U.S.: Saudis recruited Twitter workers to spy

Two employees allegedly used

SAN FRANCISCO — The Saudi government recruited two Twitter employees to get personal account information of their critics, prosecutors said Wednesday.

A complaint unsealed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco detailed a coordinated effort by Saudi government officials to recruit employees at the social media giant to look up the private data of thousands of Twitter accounts.

The accounts included those of a popular critic of the government with more than 1 million followers and a news personality.

It also alleged that the employees — whose jobs did not require access to Twitter users’ private information — were rewarded with a designer watch and tens of thousands of dollars funneled into secret bank accounts. They were charged with acting as agents of Saudi Arabia without registering with the U.S. government.

The Saudi government had no immediate comment through its embassy in Washington.

Twitter acknowledged that it cooperated in the investigation and said in a statement that it restricts access to sensitive account information “to a limited group of trained and vetted employees.”

Ahmad Abouammo, who left his job as the media partnership manager for Twitter’s Middle East region in 2015, was also charged with falsifying documents and making false statements to obstruct FBI investigators — offenses that carry a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison if convicted.

At his appearance in Seattle federal court Wednesday, Abouammo was ordered to remain in custody pending a detention hearing set for Friday.

His lawyer, Christopher Black, declined to comment, as did Abouammo’s wife, who did not give her name.

Investigators alleged that a Saudi citizen working as a social media adviser for the Saudi royal family recruited Twitter engineer Ali Alzabarah. The two met in Washington. D.C., around the same time the adviser, Ahmed Almutairi, met with someone named in the complaint as Royal Family Member 1.

“Within one week of returning to San Francisco, Alzabarah began to access without authorization private data of Twitter users en masse,” the complaint said.

The effort included the user data of over 6,000 Twitter users, including at least 33 usernames.