Twitter stonewalled questions by members of the Standing Committee on Information Technology on the latest revelations made its former head of security Peiter Zatko who claimed that Indian government forced the social media firm to put a government agent on its payroll. At a meeting on Friday, the Twitter executives evaded questions on the subject.
The committee has asked Twitter to submit replies within a week’s time.
Mr. Zatko, as per a news report in Washington Post, filed a complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, regarding this. To several questions by the members on Mr. Zatko’s allegations, Twitter, which was represented by Samiran Gupta who heads Public Policy, Shagufta Qamran, director, Public Policy and Government, along with their legal head, claimed that Mr. Zatko’s claims are “motivated and vague”.
The members according to sources also wanted to know whether Twitter has access to users’ data as suggested by Mr. Zatko. “They claimed that they have an elaborate protocol with safeguards in place for accessing data and also only a select few staffers have been extended this privilege. But they couldn’t tell us exactly how many of their staffers based out of India have this privilege,” a member on the condition of anonymity said.
The members then demanded to know how many people does Twitter employ in India and how many of these have a previous record of working with the Indian government. To all these questions, Twitter officials did not have a reply and have sought time to make written submissions. Twitter officials further claimed that there has been no data breach in India. “They claim that no Indian data was leaked in the January 2022 data breach where phone number and e-mail addresses of 5.4 million Twitter users were allegedly sold off by hackers ,” another member said.
The committee also met a team from Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) about their recent tender seeking to hire a consultant for monetising its passenger, freight and parcel business data as it envisaged generating a potential revenue of ₹1,000 crore. The tender has been withdrawn following outrage. IRCTC officials told the committee that the idea was only to leverage the data and not to sell it to any outside party. The officials, according to sources, further said that they will reissue the tender once the new Data Protection Bill, on which the Ministry of Electronics and Information & Technology is working, is in place.
