Hey @elonmusk will you release ex-Twitter security chief Peiter "Mudge" Zatko from his confidentiality agreement? He was clearly right about everything in his whistle blower complaint. How did his hiring in late '20 intersect w/ everything else?
washingtonpost.com/technology/int…
What really transpired during Mudge's tenure at Twitter, from hiring -- driven in response to the "largest hack of a social media platform in history" in July 2020 by teenagers simply asking users for passwords and going from there, to his subsequent firing is an untold story.
And it would be great to better understand to what extent Parag's tremendous ego, propensity to shade the truth, and personal responsibility for technical failures (as former CTO) played in setting the stage for the events that transpired up to the 2020 and beyond.
As an aside, it's extremely easy to see how @elonmusk was able to fire a huge % of Twitter staff & have zero negative impact -- most of them didn't know what they were doing. Twitter was a hot-mess internally due to Jack's increasing disengagement and Parag's unparalleled hubris.
Zatko's report & my excerpts contextualize the culture at Twitter & shed some light on mgmt failures; similarly, the #TwitterFiles releases show the extent to which ideologues abused trust and amassed power.
But the question remains - who really had access to what? Let's explore:
Wait, what?!??! Over-broad permissions to access sensitive areas, no auditing, and effectively ZERO controls around user privacy and data security. Mind blowing.
Don't worry though, we're trustworthy... don't worry, it was just a small number of privileged users...
Oh? REALLY?!?? "Twitter employees were repeatedly found to be intentionally installing spyware on their work computers AT THE REQUEST OF EXTERNAL ORGANIZATIONS" AYFKM??
"...multiple episodes suggesting that Twitter had been penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies and/or was complicit in threats to democratic governance"
This. This takes the cake though:
So yeah.. the question remains: who had access to what? And maybe even more essential: why?
Coda: I first met @dotMudge ~22 yrs ago when still in USAF. Always a fan & I deeply respect him; he even gave me a L0pht T-shirt "back in the day" & I suspect he still has the unit challenge coin I gave him.
~when he hired on at Twitter he blocked me😢🤔
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