In a move that had many scratching their heads this week, Twitter blocked the US intelligence community's access to a breaking news alert service called Dataminr, whose algorithms sift through social media data, including Twitter's, to spotlight important events and trends. Twitter said the move wasn't new, that Dataminr's service was always intended for the media and government agencies not in the business of surveillance, but some viewed it as an attempt by the tech giant to distance itself from government spying, a la Apple. IBM's Watson supercomputer evidently doesn't have the same compunction about working with the feds. As we reported, its deep-learning skills are being turned to criminal endeavors to help the feds fight cybercrime.

We reported on a different kind of Twitter surveillance in a story looking at a tool showing you which of your applications are reading your tweets in the background and mining other information from your Twitter account