Ex-Twitter workers ‘spied for Saudis’
Charged by US for tracking dissidents
SAN FRANCISCO: Two former Twitter Inc employees and a Saudi national were charged by the US with helping the government in Riyadh spy on dissidents who used the social network.
The employees, one from Twitter’s hometown of San Francisco and one in Saudi Arabia, were allegedly recruited to use their company credentials to gain access to the accounts of “users of interest” to the Saudi royal family, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Wednesday.
“Saudi agents mined Twitter’s internal systems for personal information about known Saudi critics and thousands of other Twitter users,” US Attorney David Anderson in San Francisco said in a statement.
The charges show a dark side of Twitter’s mission to be a free and open forum where everyone has a voice and anyone can speak truth to power. Even as the platform has served as an outlet for criticism of repressive regimes, it’s also proven useful to those regimes for tracking down and punishing critics. Human rights organisations have tallied dozens of Twitter-related prosecutions in Saudi Arabia.
Twitter said it’s committed to protecting those who use its service and applauded the Justice Department’s actions. At the same time, the company is being sued by a prominent Saudi dissident who alleges the company put his family in danger by failing to tell him about a hack into his account that he attributes to one of the men charged in the US complaint, Ali Alzabarah.
Prosecutors say that Mr Alzabarah, 35, of Saudi Arabia, and Ahmad Abouammo, 41, most recently of Seattle, were recruited by a third Saudi, Ahmed Almutairi, 30, who was working on behalf of the royal family. All three are charged with acting as illegal agents of a foreign government. Mr Abouammo is also charged with creating a false US$100,000 (about 3 million baht) invoice for consulting services to the Saudi government to cover up his activities when he was questioned by the FBI. Only Mr Abouammo was arrested and the other two are not in the US, officials said.
The criminal complaint traces Mr Abouammo’s involvement with the Saudi government back to 2014, when he worked in one of Twitter’s San Francisco offices as a media partnership manager for the Middle East and Africa. That’s when he allegedly agreed to meet in London with an unidentified member of the inner circle of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
After the Saudi official gave him an expensive wrist watch, Mr Abouammo started collecting information on Twitter users and maintained regular contact with the official, who wired him hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments, according to prosecutors.
Even after Mr Abouammo left Twitter in 2015 and took a new job in Seattle, he continued to do the bidding of the Saudi official by enlisting the help of former Twitter colleagues, according to the complaint.
Prosecutors allege that Mr Alzabarah was similarly recruited by Saudi intelligence operatives, though he travelled to Washington in 2015 to meet with a person identified in the complaint as “Royal Family Member-1”. The Washington Post, which reported on the complaint earlier, said “Royal Family Member-1” is Mohammed bin Salman.
After returning to San Francisco, Mr Alzabarah allegedly accessed the private data of more than 6,000 Twitter users, including at least 60 for whom Saudi law enforcement officials had sought information through official Twitter channels.
After Twitter fired him, he later joined a charitable foundation in Saudi Arabia where he worked with a team “to monitor and manipulate” social media, according to the official complaint.