Fort Meade's new contract monitoring Twitter

The Defense Information Systems Agency disclosed a 'sole sourced' $2.5 million social media surveillance contract with Dataminr which starts today.

The logo of X, formerly known as Twitter, overlayed on the dagger, lightning bolt, and key of Fort George G. Meade, the headquarters of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). According to a U.S. government notice, a more than $2.5 million contract between DISA and social media surveillance company Dataminr began today.

According to a contracting notice published by the U.S. Government on Tuesday, today the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) was quietly provided large-scale access to the public posts from numerous social media platforms through a former close partner of Twitter/X, Dataminr. Beyond housing DISA, Fort Meade is best known as the headquarters of the U.S. Government’s preeminent signals intelligence organization, the National Security Agency.

Partly as a result of criticism regarding its sale of real-time “firehose” access to Twitter to help police monitor civil rights protestors, Dataminr has carefully avoided the ‘surveillance’ label and instead describes itself as an “alerting” platform. In addition to blacklisting searches for the keyword “protest”, the company’s branding has helped provide X/Twitter plausible deniability for its role in government surveillance through social media.

In the past, Twitter owned roughly 5% of the company, but in recent years Google became a prominent investor and even landed a board seat. Despite Dataminr having previously committed to cutting off access to intelligence agencies after advertising the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm as a partner, former acting CIA Director Michael J. Morell has since disclosed his membership on the company’s advisory board.

As far as it is currently reported, firehose access to X/Twitter from intermediaries such as Dataminr and Zignal Labs has not been cut off since the company’s acquisition by billionaire Elon Musk. Much of the branding of the company since the Twitter Files has focused on resistance to government censorship, but Fort Meade is now a major surveillance customer for the platform.

Neither the Defense Information Systems Agency nor Dataminr responded to requests for comment by phone. When reached by email, Twitter auto-replied “Busy now, please check back later.”