Like so much else, the act of informing on bad actors for good reasons has become tainted.
When the hacker turned corporate-cybersecurity specialist Peiter Zatko went to work for Twitter in 2020, he thought he could help the company improve its practices after some embarrassing breaches. But either he couldn’t help Twitter, or Twitter didn’t want his aid—less than two years later the company fired him. Last month he issued a massive complaint against it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, alleging widespread malfeasance and fraud at the social network.
Earlier this week, after The Washington Post and CNN broke news of the complaint, newspapers everywhere started calling Zatko a “whistleblower,” and I read the word so many times that it ceased to bear meaning. Zatko’s accusations are serious, but the complaint, and the reporting I’ve read about it, also makes them seem amorphous and inchoate, disconnected from real stakes. Zatko’s situation didn’t exactly have the sensibility of, say, a factory-farm foreman revealing that a major company is poisoning its chicken thighs, or a mid-level bureaucrat exposing a government perpetrating atrocities in the name of its citizens.
Tech companies are so big and so powerful and do so many bad things without consequence, it’s understandable that people may feel they have no option other than blowing the whistle on these companies, the way a civil servant might on a...
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