There’s a new Big Tech whistleblower in town. Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, last month sent a complaint to various federal agencies and congressional committees, alleging that Twitter violated its agreement with the Federal Trade Commission by misleading regulators about its security practices; that the company prioritized growing users over reducing spam; and that Twitter’s full-time employees, of which there are some 7,000, had broad and loosely monitored access to the company’s central internal software, allowing them to make changes to how the system worked and access sensitive information, according to The Washington Post, which, along with CNN, exclusively obtained the complaint first reported Tuesday. Among the more explosive allegations in the complaint involves the Indian government, which, according to Zatko, forced Twitter to put at least one of its agents on the payroll, “with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country,” the Post reports.

The allegations come as the social media company is embroiled in a high-profile dispute with Elon Musk, over the Tesla CEO's attempt to get out of his deal to buy Twitter. Musk's legal team on Monday subpoenaed former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—with whom Musk is close—in an attempt to get information on Twitter's user data and the number of spam accounts on its platform, Axios reported. Musk, as part of his effort to walk away from his $44 billion agreement to purchase Twitter, has claimed that Twitter may be misrepresenting the number of spam and fake accounts on its site.

Zatko, who is also known by his hacker name “Mudge,” was hired by Dorsey in late 2020, following a security breach targeting various high-profile accounts, and fired in January by Parag Agrawal—who replaced Dorsey as CEO a few months earlier—for “poor performance and ineffective leadership,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Post. In his 15 months at the social media company, Zatko, per his complaint, said he found “egregious deficiencies, negligence, willful ignorance, and threats to national security and democracy.” The former security chief’s disclosure claims he “had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software,” the Post reports, “and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.”

In a statement to CNN and the Post, a Twitter spokesperson dismissed Zatko’s “allegations and opportunistic timing” as an attempt to “capture attention and inflict harm on the company, its customers and its shareholders.” Twitter's spokesperson said that while the company has not had access to the specific allegations in question—the version published by the Post, obtained from a congressional aide, is redacted—“what we’ve seen so far is a narrative about our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and lacks important context,” per the Post.

Among those allegations Twitter says lack context, are Zatko’s claims about spam and bots—a topic at the center of Musk’s legal battle with Twitter. Zatko’s complaint claims Twitter lacks the ability to accurately gauge the number of bot accounts across all of Twitter (the company has estimated fewer than five percent of the monetizable daily users are fake or spam). He goes on to say the company had “no appetite” to quantify the number of bots because the actual number could damage Twitter’s reputation and worth. Twitter “said the total number of bots on the platform is not a useful number,” according to CNN, and that the company removes more than a million spam accounts on a typical day.

Zatko's lawyer, John Tye—who also represented Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen—“said Zatko began the whistleblower process before there was any indication of Musk’s involvement with Twitter,” according to CNN. But Zatko's complaint could nevertheless prove useful for Musk's case against Twitter, which is set to go to court in Delaware in October: CNN notes that Zatko not only bolsters Musk's bot argument in his disclosure but potentially arms Musk's legal team with other issues, such as Twitter allegedly misleading the FTC, that they could leverage in their attempt to back out of the deal. Musk's lawyers haven't missed a beat: