Incidents targeting executives stir safety concerns; $20 million
to protect Zuckerberg
By Robert McMillan and Jeff Horwitz
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (May 10, 2019).
One January night this year an emergency dispatch operator in
Palo Alto, Calif., fielded a call from a man who said he had shot
his wife and then tied up his children inside his house, where he
had several pipe bombs. After a tense period in which police
officers surrounded the house, out came the owner, a senior
Facebook Inc. executive who said there was no shooting and that he
had no idea what was going on.
The call was a hoax, but not an isolated incident.
Just over two weeks later, an Instagram executive at his home in
San Francisco was also the target of a swatting attack, in which
the perpetrator masquerades as a certain individual and calls up
local law enforcement, claiming to have committed violent crimes at
the target's address.
The incidents show why safety concerns are rising across Silicon
Valley, prompting tech companies to allocate more dollars to
executive security.
Tech companies have become targets in part because they have
become more active in removing hate speech and disinformation from
their platforms -- moves that have triggered accusations of bias
from those affected by their policies. The industry also is
increasingly blamed on a range of issues, from privacy abuses to
exacerbating income inequality.
The swatting attacks early this year came weeks after someone
posted to an online message board personal details -- including
home addresses and names of family members -- of some of the
biggest figures in Silicon Valley. The list, which was viewed by
The Wall Street Journal, also included information on journalists,
celebrities and government officials. At least one of the
celebrities included in the list was subsequently swatted.
The anonymous posting with the list, which has since been taken
down, was hosted on the 8chan website, which describes itself as
"The darkest reaches of the internet." Long a hotbed for
anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic material, 8chan was used to announce
the mosque terrorist attack in New Zealand in March and a synagogue
shooting in Poway, Calif., a month later.
The uptick of incidents targeting technology executives over the
past year may be related to platforms removing accounts, including
those belonging to criminals trafficking in hacked accounts.
The takedowns have "pissed off the bad guys," said Samy Tarazi,
a sergeant with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's office, whose
jurisdiction includes the campuses for Alphabet Inc., parent
company of Google, and other technology companies. The recent
swatting attacks are still being investigated by law enforcement,
but Sgt. Tarazi said they are likely retaliation for actions the
technology companies have taken.
Swatting is often called a prank, but its consequences can be
deadly. A perpetrator was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison
for launching a swatting attack in December 2017 in Wichita, Kan.,
against a man who was killed by police responding to the call.
A spokeswoman for Facebook said the company declined to comment
about the incidents or whether it has made any changes to its
security practices. Other major tech companies also declined to
comment on security measures for their top executives.
The publicly disclosed security expenses for Facebook Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his family have nearly quadrupled
since 2016, rising to nearly $20 million last year, according to a
recent filing by the company. "He is synonymous with Facebook and,
as a result, negative sentiment regarding our company is directly
associated with, and often transferred to, Mr. Zuckerberg," the
securities filing said.
Such increases aren't limited to Facebook. Alphabet spent $1.2
million on security services for Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2018,
the company stated last week in a securities filing. That is nearly
four times the $322,241 spent on Mr. Pichai's security detail in
2016.
Google's YouTube unit was the target of the most violent
incident of late involving a tech giant. In April 2018, YouTube
creator Nasim Aghdam shot three people at the company's San Bruno,
Calif., headquarters before killing herself. Ms. Aghdam was upset
with the online streaming service, which she believed was censoring
her videos.
The security spending figures may not reflect the actual amounts
spent to protect those executives as many companies account for
such measures differently, complicating company-to-company
comparisons, said Mark Lowery, a former Secret Service agent who
has consulted on corporate management protection.
Many executives pay considerable sums of their own money on
security details for themselves and their families, and some
companies lump executive protection expenditures with other
security spending, Mr. Lowery said, "It can become more of an IRS
issue than a security issue," he said.
Multimillion-dollar security packages are the exception. Mr.
Zuckerberg's tab is the highest among publicly traded companies
tracked by the compensation-data firm Equilar Inc. Next is that for
Las Vegas Sands Corp. CEO Sheldon Adelson, at more than $5
million.
Swatting is hardly the only security problem facing technology
executives. Last month, political activist Laura Loomer staked out
Twitter Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey's house in San Francisco to protest
the suspension of conservative Twitter accounts, including her own.
Ms. Loomer, who is suing Twitter over her suspension, said she
found Mr. Dorsey's address from public records. She said the police
were called but didn't arrest her because she was on public
property.
Twitter, which declined to comment on Mr. Dorsey's security, had
previously said Ms. Loomer violated its hateful-conduct policy. She
was also recently banned from Facebook.
The extreme responses to tech companies' practices reflect in
part how deeply their services have become embedded in the lives of
users, said Chris Hoofnagle, who teaches internet law at the
University of California, Berkeley. In addition, because giants
such as Facebook and Google have focused so relentlessly on the
promise of their products and less on the risks, such actions as
account takedowns are taken all the more personally.
"When the situation sours it's actually an emotional event" for
the users, he said.
--Theo Francis contributed to this article.
Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 10, 2019 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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