Zatko allegedly divulged this disturbing information in a whistleblower revelation that Congress and government agencies received in July, according to Tom Parker of Reclaim the Net. The whistleblower information was initially covered by CNN and The Washington Post.
The complete declaration is 200 pages lengthy, according to the CNN article. On top of the 55 pages of supporting papers, 84 of the pages have been made public with redactions.
The most important claim Zatko makes about foreign intelligence eavesdropping is that “the Indian government pressured Twitter to recruit particular individual(s) who were government operatives, who (because of Twitter’s inherent architectural weaknesses) would have access to enormous quantities of Twitter sensitive data.”
However, he also says that Twitter management“kno wingly permitted an Indian government agent direct unsupervised access to the company’s servers and user data.” Zatko argues that Twitter employed agents from the Indian government.
Additionally, Zatko’s redacted disclosure identifies several instances in which Twitter’s relationships with organizations “harmed free speech” and could have let foreign organizations to access private user information.
One instance was purported worries inside Twitter that Chinese companies, who had already paid Twitter, may gain information that would allow them to identify and learn about sensitive material involving Chinese users who had circumvented the Chinese government’s restrictions on Twitter and other users throughout the world.
According to the revelation, “Twitter officials recognized that receiving Chinese money ran the risk of hurting users in China (where using VPNs or other access-bypassing technology to access the network is forbidden) and abroad. Twitter management recognized that this amounted to a serious ethical breach. According to what was said to Mr. Zatko, Twitter is now too reliant on its income stream to take any other action but to try to expand it.
Another claimed incident included Parag Agrawal, who is now the CEO of Twitter, while he was the company’s CTO. A few months before to Mudge taking over as CEO, according to Zatko, “Agrawal proposed to Mudge that Twitter should consider caving in to the Russian Federation’s censorship and monitoring requests as a method to expand subscribers in Russia.”
“The revelation said that even while Mr. Agrawal’s offer was never followed through on or carried out, the fact that Twitter’s current CEO even recommended that Twitter cooperate with the Putin administration raises questions about Twitter’s potential impact on U.S. national security. This was a significant deviation from what Mr. Dorsey had told Mr. Zatko.”
