Twitter allowed all staff access to personal user accounts, whistleblower says
Christopher Hutton
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A new Twitter whistleblower alleges that company employees had software that any staff member could have used to tweet from other users’ accounts, violating regulations.
The software, known as “GodMode,” allowed employees to access most accounts, according to a whistleblower complaint filed in October reported by the Washington Post on Tuesday. The report adds to allegations that Twitter has failed to uphold security obligations imposed by the Federal Trade Commission.
“After the 2020 hack in which teenagers were able to tweet as any account, Twitter publicly stated that the problems were fixed,” the complaint says. “However, the existence of GodMode is one more example that Twitter’s public statements to users and investors were false and/or misleading.”
While Twitter maintains that its data collection practices are safe, the whistleblower claimed that GodMode was installed on every engineer’s computer and was easily usable.
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“They put in writing to the public and regulators that they had closed all the loopholes,” the new whistleblower told the Washington Post. “That’s a lie. They removed this from one interface, but it still existed in other ways. They just changed the lock on one of the many front doors.”
The whistleblower met with staff at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday after previous meetings with the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the FTC. The whistleblower, who has decided to remain anonymous out of fear of harassment, said he or she decided to testify after watching former Twitter head of security Peiter Zatko come forward last summer to speak about Twitter’s poor security practices.
Under its co-founder Jack Dorsey’s leadership, Twitter had agreed to a consent decree with the FTC in 2011 to protect user data. The agreement included limiting employee access to user data. Zatko testified before Congress in September 2022 that Twitter failed to uphold this consent decree and that the company’s data were poorly protected due to executives declining to invest enough into data protection practices. The former Twitter executive also claimed that at least one person connected to the Chinese government had received access to the breadth of Twitter’s data.
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While Twitter claimed it had improved its security practices, it remains unclear whether they are a priority under Elon Musk’s new leadership. The FTC pressed Musk about the company’s security practices last month to ensure the efforts were receiving sufficient funding.