Twitter Whistleblower: FBI Said There Was ‘At Least One’ Chinese Agent at the Company

On Tuesday, Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said that there was “at least one” Chinese agent working at Twitter and that the platform lacked the ability to identify employees working for a foreign government.

Last month, Zatko, who is Twitter's former security head, filed an 84-page complaint where he claimed that the platform lied about bots, misled the FTC about its security standards and allowed foreign governments to "infiltrate" the platform.

In the hearing, Zatko told Ranking Member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that the FBI revealed that “at least one” Chinese agent from the Ministry of State Security was working at Twitter during his time at the company.

“In your disclosure, you mention that the FBI notified Twitter that one of their employees was suspected of being a Chinese foreign asset. Were you and others at Twitter at all surprised by that?” Grassley asked.

“This was made aware to me, maybe a week before I was surprised and summarily dismissed. I had been told because the corporate security, physical security team had been contacted and told that there was at least one agent of the MSS, which is one of China’s intelligence services, on the payroll inside Twitter,” Zatko said.

“While it was disturbing to hear, I and many others had, recognizing the state of the environment at Twitter, had really thinking if you are not placing foreign agents inside Twitter, cause it’s very difficult to detect them, it is very valuable to a foreign agent to be inside there, as a foreign intelligence company you’re most likely not doing your job,” he added.

“While employed by Twitter, the individual accepted payments in exchange for accessing and conveying the private information of Twitter users to Saudi officials. That individual is one of two former Twitter employees charged by the Department of Justice for their efforts to provide Saudi officials with the personal information of dissidance and activists critical of the Saudi regime, including sensitive data that could identify and locate these individual users,” Feinstein said.

“As head of security, Mr. Zatko, can you describe the types of efforts you’ve seen by foreign governments to infiltrate, control, exploit, or surveil twitter and its users and share what steps Twitter and regulators should have taken to protect against these attacks?” she asked.

“One of the disturbing things that I saw based upon being ten years behind where I would expect a modern tech company to be, was a lack of an ability to internally look for and identify inappropriate access within their own systems,” Zatko said.

“Other than the person who I believed with high confidence to be a foreign agent placed in a position from India, it was only going to be from an outside agency or somebody alerting Twitter that somebody already existed that they would find the person,” he continued. “What I did notice when we did know of a person inside acting on behalf of a foreign interest, as an unregistered agent, it was extremely difficult to track the people, there was a lack of logging and an ability to see what they were doing, what information was being access or to contain their activities, let alone set steps for remediation and possible reconstitution of any damage. They simply lacked the fundamental abilities to hunt for foreign intelligence agencies and expel them on their own.”

Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) pointed out that Twitter refused to take down tweets containing sexual content with children as young as 13 years old. Zatko said he was unfamiliar with this, but that it didn’t surprise him.

“Why? For what reason would Twitter refuse to take down this sexually explicit content if it knew that it was affecting underage children? Why would they leave this up? And why would they refuse to take this down?” Blackburn asked.

Zatko said he was aware that sexually explicit content on the platform became an issue with advertisers.

“They had a monetary concern but not a moral concern?” Blackburn pressed.

“There was a concern that they could even correctly identify and get ahead of this [the sexually explicit content] because they lacked the basic tools and resources in those teams, and it would have to be in a reaction after things were posted and maybe brought to their attention,” he said. He added that he did not know what was done to police this type of content on the platform.

Leah covered last month that Ahmad Abouammo, a former Media Partnerships Manager for the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region at Twitter, was convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia by handing over information about users who criticized the Kingdom and its royal family.

Abouammo was a U.S. resident who was born in Egypt. He was found guilty of acting as a foreign agent without notice to the Attorney General, conspiracy, wire fraud, international money laundering and falsifying records.