Governments beg Twitter for more data; network offers birdcage droppings

Better luck next time, Putin

Governments' demands for data on Twitter users surged 40 per cent in the last six months of 2014, according to a new report by the avian network.

America, Turkey, and Russia were behind the lion's share of that increase, with the former increasing its information requests by 29 percent. Turkey upped its demands by 150 per cent, while the Kremlin made its first ever information requests.

US requests totalled 1,622, close to double the 833 made over the same period in 2013, and landed what it wanted 80 per cent of the time, far above global averages even across the Five Eyes.

Turkey topped out at 356 requests and Japan came in third with 288.

Blighty asked for account information 116 times and was handed data a third of the time.

The report's numbers appeared to show fresh titillation in the Kremlin's information ministry was probably followed by frustration: Russia's first ever batch of 108 requests for information was entirely slapped-down by the Blue Bird.

Australia made a timid 10 information requests and was successful half of the time, while Norway nailed it by having all but one of its requests fulfilled.

"We saw an overall increase of 40 per cent in government requests for Twitter user account information since our last report," Twitter said in a report summary.

"While requests have increased in many countries, Russia, Turkey, and the United States stand out from the rest."

The biannual report covered requests to delete tweets and was designed to be easily comparable to previous publications dating back to July 2012.

It came after as Twitter filed a suit against the US Federal Government regarding restrictions that limits organisations' ability to publish information on the number of national security letters used against their users by forcing them to round to the nearest 1,000. ®