Foreign adversaries have infiltrated every sector of the American economy.
There’s been an effort to stop them through legislation, but it’s only been successful in some industries.
And shocking whistleblower testimony reveals potential Chinese foreign assets could have access to personal information of Senators.
Whistleblower claims Twitter is “misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators”
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko is the former head of security at Twitter and he has some startling news.
Mudge took the stand at Capitol Hill at the request of Senators on the Judiciary Committee.
Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, chose to reject the invitation due to “ongoing litigation with Mr. Musk” according to Chuck Grassley who leads on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
There might be other reasons for Mr. Agrawal’s absence given the Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting to discuss issues at their company.
Grassley responded to Agrawal’s absence stating clearly, “the business of this committee and protecting Americans against foreign influence is more important than Twitter’s civil litigation in Delaware.”
Peiter Zatko then began his explosive opening statement where he alleged, “Twitter leadership is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors.”
Negligence could be resulting in “real harm to real people”
He went on to warn, “The company’s cybersecurity failures” could even cause, “real harm to real people.”
He claimed that nearly 80% of user data collected by Twitter isn’t managed and therefore can’t be secured and alleged, “They don’t know what data they have, where it lives, or where it came from . . . so they can’t protect it,” according to Zatko.
The lack of data management means, “Employees then have to have too much access to too much data and to too many systems . . . it doesn’t matter who has the keys if you don’t have any locks on the door.”
Senators are exposed and Twitter employees could know “where they are physically at this moment”
“It’s not far-fetched to say an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all of the Senators in this room,” thus gaining access to far more data according to Zatko.
He recalled one instance when he needed to respond to a threat against one of Twitter’s executive team.
It took an employee, “maybe 10 minutes to get back to me and said ‘ok here’s who they are, this is the address where they live, this is where they are physically at this moment, they’re on their phone, we know their phone number . . .”
He also testified that before he was fired in January, a Chinese agent working for the Ministry of State Security was on the company’s payroll.
That would mean that this person would have had access to a trove of personal information on citizens, including politicians and civil servants.
Twitter Executive: “What does it matter if we have more” foreign agents with access?
Zatko didn’t seem to have high hopes for the resolution in other security matters.
He gave an example of executive negligence to security where he had, “one conversation with an executive when I said, ‘I’m confident that we have a foreign agent’ and their response was, ‘Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more?”
Zatko says, “Twitter leadership ignored its engineers because key parts of leadership lacked the competency to understand the scope of the problem, but more importantly executive incentives led them to prioritize profits over security.”
Grassley was understandably outraged by the deposition stating, “If these allegations are true, I don’t see how Mr. Agrawal can maintain his position at Twitter,” and he will, “continue to conduct a thorough and in-depth investigation and today’s hearing is a part of that process.”
We should all anticipate and expect great results out of this investigation.
Patriot Political will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
