>> now from abc7, liz breaking news. kristen: in san francisco, thick black smoke poured from a fire next to the aquatic park. take a look. this is video for my camera about 25 minutes ago on sutro tower, this one, from the east bay. firefighters got the fire under control just about 15 minutes ago. aquatic park is located near fort mason inside the golden gate national recreation area. we wanted to bring that to you. with that we say good afternoon, you are watching "getting answers." live on abc7. we ask experts your questions every day at 3:00 p.m. to get answers for you in real time. today we have the cofounder of a controversial silicon valley company, which can turn a speech

into unaccented, so-called perfect american english. who needs this? is a promoting understanding? or is it promoting racism? also san francisco is issuing lots of tickets, just like the pre-pandemic days. but where are you most likely to get a citation in the city? and when are the odds in your favor, or not? our media partner, the san francisco standard, dove into the data and will be joining us to share their findings. first, do you use twitter? a former top executive turned whistleblower accuses the company of overlooking major security flaws. here to talk about one of today's biggest national stories is the washington post digital threats reporter, joseph m. thanks for joining us today. >> good to be here. kristen: you did an exclusive interview with the whistleblower, twitter's former head of cybersecurity. who is he and what were his bombshell allegations?

>> well, he's a very unusual guy. one of the most celebrated hackers in the u.s. his name is peter z. most people call him mudge, a hacker handle of his from the 1980's. he ran cybersecurity grantmaking at darpa ended did special projects at google. way back in the day he was a member of a pioneer hyperspace called the loft -- hacker space called the left. he testified before congress telling them how insecure the internet was and now they can bring the whole thing in about a half an hour's work. this is why jack dorsey brought him into twitter after yet another long string of embarrassing hacks in 2020. kristen: so he brought him in, allegedly to take note of any flaws and call him out and help them fix it. but what happened? what did he notice and what did he do and what happened to him?

>> well, he was given a lot of responsibility, but not the actual power. that's because according to the complaint, jack dorsey was pretty absent. even when he was present, he was not fully present. in the course of an entire year, per the complaint, dorsey said about 50 words to mudge, half a dozen phone calls, with a couple dozen text messages, and that is it. the way twitter is structured, people need buy-in from other executives and other departments. it was all turf wars. he could not get a lot of what he wanted to get done accomplished. the big story in the security failings is the sort of cascade of things that are happening together. thousands of engineers and twitter have full copy of the source code on their laptops. 30% of twitter's laptops have

blocked automatic updates that protect software from new vulnerabilities, which means probably somebody could've hacked one of those machines and gotten the source code. but there's more. half of the servers at twitter are running on compliance software. in some cases, out of date software that's not supported by the vendors anymore. so there are all these things together. than twitter deploys stuff in the code without testing it in a big simulated environment. they just test it by taking it in a small market or eliminating it in some other way. engineers have a lot of authority. and the security people don't. this is especially important to twitter, because it has a consent to agree with the federal trade commission, from a previous set of breaches, in which among other things it promised to have a really good security program, that would keep up-to-date.

mudge's complaint is that it was never in compliance and now the ftc will take a fresh look. kristen: this is not the result of engineers working from home, right, that they had the source code in a nonprotected laptop? nonprotected enough. -- not to protected enough. were these things dating back a long time? >> many companies where you are competing for the talent of the engineers, it is a great place to be an engineer, because you use whatever tools you want. you can have whatever access you want. it's more convenient. but there's a trade-off with security. there are ways to work in source code where it is in a secure cloud environment, you don't need it on your laptop. kristen: to the layperson, why should they care about this? what is the impact on twitter users? >> so, it is pretty scary, because twitter has a lot of information about you. when you sign up an account, you likely give them a phone number and you certainly give them an

e-mail address. probably your regular e-mail address, because you thought it was going to become secure. whereas in fact, there are not enough security provisions to protect that, according to the complaint. maybe in the u.s., if you grow vegetables for a living, that's not a big deal. but if you are a dissident in saudi arabia or china or vietnam, this means that those governments might be able to hack into twitter and figure out who you are and where you are and come and arrest you. there are also problems with internal spies. just this month, there was somebody convicted in san francisco for being an agent of the saudi government, giving them information on dissidents. so, you should think carefully about giving a real e-mail address or a real phone number to twitter. kristen: we understand that zacho got fired by the new ceo. he filed this complaint. but let's talk about how all this, this revelation affects

twitter's battle. >> he focused on getting out of this. he made an argument that twitter so grossly underestimated the number of bots and spammers on their system to come up with a real estimate. legal experts say that it may be a bit of a stretch. they also said twitter was lying to musk about how many bots it has and that was only incentive to grow the amount of monetize it will users and not do anything about spam. one agro wall tweeted, as he argues that is not actually true, that is not where the bonuses come from. they come from other stuff. there's another part of musk's argument, which is that twitter

had to attest to the material veracity of its sec filings, statements to shareholders over the years, when it did its deal with him. theoretically now he could argue that it was in violation of that, because it had been misleading shareholders. which is part of zacho's complaint as well. by failing to reveal how about security was, that it was in violation allegedly of the ftc agreement, twitter was lying to shareholders. if that is true, musk could add that to his case. and he will be let out with no penalty that way. kristen: the infestation continues. really quickly, what is -- investigation continues. really quickly, what are twitter's claims about this case? >> they say it is out of date and inaccurate. that he was fired for an effective leadership in january.

but he was one of the most admired hackers in the country. kristen: joseph menn, thank you so much for your time and your insight. >> thank you. kristen: coming up next, a silicon valley startup has a so-called american voice, turning accented english into unaccented english. is it bridge and communication gaps, or feeding into bias? the cofounder of the company

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kristen: a silicon valley startup founded by stanford graduates is raising as much money as it is eyebrows. sonas is a voice technology company. its software can transform a

foreign accent into unaccented american english. the company says it is building a more connected world, but critics say it is feeding into racism by trying to make people sound more "white." joining us now is the cofounder and coo. thank you for joining us today, shara. >> think you're so much for giving us the opportunity. kristen: absolutely. what does the company do exactly? i don't know if i described it like -- described accurately. >> it is a company with a real-time speech algorithm translating accents in real-time. kristen: how did you get the idea for this? >> i think i am one of the founders, and michael founders, starting -- my cofounders, starting in stanford, had an issue with raul, he wanted to get a job and he wanted to be

a technical support associate. you would imagine that he stanford systems engineer could reassemble and assemble a computer in a matter of minutes. but he was actually fired from his job. he was abused racially. he actually went into depression. that gave the three of my cofounders idea that, hey, can technology solve this? because the only reason why he was fired was because of his accent. and that had us thinking about something that can change accents in real-time. kristen: who is using it right now? is it mainly just call centers? >> we actually built sanas with the first application being call centers. now it is being used in india

and the philippines and we are scaling across the board. kristen: let's give folks a demo of how this works. first we will listen to the original call center worker, if you will. >> hello, this is alex from customer service aide, how are you today? great to hear. i'm doing very well. thank you very much for asking. how can i help you today? kristen: we do here and accents, if you will come of the person is from india, yes? >> yes. kristen: now this same person talking filtered through sanas. >> hi, this is alex from the customer service aid, how are you today? great to hear. i'm doing very well. thank you very much for asking. so how can i help you today? kristen: wow. i mean -- how does it do that? you are not going to answer that, are you? >> i can. all we are doing is doing speech synthesis and real-time. it is hearing the source, and we

actually have different accents, all that is doing and real-time is matching a specific sound, the phonetic levels. which is why you can do it in real-time -- it can do it in real-time. kristen: we can see how this may be helpful in a call center situation. especially if the caller, the customer is not accustomed to hearing english with an accent. but i've got to ask you some questions. you've been getting a lot of publicity. it's fair to say the reaction has been both, wow, this is cool, but also this is wrong and feeds racism instead of celebrating diversity in all the different accents, it is just whitewashing voices and confirming them to a white standard, is it? >> i understand where the questions are coming from. i understand people have different opinions. but 90% of the people working for sanas are all immigrants. all of us have our own sana

story as to how the way we sound and the way we look, our experience rises from it. at 18 years of age, doing computer science in india, the first thing i was asked to do was to go through a six week accent neutralization training. i quit the job because i did not want to. when we started building the, product -- building the product, i don't know if i can change the world, but if i can help agents go back home with a smile on their face and not be abused, i will take that win anything. so yes, it is controversial. should the world be this way? i would love the world to be a very fair place. but today is an engineer, the only thing that i could think of is, how can i solve this problem that is in front of us? and again, all of us are immigrants, we are not white, and it is not something that we are converting the standard --

we basically give the agency choice of how they want to be sounding on the phone. -- the agents the choice of how they want to be sounding on the phone. kristen: i understand, but some think the onus should not be on the coworker to avoid their accent -- hide their accent or avoid racism. or enjoy the abuse that your friend enjoyed. but it should be on fixing the racism on the other end of the call, and if they hear more indian accents for example, that they will get more accustomed to it, and maybe the bias will ease. how do you respond to that? >> i've been around for 30 years now. the bias has not stopped. why do people have to go through this? while waiting tables, for example, if every three tables are being abused in the restaurants, how would you feel about it? my team thought, let's change

this bias one conversation at a time, and hopefully the world becomes more connected please. and we just thought about the perspective of all of the accented people across the world. kristen: how precise is the translation technology? can it misread, make a mistake, and unintentionally subject the coworker to even more anger from a customer? >> no, we do not say anything that is not set. it will say exactly the same thing. as you learned in the demo, only the accent was translated. that is the only change. kristen: the worker aside, who was on the phone, is there a benefit to the business or perhaps of the customer who was calling? >> we have built it to benefit the agents and we believe that if the agents are happy and they feel more comfortable and confident on the phone, solving customer problems, improving

business metrics -- and we have seen some evidence of that, but our intent was to do this for the agent, not for the customer. kristen: if you want to connect the world and create more empathy, as your website says, does that mean your technology can transform speech into something else? something other than the midwestern american english that even we as broadcasters hold up as a standard? >> actually, we can make agents sound local. we can have somebody from not india have a conversation with somebody in south india, with a south indian accent, so we basically have built up many accent models, where it can take multiple forms of input and translated into multiple forms of output. it is being used by companies in the u.s. with employees in the u.s.. because somebody talking to a new yorker, he or she will respond more seamlessly if they hear a new yorker accent. if somebody is from texas, it

will probably respond more easily to a texan accent. so we are trying to make this more organized. not specific to a u.s. accent only. because we have operations in europe, in india, and global. kristen: is a step one -- kristen: i guess more options is a step one, step two is getting rid of the bias in the world, may be one so you will come up with an app for that. >> even today, when i have to tell alexa something, i will have to say it five times because of my indian accent. i want every connected device to have an accent translator. kristen: alexa, meet sanas. thank you very much. >> thanks so much for the opportunity. kristen: coming up next -- do you want to avoid a parking ticket in san francisco? i know, rhetorical question. stick around, our media partners at the san francisco standard will reveal the

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francisco or not, if you've ever been in the city, you know parking is a challenge. it is also big business. our media partners at the san francisco standard have published a new article showing over 100,000 tickets were issued this march, that is the first time citations reached six figures since before the pandemic. so where should you, can you park, if you don't want to take it? joining us live to answer the question is noah boston, a data reporter for the standard. thank you for your time. >> thanks for having me on. kristen: this is juicy. drivers in san fran got a break during the pandemic, but now ticketing is back. tell us how many tickets have been given out and how much they are breaking in. -- raking in. >> citations pretty much fell off the cliff during the pandemic, as people may be familiar with. citations are back. as you mentioned, we hit six figures, in the number of

citations the city issued in march. then this past month, in july, it was over $8.5 million with of citations the city gave out. kristen: that's a lot of money. what's the most ticketed violation? >> so, parking in a street sweeping zone. that's the number one violation. kristen: how much is an average ticket, by the way? >> that's a good question. i didn't run the exact numbers on that. some tickets are over $100. kristen: i got one that was over $100 a few years ago for not turning my wheels, parking on a hill. the article explains some neighborhoods definitely get ticketed for more than others. there's a clear number one, in terms of citations. give us the top 10. >> yes, i can tell you for sure the financial districts can be the number one neighborhood for citations. then mission neighborhood is coming in second, then third is going to be the t. kristen: this correlates to some streets, right?

tell us about some of these and why they might be so ticketed. is that where the chase center is? >> that is exactly right. those neighborhoods in general, that is -- those are the three neighborhoods where you want to be most careful and parking -- in parking. there are these specific hotspots sprinkled throughout different neighborhoods of the city, where it is like one address that will have a ton of citations. terry francois boulevard is between the park and the chase center. you are kind of hitting both sides of these major menus of the city -- venues of the city. kristen: some of those neighborhoods have retail, right? the marina is in there. is that why people are getting tickets, they are shopping? >> yeah, so the marina has one of those specific hotspots, the peer street garage, where many people have been ticketed in that garage.

it is tricky to know exactly -- i don't know for sure why that address was the most ticketed spot. but certainly, these places where there is people coming and going, they might not be as familiar with the regulations in that neighborhood, that's going to put you at risk of getting hit with a ticket. kristen: what about the times of day? have you noticed in your research whether there are hours, where drivers are more likely to get ticketed? >> absolutely, we ran the numbers for 2022 up through the beginning of august, and it is clearly between noon and 1:00 p.m. is the most ticketed time, when the most citations are issued. coming up behind that is 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. those transition times in the day, whether it is lunch time or people arriving at work, those are both top times. kristen: almost a little counterintuitive. i used to think it was the night life 9:00 p.m., people are out at the clubs or restaurants, but that's not the case.

that is all really great information. please don't go away. i would love to continue chatting with you on facebook live. i've got more questions. you can check out more of the san francisco standard's other original reporting on their website, sfstandard.com. and abc 7 will continue to bring you more segments featuring the standard's city focused journalism. a reminder -- you can get our live newscast, breaking news, weather, and more with our abc7 bay area streaming app. just search "abc 7 bay area" and download i'm jonathan lawson here to tell you about life insurance through the colonial penn program. if you're age 50 to 85, and looking to buy life insurance on a fixed budget, remember the three ps. the three what? the three ps? what are the three ps? the three ps of life insurance on a fixed budget are price, price, and price. a price you can afford, a price that can't increase,

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