A former Twitter employee revealed continued privacy and data security violations by the company, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post on Tuesday. The whistleblower, a former Twitter engineer, filed a complaint with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in October 2022 under advice of Whistleblower Aid. The complaint contains allegations that Twitter maintains the ability to tweet from any user’s account without the user’s permission. The complaint echoes September 2022 congressional testimony from former Twitter head of security Peiter Zatko.
The new whistleblower cited Zatko’s testimony as one of the reasons they chose to come forward–albeit under the condition of anonymity over fears of harassment. The whistleblower’s complaint points to an internal program at Twitter referred to as “GodMode.” Under GodMode, Twitter engineers remain able to tweet from any account without the user’s permission. It was originally intended to allow Twitter to tweet on behalf of advertisers unable to do so for themselves.
GodMode was first discovered during an internal breach of Twitter security in 2020. Twitter claimed to have fixed the problem, but according to the whistleblower, the code still exists. All it takes to reactivate the code, from any Twitter engineer’s computer, is changing one line of code from “FALSE” to “TRUE.” The whistleblower complaint read that Twitter has no way of tracking if any of the engineers “use or abuse...
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