Top House Oversight Republican Puts Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Notice, Gives Him One Week to Identify Employees Behind Breach
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The top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), is asking Twitter to provide more information on the employees involved in Wednesday’s massive breach of the platform within a week.
“Twitter’s failure not only created an opportunity for criminals to perpetrate a crime broadcasted to millions of Twitter’s users, but the hackers’ potential breach of Twitter’s security poses broader risks regarding hackers’ access to private direct messages,” Comer wrote in a letter addressed to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Among other questions, Comer asked Dorsey to say how many Twitter employees were targeted in the “social engineering attack” the company suggested took place, as well as disciplinary action resulting from the incident, by July 24.
The company’s answers could provide more insight into whether it was being straightforward with claims that compromised employee accounts were behind the incident. Hackers claiming they were behind the incident said Thursday they had paid an employee to help them access an internal “control panel” that allows employees to tweet from user accounts.
Questions from congressional Republicans piled up into Friday. Screenshots of the control panel circulating on social media suggested Twitter employees also have the ability to “blacklist” users and trending topics on the website, prompting Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) to send a Friday letter — his second this week — inquiring further about the function.
“Please define the terms ‘Search Blacklist,’ ‘Trends Blacklist,’ ‘Bounced,’ and ‘ReadOnly.’ Please also explain, for each term, whether such flags on user accounts affect the visibility of tweets,” Hawley asked. He also asked why Twitter was removing screenshots users had been posting of the blacklist function considering “public interest” in the issue, adding, “Was any consideration given in making such a decision to the possibility that such screenshots would subject Twitter’s content moderation practices to greater scrutiny?”
Despite Twitter’s effort to suppress the images, they were widely circulated Facebook and Parler into Friday. The revelation threatens to complicate testimony Dorsey provided to Congress in 2018, when he said Twitter’s “quality filtering and ranking algorithm” didn’t result in “tweets by Democrats or tweets by Republicans being viewed any differently.”
That testimony came after users including Reps. Mark Meadows (R-NC), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Andrew Surabian, a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr., were temporarily blocked from appearing in search results, an incident Dorsey claimed was inadvertently caused by an algorithm.
“Their performance is the same because the Twitter platform itself does not take sides,” Dorsey insisted.
Wednesday’s breach led to about 130 accounts, including those belonging to former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden, sharing messages that promised to double and return money from users who sent them cryptocurrency. A little more than 400 people sent cash totaling about $120,000.
