More Twitter Files: Your Posts Replaced With "Dog Pictures, Quinoa Recipes, and Sports Scores"?

In a possible preview of our future, a Twitter contractor proposed aggressive solutions for speech, including putting users in "voids" and replacing their content with pet pics

In the wake of a major hacking scandal in the summer of 2020 in which 130 high-profile accounts — including those belonging to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Elon Musk — Twitter hired famed ex-hacker and cybersecurity expert Peiter “Mudge” Zatko to address the problem.

In late December of 2020, Zatko asked Twitter employees for visiblity into their security arrangements. By the day after the Capitol Hill riot, on January 7, 2021, as reported in Public, Zatko recommended that Twitter hire an outside contractor.

“I feel an external investigation may be quite valuable,” he said, in a Slack chat. “I’d recommend Alethea Group for the disinformation angle.”

Alethea was an interesting choice. At the time only just founded in 2019, some of the firm’s initial capital came by way of a $10 million investment by Ballistic Ventures, led by Ted Schlein and Kevin Mandia. Schlein, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, sat on the board of trustees of the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. When asked if In-Q-Tel funded Alethea Group, Schlein told Public, “This is a question either the company or InQTel should answer, not me.”

Alethea would go on to conduct two sets of audits for Twitter. The company fought hard to keep these reports private, but the authors (and many journalists who saw them) never released the full contents, either. They are embarrassing to Twitter, but the contractors’ recommendations for fixing the company’s “vulnerabilities” are also unnerving, and in parts read like the stuff of science fiction: