L. Gordon Crovitz, in today's Wall Strett Journal, points out that Twitter allows the Russian "news service" RT, which is the personal playground of Putin, and creates news by its own admission, access to its Dataminr service but denies it to the Intelligence Community. The IC, is more than just the CIA, which Crovitz has missed. It includes the FBI, NSA, DIA, DNI, et al (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community). It does exclude all the news agencies, including such noted ones as NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, et al. Unlike Russia, our news services are not dictated to by the President very often. Our reporters are not jailed if they fail to make the right point.
Twitter is missing the point, in an attempt to make a point about how it's data services are used. If you sell a commercial service, and ignore the politics of who you sell it to, you have a basic commercial service. I remember a little company selling engineering knowledge bases to the Russians during the Cold War. Defense tried to stop them, and lost. They sold this service to anyone who wanted to buy engineering services. Twitter should stick to that model.
Twitter has to look at China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and a few of our allies to find out whether "intelligences services" are buying their goods - data - when they should know there is no way to determine who is and who isn't. North Korea is not likely to list the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) as the entity buying data from them. Nobody is going to be open about buying this data, nor how they use it.
Personally, I don't like Twitter selling data at all. I have to read a 14 page End User Acceptance Agreement to find out what I have agreed to, and almost nobody ever does. I could have authorized them to sell data to the Russia Today for all I know. Besides, if I don't agree, they don't let me use the service, which is kind of like extortion.
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