The FBI is now monitoring all of Twitter

The API Twitter makes available to the general public allows users to access about 1 percent of the 500 million tweets posted each day. The FBI wants more — a lot more.

The federal agency this week entered a contract with Dataminr, a company that will give the FBI access to every single message on Twitter. Dataminr is 5 percent owned by Twitter itself and the only company allowed to offer access to the full "firehose" of Twitter data. It already has contracts with the TSA and the Pentagon as well as other federal agencies that want near real-time surveillance of the entire social network.

The FBI says this level of scrutiny is necessary because "Twitter is used extensively by terrorist organizations and other criminals to communicate, recruit, and raise funds for illegal activity." It's not clear how that will square with Twitter's terms of service, which prohibit giving content to "any entity to investigate, track, or surveil Twitter's users or their content" in a manner that would normally require a court order like a warrant or which would violate a reasonable expectation of privacy.

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In fact, Twitter revoked the CIA's access to Dataminr earlier this year because of the social network's anti-surveillance policy. "Data is largely public," Twitter said at the time of that decision, "and the U.S. government may review public accounts on its own, like any user could."