Last week, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that there is “a chaotic and reckless environment at a mismanaged company that allows too many of its staff access to the platform's central controls and most sensitive information without adequate oversight.”

Zatko, who in an earlier phase of his career was an “ethical hacker” of some renown and is a respected figure in the world of cybersecurity, has already been invited to testify before Congress, where many lawmakers of both parties, for different reasons, are frequently eager to stick it to Big Tech. 

Much of the coverage of the complaint, however, has focused on the Elon Musk angle, as Musk is claiming in his current litigation with Twitter that the company has not been honest about the number of bots, or fake accounts, on the platform. 

“Twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform, and were not motivated to,” the complaint said, although an attorney for Zatko told the media that he had not been in contact with Musk. 

That’s about to change, however, as Musk has subpoenaed Zatko. 

According to The Verge, which published the document, Zatko will be deposed on September 9. 

While much coverage in the tech press has indicated that Zatko’s complaint is helpful to Musk’s case in his legal battle with Twitter, a Techdirt editorial last week argued the opposite. 

“The first and most important thing to remember is that, even as Musk insists otherwise, the Twitter lawsuit is not about spam. It just is not. I’m not going to repeat everything in that earlier story explaining why not, so if you haven’t read that yet, please do. But the core of it is that Musk needed an escape hatch from the deal he didn’t want to consummate and the best his lawyers could come up with was to claim that Twitter was being misleading in its SEC reporting regarding spam,” Mike Masnick wrote. 

The report added that the Twitter SEC filings list the number of bot accounts in the company’s “monetizable daily average user” (mDAU) reporting, which is not the same thing as its total user base. 

“The fact that Mudge is saying that there are spam accounts outside the mDAU…is the very point that Twitter has been making and that Musk keeps misrepresenting. mDAU does not include all accounts on the platform,” the report said. “And the only way in which the spam counting could even be remotely relevant to the case (and, again, it’s not) is if Twitter made a material misstatement to the SEC.”

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.