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I may be wrong, but I believe this is information that was already available to you using the API. The only difference being that they have downloaded all the data and compiled it into an easy to use CSV. So I could see a lot of small-time spammers wanting a copy, but I don't see it being terribly valuable, like actual privative data might be.

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There was a publicly available API endpoint to query email addresses and phone numbers given a Twitter handle?

I'm genuinely curious about this too. I've never heard about such a thing to exist.

They used an exploit in the public API. You're not supposed to be able to get this data about any twitter account (except your own).

I believe this is not correct. You are definitely not able to get random people's (including government officials) phone numbers and email address using the API.

They were through a bug in the API.

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