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A former Twitter security chief has filed a lawsuit against X, alleging he was fired after objecting to various cost-cutting measures enacted shortly after Elon Musk bought the company last year.
Attorneys representing Alan Rosa, who was Twitter’s global head of security, information technology and privacy, filed a complaint late Tuesday in U.S. district court for New Jersey against X, Musk and Steve Davis, a company advisor. At the time of his employment, Rosa, who was based in New Jersey, was responsible for Twitter’s global security and IT team consisting of 500 employees scattered across the U.S.
Similar to other recently filed lawsuits by former Twitter employees, Rosa’s suit stems from the massive cost-cutting efforts implemented by Musk in the aftermath of his $44 billion acquisition of the company, which he would later rename X.
Rosa alleged that Davis, under orders from Musk, engaged in a number of cost-cutting measures that the security chief thought would undermine the company’s ability to comply with various obligations and regulations like a Federal Trade Commission consent decree and the Digital Services Act (DSA) enacted by the European Commission. The European law requires certain large tech platforms to document and monitor illegal online content or face penalties as much as 6% of annual sales.
Rosa alleged that Davis wanted to stop paying for an “ethical hacking program called ‘HackerOne'” and other “vulnerability management software” that the company needed in order to comply with Twitter’s FTC Consent Decree, the attorneys wrote.
“Davis, like Musk, was dismissive of the Twitter FTC Consent Decree and began cutting Twitter’s products and services that supported and complied with the Twitter FTC Consent Decree,” the lawyers wrote.
Davis also directed Rosa to terminate use of Salesforce, which was a problem, according to Rosa, because the software contained data that the company would need to be able to share with law enforcement.
“Plaintiff objected to the direction to shut down Salesforce,” the suit said, because doing so would violate the DSA and compromise the company’s ability “to properly handle law enforcement inquiries.”
Additionally, Rosa alleged that Davis ordered the Twitter security chief to “to cut the physical security budget by an additional 50% by midnight,” an action that “was done in hours, not days.” Rosa claimed the cuts “posed a substantial danger to public safety.”
“The physical building, whose security he had to immediately cut, stored over 800 laptops and other electronic devices that were subject to litigation holds, per Court Orders, which required the Company to ensure that the physical data on the laptops and other electronic devices in the building were preserved and were not removed, destroyed, or altered in any way,” the attorneys wrote in the filing.
Rosa alleged that he was fired a few days after voicing his objections and said he was “terminated in an unexplainable fashion as he did nothing wrong that would justify his termination.”
Rosa also said X started a “sham investigation” into his workplace conduct in an attempt to “deprive him of his severance package.”
Although Rosa entered an arbitration agreement with X, his lawyers say the company has “refused to pay its portion of the arbitration fees” despite an order to do so, leaving Rosa with no choice but to file a complaint.
The lawyers allege X violated several employee-related laws, including the New Jersey Conscientious Employee Protection Act, New York and California labor rules and the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.
Rosa is seeking relief for unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
A spokesperson for X didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In October, an ex-Twitter software engineer, Yao Yue, filed a lawsuit against the company alleging that it violated the National Labor Relations Act in firing her. Yue claimed to have helped organize colleagues who were concerned about Musk’s immediate changes to various work policies.
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