Library of Congress has 170 billion Tweets and growing.

Washington, DC - The "Twitter collection" at the Library of Congress. If you've been curious about how much data the Library has amassed as part of its plan to archive all public tweets, first announced in April 2010, the Library has a pretty beefy number that it's now able to announce: 170 billion tweets.

Just to put that number into a bit of perspective, the Library received around 140 million tweets for archiving – each day – in Feb. 2011. The pipe expanded to approximately half a billion daily tweets by Oct. 2012, and it stands to reason that the Library will likely be processing even more tweets on a daily basis going forward.

"The Library's first objectives were to acquire and preserve the 2006-10 archive; to establish a secure, sustainable process for receiving and preserving a daily, ongoing stream of tweets through the present day; and to create a structure for organizing the entire archive by date," wrote director of communications Gayle Osterberg in a Friday blog post.

With those goals achieved, the Library now plans to tackle the equally large elephant in the room: How to process and display this volume of Twitter posts so they can be accessed by researchers, "in a comprehensive, useful way." Interest in the Library's Twitter archives – ranging from research about citizen journalism and elected officials tweets to stock market predictions – has generated approximately 400 inquiries from researchers thus far, and that's even before the Library has been able to grant any kind of access to its 170 billion-large tweet archive.

"Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress but an important one to its mission," Osterberg wrote. "As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing, and in some cases supplanting, letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries."

The library may work with a private partner to provide access because its own search technology is slow.
 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413889,00.asp

EFF and ACLU successfully oppose speech-chilling Twitter subpoenas.

Last month the San Francisco District Attorney’s office went on a fishing expedition.  After EFF and ACLU got involved, the DA wisely cut bait.

The fishing expedition cut short by the DA last week consisted of a pair of subpoenas issued to Twitter, seeking tweets, photos, and a trove of other information related to the accounts of two activists, Robert Donohoe and Lauren Smith, whom the SF DA has charged with a number of offenses stemming from a Columbus Day anti-capitalist protest.  After Twitter notified the users, attorneys for Donohoe and Smith opposed the subpoenas, and ACLU and EFF supported their efforts.

Not only did the subpoenas to Twitter violate federal law (the Stored Communications Act makes clear that the government cannot use a subpoena to gain access to the content of communications), but they violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution as well.  Government surveillance of what we say—even in public—has a chilling effect on speech.  That is why courts have held that any effort to compel the disclosure of a person’s communications or associations must be narrowly tailored.  

The subpoenas issued in this case were anything but narrow.  Not only did the requests seek Donohoe and Smith’s own tweets, but also all communications by any Twitter user (presumably including both tweets and private Direct Messages) that even mentioned them.  Further damning the DA’s subpoenas was the wildly overbroad ten-month time period they covered.  As we wrote in our brief to the court, a “district attorney’s decision to prosecute is not an invitation for the government to engage in intrusive fishing expeditions into a criminal defendant’s opinions, beliefs, and interests, let alone the opinions, beliefs, or interests of third parties unconnected to the charged crime other than that they have once uttered the names of defendants or their Twitter accounts.”  

While we appreciate the San Francisco District Attorney’s decision to withdraw these unconstitutional subpoenas, we are deeply concerned that they were issued in the first place. It seems that throughout the country, law enforcement is subpoenaing this information almost routinely in connection with criminal investigations. Last year, EFF and ACLU supported Twitter’s ultimately unsuccessful fight against New York City prosecutors attempt to get account information and tweets about an Occupy Wall Street protestor with a subpoena. And Google’s semi-annual Transparency Report has shown growing law enforcement requests for user data. 
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/eff-and-aclu-successfully-oppose-speech-chilling-subpoenas