Pedestrians outside Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on Oct. 6, 2022.
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A former Twitter worker found guilty of spying on users on behalf of the Saudi royal family has been sentenced to 3 and a half years in prison.
Ahmad Abouammo, a dual U.S.-Lebanese citizen who helped oversee media partnerships for Twitter within the Middle East and North Africa, was a part of a scheme to amass the non-public information of users, including phone numbers and birth dates, for a Saudi government agent. He was sentenced Wednesday within the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
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The Justice Department has said it believes that one other former Twitter worker accused of accessing user accounts and a person accused of helping the Saudi government with the scheme have fled to Saudi Arabia to evade American authorities.
The Saudi government severely penalizes anti-government expression on social media sites like Twitter. In April, courts sentenced Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi citizen and 34-year-old mother of two children, to 34 years in prison for tweets protesting the federal government.
Based on testimony from an FBI agent presented to the Northern District of California, a Saudi government agent began courting Abouammo in 2014 by buying him gifts and depositing money in his cousin’s checking account. Abouammo then began secretly accessing accounts of users who were critical of the Saudi government and sharing their email addresses and phone numbers with the federal government agent.
The Saudi consulate didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Even after Abouammo left Twitter in May 2015, he still helped the Saudi government by contacting former co-workers and inspiring them to confirm particular Saudi accounts or remove posts that the Saudi agent highlighted as violating the positioning’s terms of service, the FBI agent said of their testimony. He received tons of of hundreds of dollars and used a few of that cash to place a down payment on a house in Seattle, Wash.
The indictment highlights the threat that Twitter faces from foreign spies who see value in the data it stores on users and their direct communications.
All major tech corporations will be targets for intelligence gathering, and Twitter has long been a selected goal, functioning as an important platform each for protesters and dissidents all over the world.
While Abouammo is the primary person found guilty and sentenced for spying on Twitter on behalf of a foreign government, a former head of cybersecurity at the corporate has testified that the corporate has previously been infiltrated by spies from not less than two other countries.
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, filed a lengthy whistleblower grievance concerning the company submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission in July. In it, he said he believed the governments of India, Nigeria and Russia had each tried to get Twitter to rent hand-picked people as full-time employees who would potentially spy on users.
Later, when testifying before the Senate in September, Zatko said that before he got here to the corporate, the FBI had warned staffers that Chinese intelligence had likely also infiltrated Twitter.
