Plus, Tucker Carlson has a mind-bending term for the Jan. 6 insurrection
A former security chief at Twitter, who released a whistleblower report about the company, told lawmakers on Tuesday that the platform has serious security and privacy failures that leadership has refused to fix. Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a cybersecurity expert who served as a Twitter executive from November 2020 until he was fired in January 2022, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the whistleblower complaint he filed with Congress, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. “[I] am here today because I believe that Twitter’s unsafe handling of the data of its users and its inability or unwillingness to truthfully represent issues to its board of directors and regulators have created real risk to tens of millions of Americans, the American democratic process and America’s national security,” Zatko said in his opening statement. “Further, I believe that Twitter’s willingness to purposely mislead regulatory agencies violates Twitter’s legal obligations and cannot be ethically condoned.” The cybersecurity expert said that he found that Twitter cannot protect its data because the company does not know “what data it has, where it lives and where it came from.” Employees – particularly engineers, who make up half the full-time workforce – have too much access to data. This means any employee can access loads of sensitive information about a Twitter user, including their geolocation and data needed to directly access their device. “It doesn’t matter who has the keys if you don’t have any locks on the doors,” he said. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey recruited Zatko to the company after the platform was infamously hacked by teenagers who took over several high-profile accounts as part of an effort to scam Twitter users out of Bitcoin. After joining, Zatko said he discovered that Twitter had a decade of overdue security issues and as a result disclosed the failures repeatedly “to the highest levels of” the company. When his warnings were ignored, he then submitted the disclosures to government agencies and regulators. |
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Republicans on Tuesday introduced legislation to ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks of a pregnancy, their next play on the hot-button issue after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and overturned federal abortion rights. The bill has no chance of passing in a Democratic-controlled Senate, but it does signal where the GOP might go if they take back power in November. |
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The Department of Justice has issued dozens of subpoenas in the last week to people who were familiar with the efforts by Donald Trump and his top aides to remain in power after the 2020 election and the former president’s actions before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, The New York Times reported Monday. The DOJ’s actions, which include about 40 subpoenas as well as phone seizures from two top Trump advisers, is a dramatic uptick in the agency’s investigation, which is separate from the one involving the seizure of hundreds of classified documents Trump and his team kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort for more than 18 months after he left office. |
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An FBI agent who responded to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting delivered heart-wrenching testimony Tuesday in a civil trial aiming to hold conspiracy theorist Alex Jones accountable for claiming the attack was an elaborate hoax. Agent Bill Aldenberg fought back tears as he described the scene he witnessed upon entering the school where 20 children and six adults were shot to death in Newtown, Connecticut. Aldenberg recalled seeing blood in the classrooms, and coming upon the bodies of the school’s principal, counselor and a teacher. |
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