Congressional witnesses on Thursday criticized Twitter’s decision to stop sharing information with U.S. intelligence services, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee that it was symbolic of a growing divide between government and tech companies.
“I think there’s been a change since the disclosures by [Edward] Snowden, and there are business reasons for some companies to scale back their involvement with the government, and to be seen by some customers as scaling back,” Kenneth Wainstein, a former assistant attorney general for national security, told the panel. “There are some customers that will go to other companies if they think your company is too cozy with the U.S. government, and that’s unfortunate.”
The remarks came in reference to the issue of Dataminr, a company that works with Twitter to collect information on all of the social media giant’s users. Dataminr recently cut U.S. intelligence services off from obtaining that information at Twitter’s request.
The information now is sold primarily to media outlets, though the companies have also drawn criticism for continuing to sell data to Russia Today. The state-backed media agency is largely seen as an arm of Russian intelligence services.
The hearing, led by Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was dominated by Senate hawks seeking to express their displeasure with tech giants such as Apple and Twitter for engaging in practices that law enforcement officials deem obstructive. Witnesses before the committee reinforced the notion that private actors represented a growing problem for government agencies.
“The shame of the larger proposition is that increasingly, entities within the private sector standing as the arbiter of how do you align these societal values,” said John Inglis, a former deputy director at the NSA. Inglis also called Dataminr’s collection of information on Twitter exclusively for commercial purposes “inappropriate and hypocritical.”
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Ranking member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., agreed that the revelations about classified surveillance programs made public by Snowden had a chilling effect on the willingness of companies to work with government.
“I think after Snowden, there’s a whole different attitude in the industry about this,” Reed said. “There are business considerations about who’s the most secure … That’s something we have to face going forward.”
