Senior United States lawmakers said on Tuesday that they will are investigating claims Twitter Inc.'s former head of security Peiter Zatko made in documents he had sent to Congress that were publicly released by The Washington Post earlier in the day.
Members of Congress from both parties, including legislators from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee and the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, confirmed they are looking at Zatko's allegations. "If these claims are accurate, they may show dangerous data privacy & security risks for Twitter users around the world," Democratic Senator Dick Durbin tweeted.
In whistleblower complaints he submitted to the US government, Congress and US federal agencies last month, Zatko alleged Twitter has "extreme, egregious deficiencies" in its cybersecurity system and that it had misled US regulators about this and other issues. He also claimed that the company deliberately uses a misleading strategy to determine the number of bots on its platform, which could have ramifications in Twitter's legal case against Elon Musk.