Two ex-Twitter employees were accused of spying for Saudi Arabia by prying into thousands of private Twitter accounts looking for personal information about the Riyadh government critics. This was according to the filed court documents in San Francisco middle of this week. This is the first time that the federal prosecutors are charging Saudis with positioning agents in the United States.
Online news site WBUR named the two employees as Ahmad Abouammo, former Twitter media partnerships manager, and Ali Alabarah, a site reliability engineer at the social media company. A separate report from The New York Times indicated that the two were accused of "acting as agents of foreign power inside the U.S." The case, according to the said online media company, raised questions on the security of various American technology companies that are already under scrutiny for disseminating disinformation and influencing the opinion of the public, showing that these companies can also be penetrated from the inside, too.
The Culprits and Their Cases
As an ex-media partnerships manager, Abouammo, an American citizen, was not authorized to access the private information of any Twitter user. However, he allegedly did what was not allowed of him to do in exchange for a $300,000 payment from a certain "Foreign Official-1," as identified in the complaint. Aside from the money, Abouammo also reportedly received an expensive Hublot watch worth around $20,000.
As indicated in the complaint, according to BBC News, the former Twitter employee "created a false invoice using his home computer" in an attempt to justify the payments as his salary as a media consultant, which he said, "totaled no more than $100,000." Aside from acting as an overseas mediator, Abouammo was also charged with falsification of records to hinder a federal investigation.
The other ex-employee, Alzabarah, a Saudi citizen, had worked at Twitter since 2013. And, between May and November 2015, the former site reliability engineer, who also had unauthorized access, accessed the social media site's data of more than 6,000 Twitter users, which include around 33 usernames for which the law enforcement of Saudi Arabia had submitted requests of emergency disclosure to Twitter.
Between May 21, 2015 and Nov. 18, 2015, Alzabarah, without authorization, accessed "the Twitter data of over 6,000 Twitter users, including at least 33 usernames for which Saudi Arabian law enforcement had submitted emergency disclosure requests to Twitter," the complaint said. Among the accounts he accessed were those belonging to well-known critics of the Saudi government. In its report, CNBC added that one of the accounts belonged to Omar Abdulazis, a prominent rebel who later became reportedly close to a Washington Post columnist identified as Jamal Khashoggi, who was an advocate of "free expression in the Arab world."
In a same statement Twitter released, it mentioned that the company is aware of the bad actors trying to undermine the social media firm's service and that the organization is limiting access to sensitive information of its account users to a limited group of vetted and trained employees.
