In a shocking revelation, Peiter Zatko, the former head of security at Twitter, has alleged that the Indian government pressured the social media platform into hiring a “government agent” who likely had access to private user data as part of their job.
The complaint, an 84-page document sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission and made public by the Washington Post on Tuesday afternoon, claims that Zatko’s attorneys have sent the National Security Division of the US Justice Department and the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence evidence corroborating and supporting this claim.
Zatko said that Twitter was compelled by the Indian government to pay one of its agents. According to reports, the employee had access to private user information. According to reports, the spy was dispatched to India amid “a time of intense protests” in India.
“The Indian government forced Twitter to hire specific individual(s) who were government agents, who (because of Twitter’s basica architectural flaws) would have access to vast amounts of Twitter sensitive data,” the complaint notes.
“By knowingly permitting an Indian government agent direct unsupervised access to the company’s systems and user data, Twitter executives violated the company’s commitments to its users”.
According to the former head of Twitter security, the Indian government attempted, “with different success,” to get Twitter to hire locals on a full-time basis who “might be used as leverage.”
In the complaint, it is said that “the prospect of harm to Twitter workers was sufficient to force Twitter to seriously consider complying with foreign government requests that Twitter would otherwise fundamentally oppose.”
