Twitter is falling under increased governmental pressure to provide private user data.
Information requests from the US topped the list, with 902 – 78 percent of requests – being made over the past half year, up 40 percent from the previous six months.
The social media platform’s semi-annual transparency report revealed that in total, 1,157 bids were made for user data, meaning requests are up by 40 percent, according to Twitter’s semi-annual transparency report published on Wednesday.
Twenty-six different governments worldwide have demanded the provision of information, meaning there has been an increase in country numbers too of around 15 percent from between July to December 2012.
The number of US requests for data soared above the others: Second on the list was Japan, who attempted to acquire the data of some 87 users, totaling a mere eight percent of total government data requests received.
The most common way in which governmental bodies ask for access to email or IP addresses of users is through court-issued subpoenas, Twitter said.
The company also noted a sharp rise in attempts to censor the San-Francisco based social media platform.
“Over the last six months, we have gone from withholding content in two countries to withholding content (ranging from hate speech to defamation) in seven countries,” said Twitter legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel.
Brazil was the home of the most censored twitter accounts, having requested that 39 defamatory tweets be removed from the social media site on nine separate occasions. France – a country notorious for ordering Twitter to reveal the identities of anti-Semitic Tweeters – came second on the list, requesting that 12 tweets be removed from its servers. Twitter complied with the anti-Semitic tweet requests in June.
“Over the last six months, we have gone from withholding content in two countries to withholding content (ranging from hate speech to defamation) in seven countries,” said Twitter.
The transparency report is the first released since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding US governmental surveillance practices.
Twitter stated that at the present moment it was unable to distinguish between the types of requests and separate them into national security issues. However, it expressed how that it would in the future be able to differentiate between the two.
“An important conversation has begun about the extent to which companies should be allowed to publish information regarding national security requests….we believe it’s important,” said Twitter in a blog post on Wednesday.
Unlike major tech companies Google, Facebook and Microsoft, Twitter was not listed as a participant in the PRISM program – as the bulk of the platform’s activity is conducted in the public sphere.
However, the company would still have to comply if the FISA court asked for information.
The mountainous region which lies on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan has long been infamous as an insurgent hotspot. Foreign air power is deemed necessary to cover the area as Afghan security forces have insufficient air power.
Turkish police have detained at least 25 Twitter users for allegedly spreading false reports, as anti-government demonstrations in Turkey continue for a sixth day.
Social media activists have been accused of using Twitter to “instigate public hatred and animosity,” according to Turkish media. Police raided 38 addresses to locate the suspects.
The activists were arrested early Wednesday in the western city of Izmir. Police said that their tweets contained “misleading and libelous information,” state-run news agency Anatolia reported. However, Ali Engin, an official from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), said that they were detained for urging people to protest.
Police tracked down the activists through their IP addresses, and were reportedly able to locate most of them. CHP said that they have sent lawyers to assist the arrested individuals.
The lawyers revealed to the media that police files on the individuals included tweets about where to meet, about police actions, and about the names of volunteer doctors and lawyers.
Earlier on Tuesday, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc apologized for the treatment of protesters during riots that grew out of a demonstration last Friday against the planned demolition of Taksim Gezi Park to build a mall. The police use of teargas and pepper spray to disperse protesters has been heavily criticized.
Arinc said that the police’s actions were wrong, and that security forces have been ordered not to use teargas except in cases of self-defense. "The excessive violence that was used in the first instance against those who were behaving with respect for the environment is wrong and unfair. I apologize to those citizens," Arinc said at a news conference on Tuesday.
After unrest began last Friday, tens of thousands of anti-government protesters held demonstrations in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Mugla, Antalya, and many other cities and towns across Turkey. At least two people were killed and thousands were injured in the nationwide protests.
The demonstrations continued on Wednesday, with protesters surrounding the offices of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
Twitter and other social networks have played a big role in helping demonstrators organize and share developments; the Turkish media has been roundly criticized for failing to cover the protests as they unfolded.
Prime Minister Erdogan has condemned social media’s role in the riots, singling out what he called the “scourge” of Twitter.
“There is now a menace which is called Twitter," Erdogan said on Sunday, dismissing the protests as being organized by extreme elements. "The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society."
Most people use social media like Facebook and Twitter to share photos of friends and family, chat with friends and strangers about random and amusing diversions, or follow their favorite websites, bands and television shows.
But what does the US military use those same networks for? Well, we can’t tell you: That’s “classified,” a CENTCOM spokesman recently informed Raw Story.
One use that’s confirmed, however, is the manipulation of social media through the use of fake online “personas” managed by the military. Recently the US Air Force had solicited private sector vendors for something called “persona management software.” Such a technology would allow single individuals to command virtual armies of fake, digital “people” across numerous social media portals.
These “personas” were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account. They even worked out ways to game geolocating services, so these “personas” could be virtually inserted anywhere in the world, providing ostensibly live commentary on real events, even while the operator was not really present.
When Raw Story first reported on the contract for this software, it was unclear what the Air Force wanted with it or even if it had been acquired. The potential for misuse, however, was abundantly clear.
A fake virtual army of people could be used to help create the impression of consensus opinion in online comment threads, or manipulate social media to the point where valuable stories are suppressed.
Ultimately, this can have the effect of causing a net change to the public’s opinions and understanding of key world events.
Wired.com published an article how US spies are making investments in the Company In-Q-Tel in order to monitor your blogs and read your tweets.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using “open source intelligence” – information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
“That’s kind of the basic step – get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.
Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (“Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.
In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.
Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.
“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”
Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds.
Tighe disputes this – sort of. “This contract, this deal, this investment has nothing to do with any agency of government and this company,” he says. But Tighe quickly notes that In-Q-Tel does have “an interested end customer” in the intelligence community for Visibile. And if all goes well, the company’s software will be used in pilot programs at that agency. “In pilots, we use real data. And during the adoption phase, we use it real missions.”
Neither party would disclose the size of In-Q-Tel’s investment in Visible, a 90-person company with expected revenues of about $20 million in 2010. But a source familiar with the deal says the In-Q-Tel cash will be used to boost Visible’s foreign languages capabilities, which already include Arabic, French, Spanish and nine other languages.
Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington, DC, consulting firm Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others. On its website, Concepts & Strategies is recruiting “social media engagement specialists” with Defense Department experience and a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian. The company is also looking for an “information system security engineer” who already has a “Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph” security clearance.
The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis – even a MySpace for spooks. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center’s Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October 2007 that “we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.”
But, “the CIA specifically needs the help of innovative tech firms to keep up with the pace of innovation in social media. Experienced IC [intelligence community] analysts may not be the best at detecting the incessant shift in popularity of social-networking sites. They need help in following young international internet user-herds as they move their allegiance from one site to another,” Lewis Shepherd, the former senior technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, says in an e-mail. “Facebook says that more than 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S., in more than 180 countries. There are more than 200 non-U.S., non-English-language microblogging Twitter-clone sites today. If the intelligence community ignored that tsunami of real-time information, we’d call them incompetent.”
