Benjamin Wittes:

I was at the National Security Agency yesterday giving a Constitution Day speech and I learned details of a shocking collection program: The government is bulk collecting all traffic on Twitter.

What's shocking is that this would be considered shocking in September 2014.

Biz Stone, in April 2010:

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

Matt Raymond, in April 2010:

Private account information and deleted tweets will not be part of the archive.

I've been working in journalism and public relations for nearly 20 years, and of all the stories with which I was personally involved, this one has beaten the rest by a mile. Thousands of hits on Google News. Countless blog posts from around the world. Media interest from virtually every national newspaper and broadcast outlet (which continues even two weeks later), and numerous local outlets. And websites as diverse as The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, and even Perez Hilton.

Gayle Osterberg, Director of Communications for the Library of Congress, in January 2013:

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.

This month, all those objectives will be completed. We now have an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012.

The Library's focus now is on addressing the significant technology challenges to making the archive accessible to researchers in a comprehensive, useful way. These efforts are ongoing and a priority for the Library.

Adrienne LaFrance, in 2013:

The library is not archiving tweets from those who opt for the strictest privacy settings, which allow Twitter users to approve or reject each potential follower. The library is also planning to scrub deleted tweets, meaning the public won't have access to posts that were published but later removed. Dizard, citing privacy concerns, calls that decision "one of the more significant policy questions we face."

In its terms of service, Twitter says that the default is "almost always to make the information you provide public for as long as you do not delete it from Twitter."

Moody says it follows that deleted tweets are off-limits.

RE: Lawfare › Breaking News: Government Agency Bulk Collecting Twitter Data