If you can’t buy off the witness completely, at least pay him enough to destroy the evidence. That seems to be the Twitter policy. In the latest round of hostile takeover drama, Elon Musk is accusing Twitter honchos of intimidating or bribing whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko into destroying documents which would prove they were infiltrated by spies and riddled with robot accounts.
Burn and bleach the evidence
Peiter Zatko used more than just a Kleenex to wipe the evidence off his hard drives. He went with the Hillary Clinton approved industrial strength bleach bit for all his digital needs. Then, he utilized good old fashioned fire to destroy his printed records. That was part of the whistleblowing security expert’s agreed upon “separation deal” with Twitter.
Coincidentally, the timing of the agreement matches up to just before Musk reinstating “his offer to purchase the social media platform.”
Bloomberg says they got their hands on some court records which reveal that Zatko, former head of Twitter security, disclosed that “he burned 10 handwritten notebooks and deleted 100 computer files at the urging of managers as a part of his separation deal.”
Attorneys for Musk argue that “Twitter’s attempt to buy Mr. Zatko’s silence failed, but Twitter achieved its secondary aim of ensuring Mr. Zatko’s corroborating evidence would never come to light.” That filing was unsealed on Monday, October 10.
Twitter isn’t returning anybody’s calls about the matter but the evidence certainly would have been useful to Musk in court. “The notebooks allegedly burned by Zatko contained notes that he kept in meetings with his counterparts during a year-long stint as Twitter’s security chief.”
He appeared to testify in front of the Senate last month and told them all about “a Chinese agent on the payroll of Twitter.”
An internal conundrum
When he found out they had a rat nibbling at their cheese, he was reportedly told one more wouldn’t matter all that much. Court filings call it an “internal conundrum.” They knew they had spies but liked their work and wanted to keep them. Back in August, “Musk had subpoenaed Zatko seeking documents and communications on Twitter’s spam and alleged security vulnerabilities.”
You can’t turn over what you don’t have. Since Seth Rich was also in the headlines again around that time, Zatko decided to take the money and destroy all the evidence. That’s a whole lot more pleasant than being murdered.
The on again off again deal is still up in limbo. They’re in court because Musk “abandoned his buyout of Twitter for $44 billion.” The judge gave him until October 28 to seal the deal so Elon offered to do it, on the original terms. Suddenly, that’s not good enough for Twitter.
BE the change you want in the world!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2022
They’re the ones walking away from the table, this time. Part of that could be because the destroyed evidence is no longer hanging over them like the sword of Damocles.
One of the reasons Twitter wanted all that evidence gone is because they don’t want Musk undoing all their hard social engineering work. NPR is totally freaking out.
“Twitter has created a lot of rules to promote what it calls healthy conversations. So it has rules against harassment, hate speech, extremism, false or misleading claims about elections and COVID. But Musk says these are too restrictive. He says Twitter should allow basically all legal speech. And that would be a big change.” Legal speech horrifies them.
