US government displays growing appetite for Twitter users' personal data

 

On the heels of reports that Google and Yahoo require probable-cause warrants to give authorities e-mail and cloud-stored content belonging to users, "despite federal law not always demanding that," Twitter said today that only 19 percent of federal and state government requests for user data were accompanied by probable-cause search warrants during the six months ending in December 2012. David Kravets at Wired News has more. During that period, there were 815 demands for Twitter account-holder data.
"Twitter did not say what type of user data was sought in those 815 requests," explains Kravets, "but it likely includes a mixture of e-mail addresses associated with accounts, IP logs, tweets and direct messages."