI agent willing to do some detailed police work. The difference is that now the agency can search and sort all of Twitter's posts to find trends — or zero in on particular individuals, including those who have set their feeds to private.

The FBI got this access through a contract with Dataminr, a company partly owned by Twitter itself and the one company able to give users access to the full "fire hose" of Twitter data. (The publicly-available API only allows access to about 1 percent of all tweets.)

The bureau says it needs real-time access to all of Twitter to catch terrorists and other criminals. But needless to say, the overwhelmingly vast majority of Twitter users are not criminals, and their tweets will be subject to search anyway.

Moreover, in a grim irony, getting the full fire hose of Twitter data may actually make the FBI's investigations less accurate.


thelibertyadvisor.com/declare