WWED: What Would Elon Do?

Here we are in Advent, waiting for the messiah, and some people think his name is Elon. Except that the poll he ran about whether he should step down would make even John the Baptist wonder whether he is the one. The puzzle for me contnues to be the sinecure problem: Twitter pre-Elon is said to have hired some dozens of ex-FBI agents into sinecures, except their job at Twitter was to control the narrative. But if a sinecure is a do-nothing job, how were they expected to contol the narrative?

Other accounts suggest that much of the roughly 10,000 workforce pre-Musk got free meals, free red wine on tap, yoga rooms, work-from-home, pet insurance, and much more. Yet Musk laid at least half of them off, and Twitter stayed up. That says to me that it wasn't just the former G-men who got sinecures. In the video below, Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford Medical School professor and prominent COVID skeptic who was shadowbanned from Twitter for "misinformation" under the old regime, recounts a personal tour he was given of Twitter headquarters that Musk gave him after taking over.

He spends most of the time outlining the specifics of his trendlisting, but I found other details of Twitter's current state more interesting. At about 7:00, he speaks incidentally of the tech people currently at Twitter, who he says are primarily engineers brought over from Tesla who are "still trying to figure out the system". At about 11:00, he says,

You walk into Twitter headquarters, it looks like a five-star hotel that's been abandoned. There's a very fancy restaurant-looking thing, there's all kinds of -- the decorations, the artwork, it all looks like a five-star hotel. But nobody's there. Almost nobody's there. Except . . . that, when you go into the engineering area, with all of the cubicles, it's filled with lots and lots of people trying very hard to make sure Twitter doesn't explode or something. It's Saturday, during the day, and they're working hard. I meet with Elon briefly, he sends me to an engineer. He introduces me to an engineer who was assigned to help me. So I learned a few things.

But at that point his interlocutor steers him back to what Elon told him, not the engineer, but I was much more interested in the engineer. What I gather from Dr Bhattacharya's account of the current Twitter work environment is that, having fired or encouraged the resignations of Twitter's own engineers, he's brought a bunch of "engineers" over from Tesla. Now, "engineer" is a difficult term. At various times, I've been called an "engineer" although I never had the title on a business card, in part because I've been told that in some states you can't call yourself an engineer unless you have a degree or a certification in it. My degrees are in Eng Lit, and I worked with software, not strength of materials or something. So Dr Bhattacharya's use of the term is at best imprecise, although it's not his fault.

But there's still a problem. As far as I can tell, nobody at Tesla worked with the specific circumstances of social media that Twitter has. They did internal network, they did payroll, they did inventory, they did data base. It doesn't matter how many dozens Musk brought over, even if they were his best guys at assembly line automation, they wouldn't know a thing about Twitter. It doesn't matter if they were working their little heads off all day Saturday, it wouldn't help.

This is one of my main takeaways from my career in tech, that if people are working all day Saturday, as Dr Bhattacharya relates, if they're working all night, working all weekend, it's a key sign they don't know what they're doing. That's because they, or at least the people they're replacing in Twitter's case, had months, probably years, to do the work they were supposed to be doing, and they didn't do it (we're back to the meaning of "sinecure"). A few frenzied all-nighters aren't going to make up for years of free red wine and yoga rooms.

This is part of Musk's problem and why he's now toying with stepping down. But the overall conundrum is bigger. Twitter had a product of sorts, although it lost $1.4 billion in 2020, somewhat less in 2021, but is projected to lose far more this year. In other words, it sustained the free red wine and pet insurance for 10,000 employees for a while, but even after laying half of them off, that's not going to fix it. Nor is a big show of we're-working-all-weekend gonna help a thing. But even with a team of "engineers" with no social media experience trying to keep Twitter from exploding, its silly rinky-dink product just keeps on keepin' on, which itself is probably a misleading indicator.

Still, the right-wing organs think Elon has something up his sleeve. Matt Margolis at PJ Media:

[I]n response to a tweet suggesting that Musk already has a successor picked out, Musk tweeted, “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”

Does this sound like someone who’s about to step down? It sure doesn’t sound that way to me. The fine print of the poll is that anyone who would take over as CEO of Twitter would need to have the same vision for the platform as Musk does, and that’s a rather significant caveat.

A new CEO would need to have the same vision for Twitter as Musk? Pray tell, what on earth is Musk's vision? Nick Arama at Red State:

He tweeted on Sunday that there was “no successor” because “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive.” So it sounds like he was feeling out folks but hadn’t had luck yet.

According to CNBC’s David Faber, sources told him that Musk had been looking for a CEO since before the poll. As we’ve said, he always intended to put a CEO in charge which was why the left cheering and trying to bomb the poll was funny because having a different CEO didn’t mean that Musk was going away, just that he wasn’t going to be the day-to-day head of operations.

. . . But it doesn’t sound like he has the person yet, so don’t count on him leaving immediately. Sounds like it’s going to take a while yet. This isn’t going to make those on the left happy.

Just you wait! Elon's still going to fix Twitter, and that's going to fix everything. Oh come, divine messiah!

Really? Elon Musk??

So, Why Were All The Ex FBI Agents At Twitter?

Every indication I've seen from the whole Twitter saga is that the company was some sort of hybrid between a boondoggle and a bubble. Its product isn't something easily explainable; it started with a 140 character limit that was raised to 280, which simply privileged the inarticulate and turned the whole exercise into something between a video game and Scrabble. It wasn't useful as a communications tool, because it left little room for any capable rhetoric and none at all for exposition or argument.

So we have the question, "Why was Twitter filled with retired FBI guys?" The piece tries to answser,

Twitter, as a company whose product is social influence more than software or stuff, has less money to throw around, but they have something that is perhaps even more valuable to the Elite™: it is a chokepoint through which most information flows, and hence is a place where The Narrative™ is fleshed out.

Their protection money, so to speak, was handing over at least partial control to the powers-that-be of the information flow.

That’s why, over the past few years, Twitter has become a home-away-from-home for FBI retirees.

. . . Twitter had little money to give, but they could offer sinecures for clients of the powerful, and the ability to control the flow of information. And that is what they did.

Tiny slices of language at 140 or 280 characters per post are information? I can get more information from a skin cream commercial. Our cat conveys more information by mewing and tilting his head. Twitter is not much more than a certain kind of noise. We might get a little farther if we allow that the retired FBI guys were in sinecures, "a position requiring little or no work", but that's just another way of saying they weren't doing anything, and that conflicts with the assertion that they were controlling the information flow.

So the retired FBI agents were pretending to control something that a certain class of consumers chose to call "information". In the most critical case at hand, they sought to limit a certain level of superficial noise over Hunter Biden's laptop. Now, I simply don't understand how you can explain "Hunter Biden's laptop" in 280 characters. At best, you can post a link to a story that gives an outline of the case in maybe 2000 words. Twitter is thought to have controlled the case by banning the New York Post, but how did that stop Hunter Biden from becoming a meme? I, or indeed anyone, can post the photo at right, and a huge segment of the population will not only recognize it as the First Cokehead, but will chuckle yet once more at the whole narrative. How did all those retired FBI agents stop a single thing?

I think the answer is that Twitter did little to control the Hunter laptop story, and the biggest beneficiary of Twitter banning the New York Post was the Post itself, as its own headlines reflect. They used to sell books by saying they were banned in Boston, after all.

I think the main issue with Twitter is that it was somehow able to convince a lot of people, certainly much of David Brooks's New American Upper Class, who could flatter themselves with blue checkmarks, that influential people hung out there. And a bunch of Inspector Clouseau wannabes from the FBI convinced people at Twitter that they needed to be put in do-nothng jobs that allegedly "controlled information" from people who convinced themselves and their peers that they had important things to say. In 240 characters.

And Elon Musk decided he was gonna fix this, and a lot of influencers didn't want him to. And in the process, a whole bubble is bursting. So far, we've been mostly getting information about Elon Musk's actual business judgment. But how did Twitter manage to convince anyone that it mattered in the first place?

Here's Another I-Told-You-So

No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 19, 2022

The reaction to last night's poll from Elon Musk on whether he should step down as CEO of Twitter has mostly provoked amusement, but his subsequent tweets suggest he's belatedly coming to recognize what I've been pointing out for the last several weeks, that Twitter is in such bad shape that in fact its auditors should have issued a statement that there is substantial doubt about the entity's ability to continue as a going concern. The link explains an auditor's responsibility in reviewing this circumstance:

Continuation of an entity as a going concern is assumed in financial reporting in the absence of significant information to the contrary. Ordinarily, information that significantly contradicts the going concern assumption relates to the entity's inability to continue to meet its obligations as they become due without substantial disposition of assets outside the ordinary course of business, restructuring of debt, externally forced revisions of its operations, or similar actions.

I've had a fair amount of experience working with both internal and outside auditors as a representative of several corporations' data security and contingency planning programs. This was fairly routine for me, in some part because when I was directly implementing those programs, there were few problems, and the auditors didn't need to spend much time on them. On the other hand, as an active participant in the industry, I was aware of the constant threat that auditors could in fact report that either the data security or contingency planning programs at a company were so deficient that the auditor could issue an opinion that the company cannot continue as a going concern. (On the other hand, I've never heard of such an opinion actually being issued on that basis.)

But on Saturday, I quoted a whistleblower report by Twitter's former data security head, Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, that alleged

[A] series of cascading datacenter problems did put Twitter at risk of “permanent irreparable failure,” and was only prevented by the herculean efforts of a team of Twitter engineers. Every account, every bit of code, every tweet, like, retweet, quote-tweet, DM—everything that constitutes the company, platform, and community known as Twitter—was nearly lost forever during this incident. A key piece of the global information system, poof, gone, and with no way to bring it back. A multibillion-dollar company obliterated in an instant, the biggest 404 error in history, caused not by hackers, but by incredible negligence.

In effect, the company's entire product, its platform, its archive of all past tweets, its valuable user data, its reputation and good will, were at risk of simply disappearing. The equivalent might be roughly characterized as every Ford car, every dealership, every parts inventory, all the company's engineering and research, all its plants, all its user data, and all its credit accounts simply disappearing one day in a puff of smoke. This would include every driver and passenger in a Ford car suddenly dumped in the middle of the street or freeway with no way to continue the journey.

It sounds to me as though Twitter's auditors should have been aware of this and should have been investigating it. Certainly my interviews with outside auditors, as well as bank examiners in some cases, involved them assuring themselves that there was no equivalent threat in the cases of the companies where I worked. It sounds as though there was major negligence in Twitter's case, not just within the company, but from its auditors,who should have actually issued a going concern statement in their prior audits.

The Enron failure also led to the failure of Arthur Andersen.

In 2002, just nine months after the [Enron] scandal broke, the firm was found guilty of crimes in the auditing of Enron. By that time, Arthur Andersen had lost most of its business and two-thirds of its 28,000 employees, and was facing multi-million dollar lawsuits. On August 31, 2002, the company surrendered its licenses to practice as certified public accountants in the United States, effectively putting the company out of business. In 2005, the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed Arthur Andersen's conviction due to errors in the trial judge's instructions to the jury that convicted the firm. Despite this, the damage to Andersen's reputation was so great that it has never returned as a viable auditor even on a limited scale.

The Hot Air commentator in the first link above concludes,

If [Musk] honestly believes that the company is heading for bankruptcy and nobody could “keep Twitter alive,” might he actually be thinking about pulling the plug? If so, this would wind up being the most expensive “experiment” in the history of global business. Musk spent $44 billion of his own money to purchase the company and take it private. If he shuts down the platform entirely, the value of the company will be fairly close to zero.

I've kept saying here that Twitter is a lot closer to FTX than anyone thinks, and a lot more will collapse with Twitter. Instead, we get this:

Fun suggestion @elonmusk:
Let me run Twitter for a bit. No salary. All in. Focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world.

Just offering my help in the unlikely case it's useful.

— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) December 18, 2022

This is the state of David Brooks's meritocratic New American Upper Class. Just focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world. Hey, wasn't that Sam Bankman-Fried's formula?

The Puzzling Thing About Tucker Carlson

Nobody so far has taken over Rush Limbaugh's mantle as the most influential voice of the American right. At his best, although I think he'd been declining since the late Obama years, he had a combination of perceptiveness and wit that matched William Buckley. The problem is that so far, we haven't seen an equivalent figure step in -- as in fact Limbaugh stepped in to replace Buckley during Buckley's own extended decline.

One possibility was Tucker Carlson, although I was always skeptical due to Carlson's wannabe upper-class background, opportunism, and careerism. His best moment, as far as I can see, came when he debunked Sidney Powell's threat to "release the kraken" in the controversy following the 2020 election. But since then, he's been a leader of the inexplicable anti-Ukraine campaign on the US right, and now he's alleging a coverup of CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

In April of 1964, a psychiatrist called Louis Joylon West visited Jack Ruby in his isolation cell in a Dallas jail. According to West’s written assessment, he found that Jack Ruby was “technically insane” and in need of immediate psychiatric hospitalization. Those are conclusions that puzzlingly no one who had spoken to Jack Ruby previously had reached. Ruby had seemed perfectly sane to the people who knew him.

Well, he was an unsuccessful business owner, a small-time pimp and major attention-seeker who traded on the assumption he was tied in with the mob. Perfectly sane. Carlson goes on,

Except that he Louis Jolyon West pronounced him crazy. But what West did not say was that he was working for the CIA at the time. Louis Jolyon West was a contract psychiatrist for the spy agency. He was also an expert on mind control and a prominent player in the now infamous MKUltra program in which the CIA gave powerful psychiatric drugs to Americans without their knowledge. So of all the psychiatrists in the world, what in the world was this guy doing in Jack Ruby’s prison cell? The media did not seem interested in finding out. In fact, the New York Times, in an extensive 1999 obituary of West, never mentioned the fact that he had worked for the CIA, much less his time in Jack Ruby’s cell, which seems relevant.

However, the detailed research into Jack Ruby up to now has stressed only his low-level mafia ties and his possible role in gun-running to Castro, not CIA connections. Allegations from the time of Ruby's incarceration that he was insane appear to have been driven by a campaign to make hin ineligible for the death penalty, not to discredit him as some sort of knowledgeable witness. A news story at the time quotes Dr West in his capacity as a professior and chair of the University of Oklahoma's Department of Psychiatry and Neurology that Ruby was developing a paranoid state, and "The law says he has to be sane to be executed." In any case, Ruby's conviction for murder was overturned pending a new trial, but Ruby died of cancer before it could take place. On his deathbed, Ruby issued a statement that he alone had been responsible for the murder of Oswald.

Carlson uses this random and somewhat questionable data item to pivot to a completely different question, files on the Kennedy assassination that continue to be unreleased:

We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President?["] And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” It’s hard to imagine a more jarring response than that. Again, this is not a “conspiracy theorist” that we spoke to. Not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public. And the answer we received was unequivocal. Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president. Now, some people will not be surprised to hear that they suspected it all along. But no matter how you feel about it or what you thought about the Kennedy assassination, pause to consider what this means. It means that within the US government, there are forces wholly beyond democratic control. These forces are more powerful than the elected officials that supposedly oversee them. These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president.

All Carlson can do is assure us that this anonymous guy is "not a 'conspiracy theorist'", but we can't learn his name. Isn't this actually pretty close to Sidney Powell's kraken? Just asking. For whatever reason, at what seems to be the peak of his media career, he seems to be coming apart. It's a sad thing to watch, but it's also worth noting that even while terminally ill, Limbaugh kept things together.

If something new and solid comes of all this, I'll reassess, but so far, I think this is trading on the continuing loss of FBI credibility from the Twitter files, and there's nothing new to learn about the Kennedy assassination.

More On The Twitter Whistleblower

On Thursday, I posted on the wide-ranging allegations by a Twitter whistleblower, its former head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, that alleged numerous risks to the company's business continuity, as well as that CEO Parag Agrawal concealed these issues from the company's board, when current standards of corporate governance clearly establish that the board should have been notified of them. Via Instapundit, here's an update:

According to the whistleblower report, one consequence of these and many other poor practices was a nearly constant stream of security breaches, with serious incidents occurring almost weekly throughout 2020. One such breach made headlines when a group of teenagers hijacked several major accounts, including those of former President Barack Obama, future Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Apple, and Uber, and used them to solicit transfers of bitcoin. The teen hackers’ level of access was “enough to achieve 'God Mode,' where the teenagers could imposter-tweet from any account they wanted,” the report explains. “Twitter's solution was to impose a system-wide shutdown of system access to all of its employees, lasting days. For about a month, hiring was paused and the company essentially shut down many basic operations to diagnose the symptoms, not the causes, of the hack.”

Elsewhere,

As one report to Twitter’s Board of Directors put it: “Every new employee has access to data they do not need to have access to.” Presumably that included employees known by Twitter to be agents of the Indian and Chinese governments, of which there were several.

. . . Mudge recalled one Twitter executive’s reaction to the discovery of a foreign agent: “Well since we have one, what does it matter if we have more?”

In my own experience, raising data security issues with managers can certainly result in grumbling and resistance, but eventually common sense wins out, even if the messenger isn't necessarily popular. The impression I have here is that the lunatics were running the asylum, and the issue isn't so much Schadenfreude as it is how this could have happened. And this in turn applies to two regimes, the one pre-Musk and the current one, in which Musk was forced to buy the company when he pretty clearly hadn't done due diligence.

As for Twitter pre-Musk, there's an intriguing reference in a mea culpa that Jack Dorsey released this past Monday:

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe. . . . The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

So it sounds like Jack Dorsey himself knew he was in the wrong job for maybe 18 months, but he did little or nothing to leave it until Musk broke in with a deal that was so insanely generous to Twitter shareholders that they had absolutely no choice but to accept it. Who was the "activist" who "entered our stock in 2020" and somehow changed everything? Sounds like there's a story here, huh? But whoever was running things on the board after that, and it wasn't Dorsey, clearly set up an environment where he or she didn't want any bad news, and the managers, including Dorsey himself, obliged. The takeover by Musk was clearly the best of a whole range of horrible outcomes, good for the board but bad for Musk.

Here's the sort of problem that Musk inherited:

[A] series of cascading datacenter problems did put Twitter at risk of “permanent irreparable failure,” and was only prevented by the herculean efforts of a team of Twitter engineers. Every account, every bit of code, every tweet, like, retweet, quote-tweet, DM—everything that constitutes the company, platform, and community known as Twitter—was nearly lost forever during this incident. A key piece of the global information system, poof, gone, and with no way to bring it back. A multibillion-dollar company obliterated in an instant, the biggest 404 error in history, caused not by hackers, but by incredible negligence.

. . . After Agrawal took over as CEO in November 2021, Mudge alleges that prior to his first Board meeting as company chief, Agrawal planned to mislead the Board on a number of security and compliance issues, and required convincing not to do so. And in advance of a meeting with the Board’s Risk Committee, Agrawal announced his plans to present misleading data yet again. This time neither Mudge nor other concerned employees were able to stop him, but after Mudge noted that the events of the meeting could constitute fraud, Twitter’s Audit Committee investigated and ultimately agreed. Mudge began working on a report to correct the record with the Board, but Agrawal fired him the next day.

In other words, although Musk, having neglected due diligence at the time of his April offer to buy Twitter, tried to backtrack on it throughout the spring and summer over ostensible concerns about which accounts were bots, there were in fact clear instances of fraud in the company's operation already recognized by the board's audit committee. It appears that not only had Mudge written a whistleblower report that should have been avilable to Musk's staff, but he'd publicly testified about these issues before Congress. Where were Musk's legal and financial advisers? Not much smarter than the Twits, it would seem.

One big problem with the whole Musk-Twitter story is that he conventional wisdom is focusing on a censorship-free speech issue, when the reality is that it looks like Musk walked into a corporate problem much closer to FTX, which he isn't competent to fix. Indeed, he's struggling with just the free speech problem:

The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem. I oppose it in both cases. And I think those journalists who were reporting on a story of public importance should be reinstated.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 16, 2022

I think Bari Weiss gets to the heart of it: Musk is a creature of his own whims, and with Twitter, he's hit a major set of corporate problems he isn't remotely equipped to handle. Among other things, he might want to consider rehiring Mudge -- but of course, only after actually reviewing the circumstances and thinking things through.

A Couple Of I-Told-You-Sos

My wife and I have a soft spot for Dan Abrams. Although he appears to be quite wealthy and fully tied in to the Democrat-media establishment, he also hosted Live PD and appears to have invested a great deal of his credibility in restoring a clone of that show to the air after Live PD was canceled following the George Floyd riots. He also hosts the new show, On Patrol Live, where his persona is down-to-earth, sympathetic to the day-to-day jobs of uniformed police, and committed to maintaining public understanding of law enforcement.

Thus it wasn't a surprise to us that in a segment of another of his shows, Dan Abrams Live, he raises a question I've raised here, the potential liability of Sam Bankman-Fried's parents in the FTX scandal. Whether due to obtuseness or a wish to cover up for culpability within David Brooks's New American Upper Class, other media hasn't mentioned this issue, but now Abrams has. He notes that Sam himself is now in custody in the Bahamas,

but -- what about his parents?

I'm surprised so few are asking whether either of them could be in legal jeapordy. Fried's father, Joseph Bankman, works as a tax law professor at Stanford, though he's announced he won't be teaching at the university next year. The father Bankman worked for FTX for almost a year, deeply involved in the business in its early days, he helped the company recruit its first lawyers, last year he joined the FTX staff in meetings on Capitol Hill, he consulted FTX employees on tax matters, and he also had a large focus on FTX's charitable operations.

His mom, Barbara Fried, retired from teaching at Stanford, was head of a political advocacy network called Mind the Gap, which she helped start, to support Democratic campaigns and causes. Her son was among the donors for the network. Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried and his parents bought real estate together in the Bahamas worth $121 million.

Dan Abrams is neither QAnon nor Tucker Carlson. I think it's commendable that he's picking up this story when so many on all parts of the spectrum seem to think it's either too sensitive or too much work to cover.

But 0n the subject of Prof Bankman and his efforts on behalf of FTX, there was an intriguing data item in this week's House hearings on the case:

[Republican Representative] Huizenga turned then towards family involvement in the case, enquiring whether SBF’s father, Mr. Bankman received payment from FTX. Ray confirmed that “the family did receive payments.”

Huizenga met with SBF on Dec. 8, 2021, accompanied by his father, Mr. Bankman. Noting that SBF was 15 minutes late to that meeting, Huizenga said: “I asked and focused on what types of regulation he was under his engagemnet with regulators and how that affected FTX but it seems that there’s a lot more to uncover here.”

As we saw in the photo I ran here of Prof Bankman escorting Sam in a meeting with Congresswoman Waters, it appears that on matters of importance, like meetings with politicians, Prof Bankman seems to have been the prime mover and major negotiator; Sam was little more than a ventriloquist's dummy.

On a separate issue, days after I first raised the matter, a story appears in right-wing media, Questions Arise About How Disgraced ‘Non-Binary’ Biden Official Received Top Clearance.

Following the firing of Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear official Sam Brinton, critics have begun questioning as to how someone with a dodgy past and criminal tendencies managed to receive the highest level of security clearance in the federal government.

The whole question of security clearance has never been adequately investigated. The 1970s Falcon and the Snowman scandal involved a "connected" and privileged kid who got together with a drug-addled pal to pass US secrets to the Soviet Union. The whole plot was facilitated by the complacency and negligence of the corporate and government security system, within which I worked for much of my tech career. Problems in that story like someone lying dead drunk on the floor of a top-secret vault were the sort of thing I saw myself with some regularity.

Whatever comes of the Brinton fiasco, it will be nothing new, and it will result in no real reforms.

Twitter vs FTX

A past allegation against Twitter has resurfaced, and if it's correct, it raises questions about whether Twitter has been nearly as big a swindle as FTX. The questions involve areas that I worked on in my tech career, so they're particularly interesting to me, and based on my own experience, they at least appear credible.

This past September, during the period when Elon Musk was attempting to get out of his obligaation to buy Twitter, Musk

accused Twitter of fraud by concealing serious flaws in the social media company’s data security, which the entrepreneur said should allow him to end his $44 billion deal for the company, according to a Thursday court filing.

. . . Musk said the claims by the whistleblower, former head of Twitter security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, amounted to fraud and breach of contract by Twitter.

I don't believe the maneuvers between Musk and Twitter following Musk's September allegations and his late October decision to proceed with the purchase have been made public, or if they have, I haven't seen them. In any case, his September allegation of fraud due to data security shortcomings wasn't sufficient to stop the deal. However, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko's claims have resurfaced in the wake of Musk's Twitter Files revelations.

The whistleblower report has emerged independently of Musk’s “Twitter Files” but was likely inspired by the exposés.

A Twitter user who published the report said: “The stuff uncovered in the Twitter whistleblower report is much crazier than anything in the ‘Twitter files’ but it’s much less politically/tribally salient so it got no attention.

. . . “Twitter didn’t monitor employee computers at all, it was not uncommon for employees to install spyware on work devices.

“Twitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments.

“At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems.

“In 2020, Twitter had security incidents serious enough they had to be reported to the federal government on an almost weekly basis.

The difference between "test" and "production" environments is particularly important, as is the related question of how many employees had privileged access to "production systems". In a programming environment, mistakes will inevitably be made in writing programs, especially given the tricky logical issues programmers have to deal with -- what you actually told the machine to do may not be quite what you meant for it to do; that's just how logic is. If I tell the driver of a car to "go ahead and back up", he'll know what I mean. A computer instead will either give me an error message or maybe move forward, not reverse.

As a result, programs must be tested exhaustively before they're approved and moved to "production" status, at which point they are basically the company product, and they can't be changed without a repeat of the testing and approval process. This means that it's important to get things right the first time, because fixing things afterward is expensive and time-consuming.

A key reason for the corporate data security function is to maintain these controls between "test" and "production" ("Mudge's" use of the term "staging" sounds more company-specific; the distinction between "test" and "production" is the important one).

If there is no enforceable distinction between the two, then there are two posssibilities. The most likely is that software with bugs will become in effect the company product, which at best will make the users angry, but if it results in incorrect account balances, it could be a major problem for the company. The less likely but more serious possibility is that a programmer will deliberately write a program that steals money from the company or its customers (for instance, by incorrectly rounding and putting a tiny percentage of the rounding into the programmer's own account). The absence of a rigorous testing and approval process for "production", or the ability to bypass the process, will make these possibilities much more likely.

That "Mudge" claims that 5,000 employees (in other words, half of Twitter pre-Musk) had privileged access to "production" indicates that there were no serious company controls over its tech environment -- this in a major tech company. This is equivalent to the alleged "back door" between FTX and Alameda that allowed the company to raid customer deposits to make up for investment losses, except that instead of a few FTX executives who could do this, half of Twitter could do that there.

Farther down in the same story,

Mudge realized that a data center failure could potentially cause the permanent loss of all of Twitter’s data.

He shared this fact with senior leadership, who instructed him not to put it in writing for the Board.

. . . After Agrawal became CEO, he wanted to present materially misleading information to the Board, overriding Mudge’s objections.

The question of data center failure is another basic task of data security. If, as relatively recent history demonstrates, corporate data centers can be rendered inoperable by fire, flood, hurricane, sabotage, terrorist act, earthquake, power failure, or any other of a wide range of interruptions, the company must have contingency plans to accommodate this. Clearly if a bank's data center burns down, there are repercussions; the ATMs won't work, payrolls won't be deposited, checks will bounce, and so forth. Banks have elaborate plans to recover operations within hours with full current data in such an event, but banks are just the most visible instance of an overall problem.

"Mudge's" point seems to be that Twitter had no viable plan in place to deal with, say, an 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas Fault near its data center. If such an event took place, the implication is that Twitter would simply go down and never come up again; the company would no longer have a product to sell and no way to recover it. The effect would be the same as an FTX bankruptcy. This in fact is board-of-directors-level material; if Parag Agrawal concealed it from the board, which is "Mudge's" allegation, he should have been fired, and of course, he was. The story continues; when he learned of this,

Musk responded saying: “Wow.”

“Live & learn,” he added.

My view continues to be that Musk makes things up as he goes along, and he appears to work from instinct. He isn't a rationalist, policy-driven CEO along the lines of John Ray, instead, it's "Live & learn". Nevertheless, at this point, I think it's clear that in firing half or more of Twitter and starting over from scratch, he made the only possible move. In fact, if Twitter had continued under prior management, there would likely have been either a software failure or a data center disaster that would have put the company out of business and, if anything, thrown even more people out of work.

I certainly agree with the guy who said this is "much less politically/tribally salient", but it's actually more important. Musk has said he intends to hire a CEO for Twitter, but this needs to be a rationalist John Ray type, not a Steve Jobs style figurehead.