On 9/13/2022, in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) questioned Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Twitter whistleblower and former head of security for Twitter, who revealed that over 4,000 Twitter engineers have access to user data, including geolocation data, that could be used to dox users. Mr. Zatko also revealed that Twitter engineers have the ability to “tweet as anybody” and may have done so. “That is a significant concern, 4,000 people with the ability to dox individual users who pick up the phone and use Twitter. Four-thousand employees with access to that data, this is extraordinary,” said Senator Hawley.
Hawley: So earlier this year, documents that we obtained from a different whistle blower at the DHS exposed that the disinformation board, that the DHS set up that first on the disinformation board’s list of companies to meet with was Twitter. And they had an extensive memo, which by the way, is public information. Now we’ve released it. You can go and look at it, but they had a memo prepared with notes for this meeting, with Twitter, talking about cooperation and content moderation, and frankly, in monitoring American’s speech. And now we know that thousands of Twitter employees have access to that. This was all in these documents. I guess my question to you is, and I know you weren’t in those meetings, but why do you suppose that the disinformation board had Twitter first on the list of entities to come to, to talk about coordinating, monitoring American speech?
Zatko: I, I can’t opine on that, but I can say that Twitter is a tremendously influential platform. And we do know that there are information operations, you know, being run on, on Twitter.
Hawley: Do you think it’s maybe because Twitter has proved so pliant to government pressure to censorship and monitor people. I’m thinking of, you know, first of all, the Hunter Biden story, we now know that Twitter killed the Hunter Biden reporting. We know mark Zuckerberg has said that the FBI pushed Facebook to do so Facebook throttled it down, Twitter killed it completely wouldn’t, you know, locked up accounts that were trying to report. And what we now know was a true story, or how about by your own, in your own report, you claimed that the Twitter CEO …
Zatko: I, the, I wasn’t there when the Hunter Biden issue happened and I don’t have any information on that. I wasn’t briefed into it or involved in any of the investigations. The CEO was the CTO at the time when he proposed to me that, Hey, what do you think about you know, why don’t we just let Russia perform their own moderation? They’re a democracy. So why should, why should we why shouldn’t we let them do it? I didn’t know what to think at the time then, sir, I was a little flabbergasted.
Hawley: Twitter has been all too eager to take private information from its users, without telling them to sell it and monetize it without their permission to expose them to the worst kind of security threats to censor them, to spy on them. I mean, this, you have painted a picture of a company that is not only out of control, but is truly in many ways of malign actor. And I, I thank you for being willing to be here and testify.
Hawley: in your report that about 4,000 Twitter employees are classified as engineers, is that right?
Zatko: Yes, sir. At the time, half the employees, I believe there were 7,000 plus full-time employees.
Hawley: Got it. And that means that these 4,000 ish employees would’ve had access to live user data, all data, all over Twitter, they could access individual users’ personal information, including their live data. Have I got that right?
Zatko: Yes, sir. If they so they would have access to the production environment. If they spent the time to meander around and look around, they would find that they could access these large TROs of data,
Hawley: Including geolocation data. Did you testify to that earlier today?
Zatko: That the, I know that Twitter has IP locations and that they do use geolocation services based upon IP addresses. Wow.
Hawley: 4K employees with access to that data. That’s extraordinary. So those employees would be in a position then if they wanted to, to get this information and, and docs Twitter users. Is that fair to say?
Zatko: That is a concern of mine, sir? Yes.
Hawley: Wow that’s a significant concern, 4K people with the ability to docs, individual users who pick up the phone and use Twitter. That’s extraordinary. Have you ever seen it happen?
Zatko: I have seen numerous situations where Twitter engineers had to patch a problem. And I said, what was the problem? And they said, oh, engineers could tweet as anybody. The data was exposed in this part. it was always reactionary rather in finding these wounds left and right
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Hawley: Wow, That’s A Significant Concern; Twitter Whistleblower: 4,000 Twitter employees access your personal data.