US Senate Holds Session September 13 To Hear Peiter "Mudge" Zatko's Report Against Twitter

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley will hear reports on Twitter. (photo: twitter @ChuckGrassley)

JAKARTA - The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee has announced it will hold a hearing on September 13 to face former Twitter Inc chief security officer Peiter "Mudge" Zatko. This trial is to discuss allegations from the whistleblower's complaint that the social media company has been misleading regulators in the US.

Zatko, who accused Twitter of falsely claiming to have a solid security plan in place. It also accused the platform of making misleading statements about its defenses against hackers and spam accounts. According to a spokesman for Zatko, he has also discussed his complaint with the chairman staff and ranking members on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Energy Council and Commerce Committee, and Senate Intelligence Committee staff.

In the 84-page report, Zatko, a notorious hacker widely known as "Mudge," made multiple claims accusing Twitter of prioritizing user growth over reducing spam. While the executives are only pursuing targets to qualify to win individual bonuses of as much as 10 million US dollars associated with daily increase of users. They also have no explicit plans to cut spam.

Instead, Twitter has labeled the complaint a "false narrative."

"The Senate Judiciary Committee will investigate this matter further with the full committee listening to this term, and take further steps necessary to resolve this worrying allegation," said committee chair Senator Richard Durbin and top Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, quoted by Reuters.

Staff with Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee and the Judiciary Committee also met Zatko this week.

Blumenthal has a great interest in Big Tech. He had written in a letter to the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan.

“According to disclosures and evidence provided by Peiter 'Mudge' Zatko, a highly respected cybersecurity expert who served as Twitter's Security Leader from 2020 to 2022, Twitter executives allegedly failed to address significant security vulnerabilities, ignored mishandling of personal data, and privacy risk known to users for more than a decade,” the letter reads.

Blumenthal is now calling for an FTC investigation in the letter.