The decision was not publicly announced which was confirmed to the media by an intelligence official and other people also aware of the facts. The service, which sends alarms to the political unrest, terrorist attacks and other potentially important events in real time, is not supplied directly from Twitter, but from Dataminr. Twitter said in a statement that its “data is largely public” specifying that the “US government may review public accounts on its own, like any user could”. A US private company that extracts important information from their Twitter feed for customers, including the intelligence agencies and Dataminr is the only company authorized by the Twitter (which owns 5%) to have access to the set of all the messages posted on the social network. However, US intelligence has a venture capital arm called In-Q-Tel (yep) that has reportedly invested in Dataminr and other social media analytics firms. For example, Dataminr broke the news, the US intelligence agencies, the terrorist attacks in Paris, in November, soon after their start. In March, the company would communicate to its customers the news of the attacks Brussels 10 minutes prior to its dissemination in the media. As the John C. Inglis said, “If Twitter continues to sell its data to private, but denies them the government is hypocritical”. — Jameel Jaffer (@JameelJaffer) May 9, 2016 John C. Inglis, a former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency also added that “I think it’s a bad sign of a lack of appropriate cooperation between private sector organizations and the government”. However, US spy agencies reportedly aren’t pleased with the decision, as they have become increasingly dependent on social media analysis to root out terrorists.
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