(EDIT: The now-deleted Tweet said “I have been terminated from Zoom for refusing to remove the following tweets. Anyone have recommendations for wrongful termination lawyers based in California?” His Twitter feed still has the leaked materials and Tweets critical of Okta)<p>So he’s posting leaked, private materials that he doesn’t have rights to, and the materials are from a Zoom partner company that provides a critical integration for the company’s operations?<p>Obviously he’s going to get fired if he refuses to remove the Tweets. I’m surprised they even offered to let him stay if he removed them. You can’t have an employee actively leaking private materials from one of your key partner companies with which you’ve undoubtedly engaged in a lot of contracts.<p>This isn’t really a wrongful termination case. If you want to be a Twitter leaker of private company materials on sensitive topics, you can’t also expect to work for companies adjacent to those leaked materials.
Hum, reading that material, and seeing it also discussed on the HN frontpage, seemt to imply there was a an interest. From the public. Like, a public interest.<p>People seem awfully quick to say "zoom did the right thing here" or "what did you expect?" But these timelines look like people kept it quite for long enough that "oh they'll get around to disclosing it in due time" doesn't cut it. So yeah, "zoom was in their right to fire someone for raising legitimate concerns, bEcAuSe Of ThEiR BoToMlInE" is a stance you can take. But it also means putting corporate interest over public interest once more. Great...<p>Edit: don't get me wrong I'm not surprised companies would react like that. But "what did you expect" implies that the person would better not have done that, or doesn't have the moral high ground here when they say that the termination, lawful or not, was a dick move.
The (now deleted) tweet said:<p>"I have been terminated from Zoom for refusing to remove the following tweets. Anyone have recommendations for wrongful termination lawyers based in California?"<p>And it links to this: <a href="https://twitter.com/BillDemirkapi/status/1508527487655067660" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/BillDemirkapi/status/1508527487655067660</a><p>(Editorializing: The poster seems to be a 20-year-old college student. The linked tweet may have been deleted because the replies pointed out California is at-will and no lawyer would be able to help.)
You broke the first rule of twitter, never post anything on your public twitter other than banal corporate hype and safe, non controversial topics you've already seen other worker-drones post. Or, just be uncontroversial enough in your personal life that everything you'd post anyway would never possibly offend the hierarchs now or at any time in the future, like 10+ years down the road.<p>For most of us, it's just not worth it. The only thing I post on my identity-linked twitter is stuff I'm told to post by my employer. It's just not worth taking this sorts of risks in this environment.
To everyone here saying “duh he got fired” I would ask you to step back and think about the implications.
Why would you take the side of a corporation covering a legitimate data breach over an employee that is broadly sharing that information? Why would you support a company trying to censor its employees on their personal social media page?
Yes, the employee can be reasonably and legally fired. But this isn’t the society we should be striving for and we should feel angry at Zoom’s response
This is the kind of stuff that any IT professional even tangentially interested in computer security could have twitted.
People are too eager to have opinions based on a single headline and on their pre-conceived notions, instead of going there and looking at the tweets.
There's definitely public interest on this posting, it is not something that could cause irreparable damage to okta beyond their own stupid reaction to their own errors.
He was not posting internal confidential financial documents or lists of credentials.
Yes, Zoom is on their LEGAL rights to terminate the employee, but this is a stupid decision that shows that company is run by stupid obtuse lawyers and MBAs and doesn't give a damn about the technical side of things and the professional ethics of engineers. Definitely not the place a security professional would like to work at, and because of that, not the place I would like to trust for my business.
Not that I’m suggesting he should have shared these files anonymously with someone else…<p>But surely he could have seen this coming when he posted it on his own Twitter…?
I think he should have considered talking to a lawyer before posting this tweet.<p>This doesn't feel wise to double-down on without first checking with a lawyer the following:<p>1. What are his employment rights<p>2. What is the legal standing of his previous tweets
Tweeting with your real name is a tiny bit mad when it is anything remotely sensitive. Leave it to journalists, they're used to the flak and protected.
I don't understand how anyone with half a clue could outsource internal authentication with something like Okta. As far as I can tell the logic is Let's send all of our credentials to a third party to then send us back a token, so we don't have to type our password more than once. Unless you use a browser that is not fully supported, in which case you're going to type it way more than once.
The OP tweet has since been deleted; this appears to be a snapshot of it:
<a href="https://twitter.com/BillDemirkapi/status/1508610588200607746" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/BillDemirkapi/status/1508610588200607746</a>
Related:<p><i>New documents for the Okta breach</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30841413" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30841413</a> - March 2022 (61 comments)
How would say this is whistleblowing - why does he nor argue that way?<p>His actions are for the publics favor and interest - considering how much Okta lied about all of this.