WASHINGTON The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the top Republican on the committee asked Twitter Inc.’s (NYSE:TWTR) CEO, Parag Agrawal, on Monday to answer questions about a former Twitter employee who is going to testify as a whistleblower.
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a well-known hacker who was Twitter’s head of security until last year when he was fired, will talk to the committee on Tuesday.
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Senate Judiciary chair Dick Durbin and Republican Chuck Grassley asked Agrawal on Tuesday to answer questions by September 26. One of the questions was about Zatko’s claims that Twitter “turned a blind eye to foreign intelligence infiltration, does not adequately protect user data, and has given misleading or incorrect information to government agencies about its security practises.”
The senators said that they had asked Agrawal to testify on Tuesday, but he had turned them down.
Twitter refused to say anything.
Durbin and Grassley talked about some of Zatko’s worries, such as the fact that more than half of Twitter’s full-time workers might have special access to the company’s production systems. Zatko says that with this ability, several thousand employees can get to sensitive user data.
“At the same time, Twitter doesn’t seem to have enough ways to know for sure who has gotten into certain systems and data and what they did with it,” the senators wrote in a letter to Agrawal.
“With tens of millions of users in the U.S. and hundreds of millions of users around the world, your company collects and is responsible for huge amounts of sensitive data,” they wrote. “If Mr. Zatko’s claims are true, they show an unacceptable lack of concern for data security that threatens national security and the privacy of Twitter users.”
Zatko has said that Twitter lied to regulators about how it was following a settlement it made with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011 over how it handled user data.
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Durbin told reporters on Monday that Zatko’s claims were “a very serious matter of personal and privacy.”
Twitter said that the former executive was fired for “ineffective leadership and poor performance,” and that it seemed like his claims were made to get people’s attention and hurt Twitter.
