SAN FRANCISCO – During his time at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, Ahmad Abouammo was responsible for helping celebrities, journalists and other notables in the Middle East promote their Twitter accounts. He handled requests for Twitter’s coveted blue verification badge and arranged tours to its San Francisco headquarters.
But the Justice Department says he abused his access to Twitter user data, collect personal information of dissidents and shipped it to Saudi Arabia in exchange for a luxury watch and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Abouammo, who is charged with operating as a representative of a foreign power inside the United States, committing electronic fraud and money laundering, will be tried this week in federal court in San Francisco. Francisco.
“We look forward to exonerating Mr. Abouammo and giving him a court date,” said Angela Chuang, a lawyer representing him. The government hopes Mr. Abouammo’s legal team argues that he was legally working as a consultant for Saudi Arabia, according to court filings. Ms. Chuang declined to comment on the legal strategy.
The incident, which shows the intensity of the Saudi government’s pursuit of information about its critics, is playing out at a delicate point in diplomacy between the two countries. United States and Saudi Arabia.
Last week, President Biden made his first visit as president to the kingdom, where he vowed to make a “pariah“In the hope of securing closer relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel and reducing high gas prices. Mr. Biden meets the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly known by his initials, MBS and other Saudi officials. But human rights activists harshly criticized the visit, arguing that the president was covering up the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who was assassinated in 2018 by Saudi agents. Ut.
It’s also been a difficult time for Twitter, as the company faces tight scrutiny over its data privacy practices and high salaries. Legal battle against Elon Muskwho is trying to back out of a social media company acquisition deal.
Although Twitter said it restricted employee access to user data after Abouammo left the company in 2015, it continues to grapple with security issues. In 2020, Hackers have taken over the accounts of famous usersincluding Mr. Musk, to promote a crypto scam.
In the May, Twitter agrees to pay a fine of 150 million USD to settle charges it misled users about how it handled their personal data. Twitter has told users it is collecting their email addresses and phone numbers to protect their accounts, but also uses this information to help marketers target ads.
Mr. Abouammo was charged in 2019 along with another former Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah. The Justice Department said the men used their Twitter access to glean information about thousands of users and shared information with Ahmed Almutairi, who the ministry said was a go-between. Saudi officials. Mr. Almutairi previously ran a social media marketing company working for the Saudi royal family.
The men collect “personal user data, such as device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses, all of which can be used by the Saudi government to identify and identify individuals behind the accounts, including dissidents,” the Justice Department said in its court filing.
When Twitter management confronted Alzabarah, he fled to Saudi Arabia, the Justice Department said. He and Mr Almutairi are still wanted by US law enforcement. Mr. Abouammo, who briefly worked at Amazon after leaving Twitter, was arrested in Seattle in 2019. He was released on free bail but went to the San Francisco Bay area for trial.
In recent years, the Justice Department has cracked down on lobbyists and others who work to advance the interests of foreign governments without disclosing it. For years, prosecutors largely ignored such cases; from 1966 to 2015, the Ministry of Justice pursued only seven cases under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires lobbyists to disclose their work on behalf of foreign governments.
One of the 6,000 Twitter accounts that Alzabarah allegedly acted on behalf of Saudi officials in 2015 belonged to Omar Abdulaziz, a prominent Saudi dissident and close friend. of Mr. Khashoggi, People familiar with the case said. Mr. Abdulaziz sued Twitter for the breach; According to attorneys and court records, the case is being settled.
“The problem is bigger than Abouammo,” said Behnam Gharagozli, Abdulaziz’s lawyer. “The problem is the system here. The problem was how the data was handled back then.”
A Twitter spokesperson said that “Twitter’s information security practices have undergone rigorous audits by external auditors – as has been the case since 2012.” She added: “Twitter’s investment in its security practices goes back a long time, and those security practices are constantly evolving to meet new security challenges and to deter and prevent external and internal bad actors. Twitter takes these threats extremely seriously.”
Mr. Abdulaziz, living in exile in Canada, owns a YouTube channel and maintains a popular Twitter account, where he shares sarcasm and criticism of the Saudi government. “What has happened as a result of this data sharing is that he has gone from one of many prominent Saudi dissidents to one of a select few,” said Mr.
Mr. Gharagozli said Mr. Abdulaziz’s relatives and friends who remained in Saudi Arabia had been jailed, in what he called an attempt to “torture by proxy” against Mr. Abdulaziz. A Saudi government spokesman declined to comment.
Mark Kleiman, another lawyer for Mr. Abdulaziz, said: “It is important for Omar that the foundation is secure, or at least safer, in the future. “He put it in a way that really struck me early on. He said: ‘Twitter is our Parliament. To have it stormed and permanently occupied, which is basically what happened to the way MBS’s technological attack worked, was devastating. ‘”
