Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter employee, has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for spying for Saudi Arabia, Reuters and NBC News report. Between 2013 and 2015, Ahmad Abouammo worked for Twitter as the media partnerships manager for the Middle East and North Africa. He exploited this position to gain access to the personal information of users who were critical of the Saudi government and then provided this information to Saudi officials.
Reuters reports that a Saudi official gifted Abouammo a $42,000 watch and two wire payments totalling $100,000. In exchange, he researched two Twitter users, finding their phone numbers and birthdays. In 2015, Abouammo left the firm, but an FBI agent testified that he continued to try to persuade Twitter to verify Saudi accounts or to remove messages that the Saudi government highlighted.
This past August, Abouammo was found guilty on multiple counts, including operating as an agent of a foreign government, fraud, money laundering, and falsifying records. In 2019, he was first accused, along with another Twitter employee, of accessing hundreds of accounts on behalf of the Saudi government. Ali Alzabarah, the second worker, fled the United States prior to his indictment.
Social media users in Saudi Arabia face severe consequences for sharing anything deemed to be anti-government. Two Saudi nationals were sentenced to lengthy prison terms this year; one received 34 years for tweeting criticism of the regime, and the other received 16 years.
Given the large number of prominent politicians, celebrities, and businesses who use Twitter regularly, this case demonstrates the extreme sensitivity of the data Twitter stores.
Former Twitter security chief Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko testified that the Saudi state isn’t the only foreign power to have tried to breach the social media platform. In January of this year, he said that the Indian and Chinese governments had agents embedded within the corporation and that the latter could not determine the extent to which it may have been compromised. In September, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “We simply lacked the ability to hunt for foreign intelligence agents and expel them on our own.”
Following Elon Musk’s buyout, the private office of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and the Saudi Arabian Kingdom Holding Company, owned by the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund at a 16.9 per cent stake, has claimed to be the second largest investor in Twitter. Reports indicate that the US authorities have been investigating whether or not Musk’s foreign investment partners have access to consumers’ personal information on the platform.