In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson said, “Today’s hearing only confirms that Mr. Senators expressed serious concerns about other issues Zatko raised, including that CEO Parag Agrawal contemplated bowing to Russian demands prior to the war in Ukraine, which would have risked letting the government “censor and surveil Russian users.” Agrawal was chief technology officer at the time, and Twitter did not ultimately accede to the demands. “And that crisis isn’t completed, it’s simply replaced by another crisis.” “They’re only able to focus on one crisis at a time,” he said. “They’re simply unwilling to put the effort in at the cost of other efforts such as driving revenue,” he said, noting that Twitter frequently lacks employees with the necessary language skills to address foreign content moderation issues. Zatko-who once worked as a hacker and helped companies find security vulnerabilities-pegged much of the problems to a culture of disorganization and misplaced priorities. He added that engineers could theoretically try to sell access to users’ accounts on the black market, and that the company might have trouble rooting out the culprit. In Tuesday’s hearing, Zatko alleged that Twitter lacked “basic, fundamental tools and access control,” making it challenging to determine when sensitive data may have been compromised-and by whom. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal included non-disclosure and non-disparagement provisions crucially, though, it didn’t preclude him from filing the whistleblower complaint or testifying before Congress. The former security chief was fired by Twitter earlier this year, though he signed a roughly $7 million settlement agreement in June. According to Zatko’s testimony, the executive replied, “Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more? Let's keep growing the office.” He recalled a conversation with an unnamed executive about a possible “foreign agent” on staff, after similar concerns about at least one other employee had already been raised. Peiter Zatko, who filed a whistleblower complaint with multiple government agencies over the summer, also claimed that Twitter failed to take seriously foreign spies that may have infiltrated its ranks. Twitter’s former head of security railed against the platform on Tuesday in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, alleging that it has prioritized revenue growth at the expense of content moderation and corporate responsibility.