Former Twitter staff sentenced to over three years for spying in US for Saudi Arabia

Incident brings to light how Twitter can be a valuable source of information for foreign government agents

A former Twitter employee who was previously found guilty of spying in the US on behalf of the Saudi Royal family has been convicted to over three years in prison.

Twitter’s former media partnership manager for the Middle East region, Ahmad Abouammo – a dual US-Lebanese citizen – was found guilty on six counts in August by a San Francisco federal court for money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

He was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The US Justice Department noted that another Twitter employee who accessed confidential user account data, and a person allegedly with close ties to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, was also involved.

The department believes the two accomplices fled to Saudi Arabia to escape from US authorities.

Mr Abouammo was arrested in Seattle on 5 November 2019, and was charged with acting as an agent of Saudi Arabia.

This marked the first time Saudi Arabia has been accused of spying in the US, according to the Associated Press.

According to an FBI agent’s testimony, a Saudi government agent started courting Abouammo in 2014, offering him gifts, following which the former Twitter employee began gathering private data on the platform’s users critical of the Saudi regime using his inside access.

The incident brought to light how Twitter can be a valuable source of information for foreign governments and organisations to gather intelligence or influence public opinion.

Twitter whistleblower and former security chief Peter “Mudge” Zatko had previously told a US Senate Judiciary Committee in September that the microblogging platform is vulnerable to the possibility of foreign spies working within the company and accessing user data due to a lack of internal security control measures.

“There was a lack of logging and an ability to see what they were doing, what information is being accessed, or to contain their activities, let alone set steps for remediation and constitution of any damage,” Mr Zatko had said.

He warned that a foreign agent working within the company may have several goals, including to finding out what plans Twitter has for the governments of other countries, and whether it would concede to a government censorship request.

The former security chief said in his disclosure that India was able to place at least two suspect foreign assets within Twitter and that he was warned by the FBI that at least one Chinese agent was in the company.