The explosive whistleblower complaint, an 84-page filing sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, was made public by the Washington Post on Tuesday.
New Delhi: A complaint by former Twitter security chief Peiter Zatko said the Indian government forced the social media platform to hire an individual, who Zatko said was a “government agent”, and likely had access to sensitive user data as part of the job.
The explosive whistleblower complaint, an 84-page filing sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, was made public by the Washington Post on Tuesday. This also indicates that supporting and corroboratory information for the allegation has already been sent by Zatko’s lawyers to the National Security Division of the US Justice Department and the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Zatko, in a section titled ‘Penetration by Foreign Intelligence & Threats to Democracy’, said he became aware of “multiple episodes” in which Twitter had been complicit in threats to democratic governance. Zatko is popular and admired as a hacker and is known as ‘Mudge’ to his colleagues.
Zatko’s complaint says, “The Indian government forced Twitter to hire specific individual(s) who were government agents, who (because of Twitter’s basica architectural flaws) would have access to vast amounts of Twitter sensitive data…By knowingly permitting an Indian government agent direct unsupervised access to the company’s systems and user data, Twitter executives violated the company’s commitments to its users.”
The Washington Post, in its article, also quotes a “person familiar with the matter” who agrees with Zakto’s allegation and said the hired employee was “probably an agent”.
In the section ‘Squeezing Local Staff’, Zatko alleges that the Indian government sought “with varying success” to force Twitter to hire local full-time employees that “could be used as leverage”.
“The threat of harm to Twitter employees was sufficient to cause Twitter to seriously consider complying with foreign government requests that Twitter would otherwise fundamentally oppose,” the complaint further said.
