China: Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a Twitter leaker, will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 13, the panel's leaders announced on Wednesday.
A day after Zatko made public claims that Twitter has failed to adequately protect data on its hundreds of millions of users, leaving their personal information vulnerable to hackers and spies, the committee announced that it had subpoenaed him to testify. Zatko was the company's former security chief.
"Mr. Zatko's allegations of widespread security failures and foreign state actor interference at Twitter raise serious concerns," said Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Dick Durbin of Illinois, who serves as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
If these allegations are true, they could reveal dangerous security and privacy risks for Twitter users worldwide, the senators said in a statement.
According to the statement, the committee intends to look into the allegations further with a thorough hearing and take additional actions as necessary.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, and the Federal Trade Commission received reports outlining Zatko's allegations.
Zatko was in charge of Twitter's security from 2020 until he was fired six months ago. He claimed that Twitter's director of site integrity admitted that the social media company had no idea how many automated accounts (or "bots") were using its system.
Twitter denied the whistleblower's allegations, calling them "riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies" in a statement. According to Twitter, Zatko was let go due to "poor performance and ineffective leadership."
Mudge stands by everything he disclosed, and his career of moral and effective leadership speaks for itself, according to John Tye, chief disclosure officer of Whistleblower Aid, which is representing Zatko in the lawsuit.
Ad hominem criticisms of the whistle-blower should not be the main point of discussion, Tye continued. Legal professionals predicted that Zatko's allegations could strengthen Elon Musk's lawsuit against Twitter. The founder of Tesla Inc. is claiming in court that Twitter misled him about the prevalence of bots and spam on the platform and that he should withdraw his offer to purchase the social media site.
Zatko's allegations have drawn the attention of lawmakers on several congressional committees, who have vowed to look into them and argued that they demonstrate the need for federal privacy legislation. According to Zatko, Twitter put growth ahead of controlling the scourge of spam accounts, and it even gave cash bonuses worth millions of dollars to executives who increased the number of daily active users. Additionally, he asserted that the Twitter sales team has persisted in using phone numbers improperly for targeted advertising, possibly in violation of the 2011 consent agreement it had with the Federal Trade Commission.
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