Twitter whistleblower faces the Senate. Then what?

Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko will be the star Tuesday at the latest congressional grilling on the tech industry’s alleged failings — this time, claims that the social media company’s lax practices have endangered users’ privacy and data security.

Feeling déjà vu? There’s a reason.

Congress has been holding hearings for years to spotlight lawmakers’ complaints about Silicon Valley, from tech platforms’ vulnerability to Russian meddling in the 2016 election to last year’s media-splashed allegations against Facebook by whistleblower Frances Haugen. But lawmakers have little to show for it, at least in terms of enacting legislation to change the industry’s ways.

Some veterans of D.C.’s tech wars expect little of that to change after Zatko testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I am all for congressional oversight,” said Jessica Melugin, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is often dubious about new tech regulations. “That being said, congressional hearings in general — and certainly, technology-focused congressional hearings — have been more showmanship than substance over the last couple of years. And it's an election year, so double or triple that.”

Not everyone is so skeptical. Avery Gardiner, chief counsel for competition and tech policy in the office of committee member Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), said at a conference Monday that Zatko’s testimony could prove “a wonderful catalyst for change.”

But Sara Collins, senior policy counsel and data protection expert at progressive tech group Public Knowledge, agreed that people shouldn’t expect much from Tuesday’s hearing.

“This is not going to be like, game-changing,” said Collins, whose group supports many of the bipartisan tech-crackdown bills now percolating through Congress. After years of similar hearings, Collins said senators should already know how to address the privacy and security issues Zatko raised.

“There are no privacy protections in the United States,” she said. “It all comes back to the same thing. Like, we know the remedy. So can we just get there. Please.”

The genesis

Before 2017, blockbuster tech hearings with top executives or high-profile whistleblowers were virtually unheard of. But everything changed with the revelation that a Kremlin-backed hacking and disinformation campaign, spread widely across top U.S. tech platforms, had interfered in the 2016 presidential election — with the aim, intelligence leaders and lawmakers of both parties later concluded, of helping put Donald Trump in the White House.

Senators hauled executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter before a Judiciary subcommittee in October 2017, kicking off a new era of congressional scrutiny.

Capitol Hill’s tech policy circus began in earnest soon afterward, when whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed Facebook’s unapproved sharing of user data with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

The news, which caused a worldwide media furor, forced Mark Zuckerberg to testify for the first time before the combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in April 2018 — an unusual arrangement that led to all manner of widely mocked questions from lawmakers about Facebook’s business model.

A hearing with Wylie himself followed the next month — and from there, things really took off.

Hearings after hearings

The House Judiciary Committee brought executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple to testify on antitrust in July 2019. The following July saw another antitrust hearing, this one featuring the CEOs of the four same companies (Zuckerberg was back for an encore).

More high-profile hearings followed in rapid succession — a hearing about online companies’ liability protections with Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in October 2020, followed by another hearing featuring the three executives in March 2021.

A new round of whistleblower hearings was soon upon us, with Haugen testifying in October about documents she had leaked that suggested Facebook (soon to become Meta) was aware of the societal dangers Instagram and its other products posed. Haugen accompanied her appearance with a media rollout that included a “60 Minutes” interview days before the hearing.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri was hauled before the congressional dais in December, after Haugen had appeared for an encore days before.

And this list isn’t even exhaustive.

What did all this accomplish?

“I do think in the beginning, when there was less public information about all of this, they were helpful,” Public Knowledge’s Collins said about the crush of blockbuster tech hearings over the past half-decade. Congress did ultimately enact cybersecurity legislation that included a law, S.B. 1321 (116), to toughen penalties for election hacking. And some hearings — especially the early ones — helped inform several major tech bills that now have the potential (however slim) to pass this Congress.

But as multiple legislative cycles came and went without passage of comprehensive privacy rules, changes to the Section 230 liability shield or tech antitrust bills — anything else, really — Collins said the hearings began to feel underwhelming. Today, she believes they’re largely a substitute for real action.

“Doing the hard work of writing a bill and getting into the weeds and doing all of the negotiating is really, really difficult,” said Collins. “It's not very high profile work, and it has a high likelihood of failure. This is not that. You can just say you did the thing, took an action, and you accomplished something — even if the accomplishment isn’t big.”

The most serious legislative proposals in the current Congress include a bipartisan antitrust bill led by Klobuchar, S.B. 2992 (117), which faces uncertain support amid a ferocious lobbying campaign by the tech industry. A comprehensive data privacy bill appears similarly stalled, largely due to Democratic infighting. And as the legislative calendar tightens, other bills related to kids’ privacy and tech antitrust face an uncertain path.

What to expect Tuesday

Regardless of what the senators do, the Federal Trade Commission is likely to investigate whether Zatko’s revelations constitute violations of a 2011 consent decree that Twitter formed with the agency. And David Vladeck, former director of the bureau of consumer protection at the FTC, said there’s nothing Congress can address or uncover via Zatko’s testimony that the agency cannot.

“The FTC has substantial information gathering tools and the whistleblower is, as we have seen, not shy about sharing his views,” Vladeck said in an email to MT.

Melugin and Collins said the same is true of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which may investigate whether Twitter misled investors.

Both advocates were alarmed by Zatko's contention that authoritarian governments access the data of dissidents on Twitter. But they said a closed-door Senate Intelligence Committee meeting would be a more useful venue to examine those claims.

So what are lawmakers likely to accomplish this morning?

“I think it'd be very difficult to divorce the sort of current political climate around Twitter from this hearing,” said Collins. She said the ongoing circus around Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase the company — and the partisan brawl over Twitter’s content moderation practices driven by that circus — will likely loom large.

Josh Sisco contributed to this report.