Page 8 - Inside Twitter News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

There are national security and business implications, so joining us now, cnn chief business correspondent christine romans and author of the only plane in the sky garrett graf. you're written extensively about national security. i want to start with the national security implication here. when a whistle-blower says twitter is a threat to national security and democracy, that sounds alarming. why exactly, what do you see in this that is of such concern? >> i think there are two things that stand out to me. one is just the sheer credibility of the whistle-blower. peiter zatko, that's the name h...

Saudi national was convicted on criminal charges here in the united states of working for saudi intelligence to target dissidents on its platform from inside twitter. so there is an external threat to twitter that is documented here, there is also a pretty serious internal threat of employees who might be compromised by foreign intelligence that twitter is not taking seriously internally. and in ways that donie would understand from covering this, you know, of course foreign intelligence services are going to be trying to target facebook, twitter, amazon, google. they would be silly not to. an...

No shortage of outrage, what are they saying? >> to garrett's point, this guy, this whistle-blower is legend. we were calling out a lot of cybersecurity experts saying, what do you think of this guy, is there anything we can -- where can we look at this guy, we might say he's oversaying things? and people say if he's saying there's something there, there's something there. so twitter is in this position now where their chief of security, who is hired by jack dorsey, is calling all of this out. twitter is saying he's mischaracterizing it, he doesn't have the full story, that he is making kind o...

Clear that it will. but i don't know. perhaps, in his position, you are in a place where the more pressure brought to bear from external forces, the better. you know, but it's not to insinuate that he is somehow arranging this, but it is interesting. also, the question of, you know, beating up on social media like twitter, it's his favorite thing of the republican political circus at this point in time. so the closer he can get to conservative, political figures like the texas ag, the better he's probably gonna do. so, all this is gonna brought to bear, and it may very well simply be a way of ...

Throw at you, i think it's really interesting new wrinkle, is that the texas attorney general has just announced that he's gonna be looking into the question of box on twitter. as you know, texas is a new home of -- so that's a funny coincidence. so looking at a strange moment. i'm just wondering what's gonna come next. it's really curious to see what's gonna try and pull up, you know, cozy up to a republican politician, perhaps. is he gonna try and get into the right guy out of the midterms? perhaps somehow put him in the right position, i don't know where this thing stands. i wish i did, but...