Forget the long title, what it means in short is Saudi Arabia spied on dissidents using twitter employees, in fact, Saudi Arabians. Just hearing about this.
Twitter Employee Surveillance For Saudi Arabia Raises Questions About Company’s Cybersecurity And Governance
What Happened
On November 5, the U.S. Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against two former Twitter employees and an accomplice, alleging that they had violated 18 U.S.C. § 951 by acting as agents of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. Attorney General. The complaint alleges that the former employees, Ali Alzabarah and Ahmad Abouammo, acted at the direction of the Saudi government. Their intermediary, Ahmed Almutairi, is a Saudi citizen who came to the U.S. on a student visa and resided in the U.S. from August 2014 to May 2015. He controls a social media company in Saudi Arabia that performs work for the Saudi Royal Family, including “Royal Family Member-1, presumed to be Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman.
Alzabarah, a citizen of Saudi Arabia, received a computer science degree in the U.S. and worked for Twitter as a site reliability engineer from around August 2013 to December 2015. Abouammo, a U.S. citizen, was a media partnership manager responsible for the Middle East and North Africa regions for Twitter.
The Complaint states that both employees had access to proprietary and confidential Twitter information about Twitter users, including email addresses, birthdates, phone numbers, and Internet protocol (IP) addresses.
The Complaint details how the employees accessed Twitter data pertaining to accounts believed to be held by dissidents or critics of the Saudi government and provided information about them to the Saudi government. Abouammo was also charged with violating criminal statute 18 U.S.C. § 1519 for destruction of records related to the investigation.
Read more at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jodywestby/2019/11/12/twitter-employee-surveillance-for-saudi-arabia-raises-questions-about--companys-cybersecurity-and-governance/#1bc489355f1c
