You may not have heard much about the Apple vs FBI case in recent weeks. Just because you haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean conflicts between government and tech entities are resolved. In fact, they’re intensifying.
Twitter bars US intelligence from accessing a service that digs through posts of random tweets. It’s believed this method is useful to fight terrorism. News agencies and intelligence leaders suspect Twitter doesn’t want to seem too cozy with the Federal Government. That seems to be a trend in the tech community these days. Then there is the?Dataminr effect. Dataminr is an organization that uses tools to reveal patterns in various tweets. Twitter owns five percent of Dataminr. In fact, they’re the only ones allowed by Twitter to access streaming of public tweets. And it’s Damaminr’s access the intelligence community has been barred from. And Dataminr is doing it’s part to fight terrorism. They’re the ones who alerted Federal authorities about the Paris attacks of November 2015…as they were happening. They’ve gathered critical information on ISIS as well. They’ve even gathered information about Brazil’s many crises on the eve of the Olympic games. Twitter says it’s barring intelligence like this because the company is concerned with digital security and privacy.
I think this part of the beef between tech and government entities. There’s still a lot of mistrust between the two. Tech industries are all too worried about the Feds exploiting data if they get their hands on it. Tech companies know privacy and civil liberties are very important to their customers. What I’d like to see is tech and government entities do is pull their strengths and resources together to fight our real enemies. I’m tired of seeing them turn on each other. If US intelligence and Dataminr work together to fight the real monsters of the world, how would that look?