Twitter revokes U.S. intelligent agencies’ access to analytics data tool

Execs from Dataminr, of which Twitter owns 5%, recently told officials that Twitter was revoking the government’s paid access to its tool, citing a policy forbidding the selling of its data for surveillance purposes, reports the Wall Street Journal. Its software sends out alerts about terror attacks and other world events when it detects patterns in the hundreds of millions of tweets each day. Dataminr, which had previously provided its services to the agencies for two years, says its software alerted clients to the terror attack in Brussels 10 minutes before the news media did. Now, however, a senior intelligence official told the WSJ that Twitter has become worried about the “optics” of appearing to be close to American intelligence services.