If you'll, uh, gentlemen would come forward.

There's this video from 1998 that is crucial to understanding what happened this week at

Twitter when the company was upended via whistleblower.

Would you want to say by the seven members of the loft, uh, hacker think tank in Cambridge

Massachusetts?

It's from the Senate Committee on Government Affairs.

The video is a little grainy, but you can see a bunch of young white guys and suits sit

down to testify at a table.

They look awkward.

The late senator Fred Thompson from Tennessee was the hearings chair.

It's his voice you're hearing.

Thompson of course was also an actor on law and order and he lent a certain theatricality

to the hearing.

Uh, due to the sensitivity of the work done at the loft, they'll be using their hacker

names of mudge, weld, Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, space rogue, tan and Stefan.

Sitting in the middle of the hackers was a tall man with glasses and long red hair.

At the time he was 27.

His name is Peter Zatko, but to a lot of people he's known as mudge and he was there

to warn Congress.

If you're, uh, if you're looking for computer security then the internet is not the place

to be.

Uh, if you think that you're an exception to the norm and that you have a secure setup

...