Mr. Musk has claimed that he should be able to abandon the Twitter acquisition because the company downplayed the number of fraudulent accounts on the service. Mr. Zatko said in his complaint that Mr. Agrawal had misled Mr. Musk after the billionaire made his concerns known.
A spokesman for Mr. Musk’s legal team did not respond to a request for comment.
At the more than two-hour hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Grassley said Mr. Agrawal had “rejected this committee’s invitation by claiming that it would jeopardize Twitter’s ongoing litigation with Mr. Musk.”
“Many of the allegations directly implicate Mr. Agrawal, and he should be here to address them,” Mr. Grassley said.
Mr. Zatko, who reached a $7 million settlement with the company after he left, described Twitter executives as unconcerned about possible holes in security, especially when it could endanger the company’s bottom line. He said he had told one executive that he was “confident” there was a foreign agent inside the company.
“And their response was: ‘Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more. Let’s keep growing the office,’” Mr. Zatko told lawmakers.
Prosecutors charged two former Twitter employees in 2019 with acting as agents of the government of Saudi Arabia, saying they had used their positions to gain access to information about critics of the Saudi government. A California jury convicted one of them on some of the charges last month; the other man left the country before authorities could arrest him.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/technology/twitter-whistle-blower-security-flaws.html
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