A whistleblower has dropped explosive allegations against Twitter in a disclosure document sent to Congress and multiple federal agencies indicating that Twitter has “major security problems that pose a threat to its own users’ personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy.” CNN obtained the disclosure document and interviewed the whistleblower.
#BREAKAn ex-Twitter executive was its security head and has now become a whistleblower.
He alleges that the company has serious security concerns, and they pose a danger to democracy as well as national security.
His first TV interview here:https://t.co/QU823RBnN1 pic.twitter.com/krh7WVOrhe— Donie O’Sullivan (@donie) August 23, 2022
According to the former head of security, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, thousands of employees — almost half the workforce — have access to the platform’s central controls and the most sensitive information on users without adequate oversight. According to the report, one or more of current employees could be employed by foreign intelligence.
The whistleblower report says the US government provided specific evidence to Twitter shortly before Zatko’s firing that at least one of its employees, perhaps more, were working for another government’s intelligence service. It is not clear if Twitter knew about the tip or whether it responded to the tip. [….]
Zatko’s report is becoming public just two weeks after a former Twitter manager was convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia.
Zatko says Twitter has also made false and misleading statements to the FTC and has been violating an agreement they entered into in 2010 after the FTC found they weren’t protecting user information.
Zatko also explained that senior executives had been working to hide these weaknesses. In January, Zatko was dismissed from Twitter. He says he was fired because he tried to flag these concerns to Twitter’s board. Parag Agrawal, the current CEO of Twitter, and his lieutenants discouraged him from informing fully the board about what was happening.
Zatko revealed also that the method they used to measure bots was inaccurate. This could be a help in the Elon Musk case against Twitter, where he alleges that the company misrepresented the number of bots on their site. Alex Spiro, an attorney for Musk, told CNN, “We have already issued a subpoena for Mr. Zatko, and we found his exit and that of other key employees curious in light of what we have been finding.”
Sen. Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and also received the report, vowed to investigate “and take further steps as needed to get to the bottom of these alarming allegations.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the same panel’s top Republican and an avid Twitter user, also expressed deep concerns about the allegations in a statement to CNN.
“Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” Grassley said. “The claims I’ve received from a Twitter whistleblower raise serious national security concerns as well as privacy issues, and they must be investigated further.”
This is in addition to the concerns over bias on the platform, and basically they are serving as Democratic operatives. Grassley’s description of a “disaster in the making” is spot on. Congress needs to be grilling them on all these issues because this puts everyone’s communications and privacy at risk.
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