Twitter Cuts CIA Access, But Sells Data To Russia?

Is Twitter Inc TWTR's policy of who it hands over data to a double standard?

Twitter's decision to cut off U.S. intelligence services from accessing its data has been widely reported known for some time. What hasn't been reported is the company's willingness to allow foreign governments, especially those that aren't particularly friendly to the US, to receive the same data and information U.S. intelligence agencies are banned from.

Dataminr is a company that searches for patterns across hundreds of millions of Tweets and then reports its findings and alerts to its clients which used to include U.S. intelligence agencies - until Dataminr was forced to end its relationship with spy agencies in early May.

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Meanwhile, Twitter appears to have no problem in allowing Dataminr to count Russia-based RT as a client.

RT is an English-language broadcaster created and funded by the Russian government. According to The Wall Street Journal, Russian Federal Security Service agents "have full access via RT to the alerts now being denied to the CIA."

The Central Intelligence Agency was quoted by WSJ as saying that Dataminr's service have proven to be "critical in providing indications of pending plots" by Islamic State and al Qaeda terrorists.