Twitter transferred non-US accounts to the Irish data center

Twitter has updated its security policies and launched a “two-tier” service to serve users from the United States and from outside the United States. The accounts of the latter were transferred to the Irish data center, where they are not available for NSA surveillance.

Now, if you live in the USA, then your account is in the possession of Twitter Inc., which is registered in San Francisco. But if you are a foreigner, then your account is the company Twitter International Company, registered in Dublin (Ireland).

The Irish division of Twitter is not required to comply with US laws and court orders for the issuance of information, including the requirements of the National Security Agency.

A similar precedent was with Microsoft. In December 2013, a court ordered Microsoft to provide information from a specific mailbox as part of a criminal investigation into the distribution of drugs. Microsoft obediently provided part of the address book - and nothing more, not a complete list of contacts or emails. Microsoft said that only a small part of the information is stored in the US data center, that is, in the jurisdiction of the United States. Everything else is in the data center in Dublin, so that American law enforcement agencies can not claim to be removed from the territory of a foreign state.

To extract data from the Irish data center, the authorities were asked to make an official request to Ireland and work directly with the local prosecutor's office. Microsoft believes that the procedure for extracting information from the data center should be equated with the procedure for confiscating physical objects of private property.

Now a similar procedure will be needed to retrieve data from Twitter servers. Changes to Twitter’s security policy will take effect on May 18, 2015.