Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the Twitter whistleblower who is warning of security flaws, privacy threats and lax controls at the social platform, will take his case to Congress Tuesday. 

Senators who will hear Zatko’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee are alarmed by his Twitter allegations at a time of heightened concern over the safety of powerful tech platforms. 

It’s Zatko’s second Capitol Hill appearance, and in some ways a 21st-century echo of his first. In 1998, he testified before a Senate panel along with fellow members of a hacker collective who warned about the security dangers of the then-emerging internet age. 

Zatko, a respected cybersecurity expert, was Twitter’s head of security until he was fired early this year. He brought the stunning allegations to Congress and federal regulators, asserting that the influential social platform misled regulators about its cyber defenses and efforts to control millions of “spam” or fake accounts. 

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the panel, has said that if Zatko’s claims are accurate, “they may show dangerous data privacy and security risks for Twitter users around the world.” 

Musk battle

Zatko’s accusations are also playing into billionaire tycoon Elon Musk’s battle with Twitter. The Tesla CEO is trying to get out of his $44 billion bid to buy the company; Twitter has sued to force him to complete the deal. The Delaware judge overseeing that case ruled last week that Musk can include new evidence related to Zatko’s allegations in the high-stakes trial set to start October 17. 

The allegation that Twitter engaged in deception in its handling of automated “spam bot” accounts is at the core of Musk’s attempt to back out of the Twitter deal. 

At the same time, many of Zatko’s claims are uncorroborated and appear to have little documentary support. In a statement, Twitter has called Zatko’s description of events “a false narrative.” 

Also Tuesday, Twitter’s shareholders are scheduled to vote on the company’s pending buyout by Musk. The vote is something of a formality given that the deal is on hold while the court case plays out. But if the measure passes as expected, it would pave the way for a Musk takeover should Twitter prevail in court. 

Zatko also filed complaints with the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among his most serious accusations is that Twitter violated the terms of a 2011 FTC settlement by falsely claiming that it had put stronger measures in place to protect the security and privacy of its users. 

The SEC is questioning Twitter about how it counts fake accounts on its platform. Twitter uses counts of its presumably real users to attract advertisers, whose payments make up about 90% of its revenue. The “spam bots” have no value to advertisers because there’s no person behind them. 

San Francisco-based Twitter has an estimated 238 million daily active users worldwide. The company says it removes 1 million spam accounts daily. 

‘Egregious deficiencies’

Zatko’s 84-page complaint alleges that he found “extreme, egregious deficiencies” on the platform, including issues with “user privacy, digital and physical security, and platform integrity/content moderation.” 

It accuses CEO Parag Agrawal and other senior executives and board members of making “false and misleading statements to users and the FTC” about these issues. Twitter denies those claims and has said that Zatko was fired in January for “ineffective leadership and poor performance.” Zatko’s attorneys say the performance claim is false. 

Twitter also hinted that Zatko’s complaint might be designed to bolster Musk’s legal fight with the company. Twitter called Zatko’s complaint “a false narrative” that is “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and lacks important context.” 

News of Zatko’s complaint surfaced August 23, almost two months before the Twitter-Musk trial is scheduled to begin. One of Zatko’s attorneys has said “he’s never met Elon Musk. Doesn’t know Elon Musk. They know people in common.” 

The company also says it has significantly tightened security since 2020. 

Among Zatko’s specific allegations: 

— The company had such poor cybersecurity that it easily could have been exposed to outside attacks or attempts to siphon off its internal data. 

—The company lacked effective leadership, with its top executives practicing “deliberate ignorance” of pressing problems. Zatko described former CEO Jack Dorsey as “extremely disengaged” during the last months of his tenure, to the point where he wouldn’t even speak during meetings on complex issues. Dorsey stepped down in November 2021. 

—That Twitter knowingly allowed the government of India to place its agents on the company payroll, where they had “direct unsupervised access” to highly sensitive data on users. It makes a parallel but less detailed accusation that Twitter took funding from unidentified Chinese entities who may have gained access enabling them to access the identities and sensitive data of Chinese users who secretly use Twitter, which is officially banned in China. 

Better known by his hacker handle “Mudge,” Zatko, 51, first gained prominence in the 1990s. He was the best-known member of the Boston-based collective L0pht, which pioneered ethical hacking, embarrassing companies including Microsoft for poor security. His work raised awareness in the computing world that forced such major companies to take security seriously. He co-founded the consultancy @Stake, which was later acquired by Symantec. 

Zatko later worked in senior positions at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google. He joined Twitter at Dorsey’s urging in late 2020, the same year the company suffered an embarrassing security breach involving hackers who broke into the Twitter accounts of world leaders, celebrities and tech moguls, including Musk, attempting to scam their followers out of bitcoin. 
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«Це не правило, а виняток. Уряд і надалі рішуче налаштований впроваджувати політику дерегуляції», прокоментувала голова Мінекономіки
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In the northeastern village of Ban Ta Klang in Thailand, Siriporn Sapmak starts her day by doing a livestream of her two elephants on social media to raise money to survive.

The 23-year old, who has been taking care of elephants since she was in school, points her phone to the animals as she feeds them bananas and they walk around the back of her family home.

Siriporn says she can raise about 1,000 baht ($27.46) of donations from several hours of livestreaming on TikTok and YouTube but that is only enough to feed her two elephants for one day.

It is a new – and insecure – source of income for the family, which before the pandemic earned money by doing elephant shows in the Thai city of Pattaya. They top up their earnings by selling fruit.

Like thousands of other elephant owners around the country, the Sapmak family had to return to their home village as the pandemic decimated elephant camps and foreign tourism ground to a virtual halt. Only 400,000 foreign tourists arrived in Thailand last year compared with nearly 40 million in 2019.

Some days, Siriporn doesn’t receive any donations and her elephants are underfed.

“We are hoping for tourists to (return). If they come back, we might not be doing these livestreams anymore,” she said.

“If we get to go back to work, we get a (stable) income to buy grass for elephants to eat.”

Edwin Wiek, founder of Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand, estimates that at least a thousand elephants in Thailand would have no “proper income” until more tourists return.

Thailand has about 3,200 to 4,000 captive elephants, according to official agencies, and about 3,500 in the wild.

Wiek said the Livestock Development Department needs to find “some kind” of budget to support these elephants.

“Otherwise, it’s going to be difficult to keep them alive I think for most families,” he said.

“Like family”

The families in Ban Ta Klang, the epicenter of Thailand’s elephant business located in Surin province, have cared for elephants for generations and have a close connection to them.

Elephant shows and rides have long been popular with tourists, especially the Chinese, while animal rights groups’ criticism of how elephants are handled there has given rise to tourism in sanctuaries.

“We are bound together, like family members,” Siriporn’s mother Pensri Sapmak, 60, said.

“Without the elephants, we don’t know what our future will look like. We have today thanks to them.”

The government has sent 500,000 kilograms of grass across multiple provinces since 2020 to help feed the elephants, according to the Livestock Development Department, which oversees captive elephants.

Elephants, Thailand’s national animal, eat 150 kg to 200 kg each day, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Siriporn and her mother, however, said they have not yet received any government support.

“This is a big national issue,” said Livestock Development Department Director-General Sorawit Thanito.

He said the government plans to assist elephants and their caretakers and that “measures along with a budget will be proposed to cabinet,” without giving a time frame.

While the government is expecting 10 million foreign tourists this year, some say this may not be enough to lure elephant owners back to top tourist destinations, given the costs involved. Chinese tourists, the mainstay of elephant shows, have also yet to return amid COVID-19 lockdowns at home.

“Who has the money right now to arrange a truck… and how much security (do) they have that they are really going to have business again when they go back?,” said Wiek.

He expected more elephants to be born in captivity over the next year, exacerbating the pressures on their owners.

“Some days we make some money, some days none, meaning there’s going to be less food on the table”,” said Pensri.

“I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

($1 = 36.4200 baht)
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«Запаси вугілля на наших складах – майже два млн тонн, це в 2,5 рази більше, ніж на цю дату минулого року. Тому готові підставити плече підтримки нашим польським друзям»
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Ethiopia once said it wanted to become the “China of Africa” — that is, a manufacturing hub — with the help of its industrial parks. But the global economic downturn and the country’s ongoing conflict have prompted companies to leave the parks and lay off thousands of workers.

The Ethiopian government hoped that one the country’s industrial parks — Hawassa, which was opened in 2016 with the potential to create 60,000 jobs — would help the country move from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy, and that the companies operating there would bring high-tech work.   

Kalkidan Asrat, a logistics manager Nasa Garment at the Hawassa Industrila Park, shared those dreams. 

Her birthplace, she said, is a small town and her family worked in agriculture for a living as subsistence farmers. When she completed her education, she joined the industrial park, where she said she was able to improve her prospects.

There are 10 other industrial parks like Hawassa spread across Ethiopia.  

The government has said it hoped to make Ethiopia a lower middle-income country by 2025, with manufacturing playing a big part. 

That is now looking less likely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, a lack of foreign currency in the country, and conflict and human rights abuses.    

“Two of the industrial parks have been directly impacted. They’ve been in the combat zone, effectively,” said emerging markets economist Patrick Heinisch. “The most severe hit to the industrial parks is from the loss of access to AGOA. One week after the announcement, the first company announced they would retreat from the Ethiopian market; they sold their factories in Ethiopia. This has been followed by other companies.” 

The African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, passed in the U.S. in 2000 to aid development in sub-Saharan Africa, gave Ethiopia duty-free access to the U.S. market for several products.

With Ethiopian wages much lower than those in China, a country synonymous with manufacturing, and AGOA making it cheaper to import goods to the U.S., many international manufacturing companies set up in Hawassa’s industrial sheds. 

On January 1, however, the U.S. withdrew Ethiopia’s access to AGOA due to “gross violations of human rights.”  

Rights groups have accused the Ethiopian government and its aligned military forces of large-scale human abuses, including ethnic cleansing, against Tigrayans during the country’s nearly two-year conflict.  

Tigrayan forces have also been accused of abuses. 

Thirty-five thousand people worked at Hawassa, but in June, one firm laid off 3,000 workers and others laid off hundreds.  

One factory owner in Hawassa, Raghavendra Pattar, said the country is struggling to adapt.

“We are forging towards a new market, but it will take more time to roll up the market again, so that’s why we are suffering a lot,” he said. “The country is suffering because of foreign currency availability in the country today. They also need support from other countries, big countries, like America.” 

The deputy general manager of the park, Belante Tebikew, said the withdrawal of AGOA was causing more problems than the pandemic or inflation.

“There are some, as I told you, reductions on orders, because they are being injured by the customs, duty-free privileges in the American markets, since most of the commodities are being exported to the U.S.,” he said. 

In another bad sign for the country’s economy, fighting between government and Tigrayan rebel forces broke out again in late August after a five-month cease-fire.
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З початку дії зернової ініціативи Україна експортувала 2,6 мільйона тонн сільськогосподарської продукції
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Шмигаль подякував Вашингтону, зокрема, за запит до Конгресу на виділення додаткових 11,7 мільярда доларів цього року
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