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Twitter whistleblower provided little for Musk

by on15 September 2022


Just gave Twitter’s PR department a headache

 Twitter’s former security boss’s testimony to US senators is unlikely to have a significant impact on Elon Musk’s legal battle to terminate his $44bn takeover deal.

For 90 minutes the Senate judiciary committee heard Twitter executive turned whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko paint a portrait of a company with woefully inept security practices to the point that national security was threatened, and no desire to address those flaws.

Legal experts said that the testimony is unlikely to be enough for Elon Musk to back out of the take over deal like he desperately wants.

An assistant law professor at Case Western Reserve University Anat Alon-Beck told the FT that to affect the Musk trial, it has to amount to a material adverse effect or fraud, which is a very high standard.

“I’m not sure it will amount to that unless more egregious violations come out of the investigation.” 

Zatko made two big accusations. The first was that thousands of employees at the company had unbridled access to reams of sensitive user data, raising grave privacy concerns. He alleged that Twitter struggled to monitor how employees used that data, which left it vulnerable to infiltration by foreign spies.

He claimed that there was at least one Chinese intelligence agent working “on the payroll” inside Twitter. And when he raised concerns with another executive that there was a foreign agent in the company, the person replied: “Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more?”

Zatko also said that India had successfully pressured Twitter to allow Indian government operatives to work inside the company.

He believed chief executive Parag Agrawal was aware of the issues.

However, while Zatko appears to have street cred among the hacker community several former senior staffers took to Twitter complain that Zatko had never bothered to communicate with them during his tenure, and rubbished his claims.

In fact, Zatko appears only to have started making the claims in January after he was fired for poor performance.  The company said his allegations were “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies” although why it gave him a $7.75 million severance package if that were the case is a little surprising. 

Musk’s lawyers also argue that Zatko’s $7.75 million severance package constitutes fresh grounds to terminate the merger agreement because it was “out of the ordinary course of business” and not signed off by Musk.

However, experts noted that Zatko stopped short of providing evidence that Twitter’s leadership was deliberately fraudulent or knowingly misrepresented user numbers which was the backbone of Musk’s case. All he showed was that theywere disinterested in removing bots and only interested in prioritising growth over everything else.

 

Last modified on 15 September 2022
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