Twitter employees charged with spying on dissidents for Saudi Arabia

Two former Twitter employees and a man linked to the Saudi royals are charged with spying on dissidents.

One of the accused men is allegedly linked to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Picture: AFP.

The US Justice Department has charged two former Twitter employees and a Saudi Arabian national with spying for the Middle East country on users of the social-media platform who were critical of the kingdom.

According to a court filing, the men were guided by an unnamed Saudi official who worked for someone prosecutors designated “Royal Family Member-1,” which The Washington Post reported was Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Those charged were Twitter employees Ali Alzabarah and Ahmad Abouammo, and Ahmed Almutairi, a marketing official with ties to the royal family.

“The criminal complaint unsealed today alleges that Saudi agents mined Twitter’s internal systems for personal information about known Saudi critics and thousands of other Twitter users,” said US lawyer David Anderson.

“US law protects US companies from such an unlawful foreign intrusion. We will not allow US companies or US technology to become tools of foreign repression in violation of US law,” he said in a statement.

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The accounts the employees spied on included those of a popular journalist with more than a million followers, and other prominent government critics.

The complaint 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 funnelled into secret bank accounts

Mr Abouammo, who left his job as the media partnership manager responsible for Twitter’s Middle East region in 2015, was arrested on charges of illegally acting as an agent of Saudi Arabia and trying to obtain personal information about its critics. He was arrested in Seattle on Tuesday and made an initial court appearance on Wednesday, prosecutors said.

Investigators also alleged that a Saudi working as a social media adviser for the Saudi royal family, recruited Twitter engineer Ali Alzabarah by flying him to Washington for a private meeting with an unnamed member of the family.

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

Mr Alzabarah was accused of working with Mr. Abouammo and using employee credentials between November 2014 and May 2015 to obtain email addresses, dates of birth, and other information about people who had published posts critical of the Saudi royal family, prosecutors said. Mr. Alzabarah is believed to be in Saudi Arabia.

“This information could have been used to identify and locate the Twitter users who published these posts,” the Justice Department said.

Mr Almutairi, also a Saudi national, was accused of convincing the Twitter employees to access the information.

Mr. Abouammo was also accused of destroying records in the investigation.

The men’s efforts involved accessing the user 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, investigators said. After being confronted by his supervisors at Twitter, Mr Alzabarah allegedly admitted to accessing user data and said he did it out of curiosity.

A Twitter representative said the company restricts access to sensitive account information to a limited group of trained and vetted employees.

“We understand the incredible risks faced by many who use Twitter to share their perspectives with the world and to hold those in power accountable,” the representative said.

Lawyers for the defendants couldn’t immediately be located for comment.

The Wall St Journal, AFP