[pheldagryph]

Senate Intelligence Committee has expressed concerns that Jack Dorsey is favoring the Russian government over the United States government.

Senator Tom Cotton, CIA Director John Brennan, transcript from Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on June 2016:

https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=414

SENATOR COTTON: I want to discuss cooperation with our Intelligence Community from Silicon Valley, specifically Twitter and a company called Dataminr. According to the Wall Street Journal from May 8th, as well as some other media reports, Dataminr which is owned in part by Twitter and is the only company authorized to access the full real-time stream of public tweets that Twitter has, recently cooperated with the CIA. But just a few weeks ago ended that cooperation. So our Intelligence Community no longer has access to Dataminr's information, could you comment on these reports?

DIRECTOR BRENNAN: It appears as though Dataminr was directed to not provide its service to the CIA Intelligence Community and so therefore, we need to be able to leverage other capabilities in order to make sure that we have the insight we need to protect this country.

COTTON: So those reports are correct?

BRENNAN: I am not going to dispute them.

COTTON: The Wall Street Journal also reported that the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, directed Dataminr to stop the contract because he was worried about the "optics" of helping intelligence agencies. Do you believe that to be accurate?

BRENNAN: I do not know his motivation for any corporate decision he may have made, but I have no basis to dispute that.

COTTON: The Wall Street Journal also reports that among customers of Dataminr remains RT, Russia Today, a propaganda outlet of Vladimir Putin's government, which Putin has said is "trying to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on global information streams." To your knowledge, is Russia Today a client of Dataminr?

BRENNAN: I believe so, I'm not certain of that. But I don't have any information that they have been excluded from their services.

[JumpCrisscross]

Do we have a source on the Wall Street Journal articles Cotton references?

More broadly, we would need to know if Dataminr is sharing (a) its full fire hose with RT, or just a subset of it and (b) any data with the subcontractors to the Intelligence Community, in which case we can assume they made a policy decision to not work with state intelligence agencies, misguided as that may be in today's hybrid world.

TL; DR Doesn't strike me as specious solely based on what's provided here.

[pheldagryph]

Good questions. Another I'd add is: are there any contractual/legal requirements preventing these intel subcontractors from proxying the full firehose to CIA? If so, it's possible those requirements would be respected on the government side.

I'm skeptical there would be any practical restrictions in RT's case.

[smsm42]

OTOH, a commercial company can sever links with foreign government agency buying their services at any time. Doing the same with US government agency is not that easy, as we know on NSA example.

So maybe the question that needs to be asked here is how come people in the US see reputation risks of cooperating with CIA as worse than ones for cooperating with Russians? Is there something that CIA and US government should be doing to fix this shameful situation?

[pdog]

How is RT at all comparable to the CIA? Even if you accept the premise that RT is a Russian propaganda channel, it's not a foreign intelligence service.

[davesque]

Why would you not accept that premise? The fact that RT is a propaganda channel is widely known.

[cycrutchfield]

So your argument is that a foreign propaganda entity is preferable to a domestic intelligence agency?

[pdog]

Yes? I hope it's not controversial to say that doing business with a television network is fundamentally different from cooperating with an intelligence agency.

[virgilp]

Referring to RT as "a television network" is as accurate as saying that Mar-a-Lago is "a privately-owned club". Technically accurate, but knowingly misleading (attempts to present as "irrelevant" what is actually the most relevant bit of information about said TV network/ private club)

[cycrutchfield]

Key words here are foreign and domestic.

[aplummer]

Isn’t your point like saying you can sell to the army because they aren’t the CIA?

[pheldagryph]

How does one determine that two things are different, or similar, without comparing them?

> RT is a Russian propaganda channel, it's not a foreign intelligence service

I wonder if there are National Security Letters and FISA courts (or something comparable) in Russia.

[086421357909764]

Given the pervasiveness of SORM deployment across ISPs and tech companies within russia, it maybe that a letter like system is not even required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM

[djrobstep]

Merely refusing to cooperate with the CIA is "favoring the Russian government"?

That seems like a dangerous idea.

[paganel]

The fully cooperating with RT is the what favors the Russian government.