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Once again, the U.S. federal government has run into a roadblock with the technology industry. This time Twitter is preventing government agencies from using the service to augment their intelligence-gathering activities.
On May 9, The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter is no longer allowing partner Dataminr to provide feeds of Twitter activity to government agencies to help with their surveillance efforts.
The change does not affect government use for non-surveillance purposes. For example, Dataminr provides alerts to the World Health Organization and the company has an ongoing contract with the Department of Homeland Security in the United States.
Twitter’s action follows other refusals by the tech industry to comply with requests to provide access to users’ data. Earlier this year Apple refused to help the FBI unlock an iPhone 5C that was used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists. Microsoft has been refusing Justice Department demands that it turn over the contents of an email server located in Ireland.
Meanwhile, the technology industry has been uniting in resistance against government demands through public statements, lobbying efforts, advertising and other means.
Just to be fair, Twitter didn’t decide to refuse access just by the U.S. government’s intelligence agencies. The ban covers any government surveillance by any government.
Twitter is especially useful as a source for immediate information about actions by terrorists and others. Dataminr reportedly provided news media with alerts immediately after the Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks.
Twitter cut off access to activity via Dataminr because of what the Journal called the “optics” of the situation. Optics, in this case, is a silly way of saying it doesn’t like how it looks. So in other words, Twitter is cutting off surveillance activity because it looks bad.
There are a few reasons why Twitter, Apple and other tech companies think it looks bad. The initial cause was revelations by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden showed the U.S. government had been using tech companies as vehicles for spying activities.
Since then, the tech industry has felt the long arm of the government intruding in its business in ways it hadn’t had to deal with previously and, in many cases, the industry deems to be illegal.
In Microsoft’s case, for example, the U.S. Department of Justice tried to force the company to turn over the contents of emails stored in a foreign nation because it didn’t want to follow procedures established by law and international treaties.
Likewise, the FBI tried to force Apple to unlock an iPhone at its own expense because it was in a hurry. The FBI quickly found there was another way to accomplish the same end. But being in a hurry hasn’t helped the DoJ, because its attempt to force Microsoft to turn over an email has taken far longer than it would have to simply follow the established procedure.
U.S. Reaping Results of a Poisoned Relationship With IT Industry
Unfortunately for the government, the variety of heavy-handed demands and actions with dubious legal standing have alienated the tech industry and, perhaps more important, the culture of the people who work in that industry. What’s worse is there’s really not a lot that the government can do if the tech industry’s leadership decides not to cooperate.
Sure, the government can take companies to court, as the FBI took Apple to court in an attempt to force the company to breach the security features of its smartphones. It wasted a lot of time in federal court that could have been spent finding its own solution. Apple still hasn’t unlocked anything and the FBI had to pay millions of dollars to another company to get into the device.
Likewise, the government—in the form of the Justice Department—can sue Microsoft for its refusal to provide the DoJ information it is prohibited from providing under European law. You can see how well that’s working, too. The fight eventually will end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, and so far Congress appears to be taking Microsoft’s side.
What’s equally unfortunate is that the government actually needs the tech industry. In fact, the intelligence community has a quasi-private company called In-Q-Tel that exists to invest in companies with technology the government wants to encourage. The idea is to get early access to breakthrough technology so the government, especially the intelligence community, can get it first.
But companies don’t need to accept investments from In-Q-Tel and they don’t need to provide technology to the government at all if their executives don’t want to. If the government tries too hard to force the industry to accede to its wishes, the tech industry can do as Microsoft did earlier this year, which is to move some critical operations offshore. That way those operations are beyond the reach of the federal government.
When looking at the current set of impasses between the government and the IT industry, it’s important for the government to remember where today’s tech industry came from. The people running the big tech companies of today were the disruptive forces that brought computing to everyday people.
These were the engineers who wrested control of the data center from the hands of mainframe operators and gave it to those who would put a computer into the hands of every employee and private person.
The government shouldn’t expect the IT industry to quietly accede to the government’s demands when these companies believe that the government has failed to follow its own laws and the U.S. Constitution.
The government—at both the agency level and within the Obama administration—needs to realize it needs the help of the tech industry badly. But having lost the industry’s confidence, the government must understand it will get no cooperation that doesn’t follow the letter of the law.