You have unbelievable claims on Twitter but also unbelievable claims from Twitter. Take the claim that security expert Peiter “Mudge” Zatko was fired for “weak performance.” Virtually everyone who has had to deal with this digital security specialist annex ‘ethical’ hacker annex transparency activist annex loose cannon over the past thirty years says: can’t. Typical ‘Mudge’ Zatko is that he doesn’t let go when he sinks his teeth into something and that, as his motto goes, he wants to make ‘a dent in the universe’.
Anonymous Twitter employees confirmed to time that Zatko was more assertive than too little with their employer. He was barely inside when he was already considered an elephant in a china shop. Higher up was the term ‘Trojan horse’. After only fourteen months, the leadership put this horse outside the walls. But the 21st century is not Homer’s.
Breathtakingly indifferent
On August 23, Zatko experienced his coming out as a whistleblower. Those who already harbored few illusions about Twitter, also lost the latter. This oh-so-influential platform, Zatko knows, makes disinformation and espionage very easy. Employees can be hired by malicious actors. The leadership is breathtakingly indifferent to anything to do with safety and reliability.
Peiter Zatko (1970) could have become a rock star instead of a tech star. In his youth, he divided his time between the electric guitar and cracking copyright codes on his father’s Apple II computer. Initially, he combined hacking work with performances by his prog metal band Raymaker. Then the digital revolution gained momentum and disappeared behind monitors that at the time still looked like Boeing cockpits.
In the mid-1990s, under his hacker name Mudge, Zatko had already become one of the figureheads of the hacking think tank L0pht. Microsoft’s products, in particular, pricked the hackers mercilessly. The long-haired Mudge in those years also caused a stir in the do-it-yourself media organization Cult of the Dead Cowwho just threw codes into the room at a hacker conference that could crack Bill Gates’ software.
jesus hacker
The distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ hackers was vague at the time, but Mudge left no doubt that what he was doing was in Microsoft’s own interest. He still had long hair (“Jesus hacker,” his wife said fondly) when he testified before the US Senate in 1998 about what was then called “weak computer security.” His name tag was not ‘Peiter Zatko’ but ‘Mudge’, then President Clinton also addressed him that way. In the 21st century, he was hired to plug digital security holes by clients as diverse as Google, Stripe and the US military.
Among his earliest admirers was the later Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who revealed that Mudge had traded his rock star dream for that of a tech star. There are those who say that Mudge is everything Dorsey wanted to be: brilliant, independent, maverick. Whether Dorsey took the ethical superhacker to Twitter on purpose to harass his successors is subject to speculation, however: shortly after this transfer, the CEO resigned with nose piercing. Also speculative is the role of tech billionaire Elon Musk. He wants to get out of his purchase of Twitter and benefits from the cesspool that Mudge is now opening.
It’s sure to be a hot fall for Twitter, but if you ask Peiter Zatko, it’s ultimately in Twitter’s best interest.