Musk says US intel agencies had 'full access' to private Twitter messages

Twitter CEO Elon Musk revealed that the United States government and foreign government agencies had "full access" to private messages among Twitter users before he took over. 

"The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind," Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview aired Monday. "I was not aware of that."

Musk said governments would read users' direct messages because they were not encrypted, and he is working to release a feature later this month that would allow users to encrypt their messages.

If users choose to encrypt their conversations, "no one at Twitter can see what you're talking about," he also said. "You could put a gun to my head and I couldn't tell you. ... That's how it should be."

Madeleine Hubbard is an international correspondent for Just the News. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram.