Some veterans of DC’s tech wars expect little of that to change after Zatko testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I’m all for congressional oversight,” said Jessica Melugin, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is often skeptical of new technology regulations. “That said, congressional hearings in general — and certainly, tech-focused congressional hearings — have been more about spectacle than substance over the past two years. And it’s an election year, so double or triple.”
Not everyone is so skeptical. Avery Gardiner, senior adviser for competition and technology policy in the committee member’s office Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), said at a briefing Monday that Zatko’s testimony could be “a wonderful catalyst for change.”
But Sara Collins, senior policy adviser and data protection expert at the progressive tech group Public Knowledge, agreed that people shouldn’t expect too much from Tuesday’s hearing.
“It’s not going to be like a game changer,” said Collins, whose group backs many of the bipartisan tech crackdown bills now making their way through Congress. After years of similar hearings, Collins said senators should already know how to handle the privacy and security issues Zatko raised.
“There are no privacy protections in the United States,” she said. “Everything comes back to the same thing. Like, we know the cure. So can we get there. Please.”
Genesis
Before 2017, tech hearings with high-profile executives or whistleblowers were virtually unheard of. But that all changed with the revelation that a Kremlin-backed hacking and disinformation campaign spread widely across America’s top tech platforms had interfered in the 2016 presidential election — with intelligence leaders and lawmakers from both parties aiming ended later, to help put Donald Trump in the White House.
Senators took executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter before a Judiciary subcommittee in October 2017, ushering in a new era of congressional scrutiny.
Capitol Hill’s tech policy circus began soon after, when whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed Facebook’s unauthorized sharing of user data with the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
The news, which caused a worldwide media frenzy, prompted Mark Zuckerberg to testify for the first time before the combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in April 2018 — an unusual arrangement that led to all kinds of mocking questions. widely by lawmakers about Facebook’s business model.
A hearing with Wylie himself followed the next month – and from there, things really took off.
Sessions after sessions
The House Judiciary Committee brought in executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple to testify about antitrust in July 2019. The following July saw another antitrust hearing, this one with the CEOs of the same four companies (Zuckerberg returned for an appeal). .
More high-profile hearings followed — a hearing on protecting the responsibilities of online companies with Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in October 2020, followed by another hearing with the three executives in March 2021.
A new round of whistleblower hearings was imminent, with Haugen testifying in October about documents she had uncovered that suggested Facebook (soon to be Meta) was aware of the social risks posed by Instagram and its other products. . Haugen accompanied her appearance with a media appearance that included a “60 Minutes” interview days before the hearing.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri recused himself before Congress in December after Haugen appeared days earlier.
And this list is not even exhaustive.
What did all this accomplish?
“I think early on, when there was less public information about all of this, they were helpful,” Public Knowledge’s Collins said of the slew of successful tech hearings over the past half decade. Congress eventually passed cybersecurity legislation that included a law, SB 1321 (116)to toughen penalties for election hacking. And some hearings — especially the early ones — helped inform some major tech bills that now have the potential (however slim) to pass this Congress.
But as multiple legislative cycles came and went without passing sweeping privacy rules, changes to the Section 230 liability shield or antitrust technology bills — anything else, really — Collins said the sessions began to feel uncomfortable. Today, she believes they are largely a substitute for real action.
“Doing the hard work of writing a bill and getting into the weeds and doing all the negotiating is really, really hard,” Collins said. “It is not a high-profile job and has a high probability of failure. This is not it. You can just say you did it, took action and achieved something – even if the achievement isn’t huge.”
The most serious legislative proposals in the current Congress include a bipartisan antitrust bill spearheaded by Klobuchar. SB 2992 (117), which faces uncertain support amid a ferocious lobbying campaign by the tech industry. A comprehensive data privacy bill appears similarly stalled, largely due to Democratic infighting. And as the legislative calendar tightens, other bills related to children’s privacy and technology antitrust face an uncertain path.
What to expect on Tuesday
Regardless of what the senators do, the Federal Trade Commission is likely to investigate whether Zatko’s disclosures violate a 2011 consent decree that Twitter formed with the agency. And David Vladeck, former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said there is nothing Congress can address or reveal through Zatko’s testimony that the agency can’t.
“The FTC has significant information-gathering tools, and whistleblowers, as we’ve seen, are not shy about sharing their views,” Vladeck said in an email to MT.
Melugin and Collins said the same is true of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could investigate whether Twitter defrauded investors.
both lawyers were alarmed by Zatko’s claim that authoritarian governments access dissidents’ Twitter data. But they said a closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee would be a more useful place to examine those claims.
And what They are lawmakers likely to reach this morning?
“I think it would be very difficult to detach from this session the current political climate around Twitter,” Collins said. She said the ongoing circus surrounding Elon Musk’s attempt to buy the company – and the partisan infighting over Twitter’s content moderation practices fueled by that circus — is likely to be huge.
Josh Sisco contributed to this report.
