The Justice Department charged two former Twitter employees with spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia by exploiting their access to confidential information the social media company stored about users.
It is the first time federal prosecutors have charged Saudis with spying inside the United States.
The Justice Department unveiled the charges Wednesday, a day after Ahmad Abouammo, an American who worked for Twitter as a media partnerships manager, was arrested in Seattle. Abouammo is also charged with falsifying a receipt to obstruct an FBI investigation.
Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi citizen, who worked for Twitter, and Ahmed Almutairi, a Saudi citizen who acted as an intermediary between Saudi officials and Twitter employees, were also charged. The two are believed to be in Saudi Arabia.
Abouammo is alleged to have spied on the Twitter accounts of three users on behalf of Riyadh, according to the criminal complaint. Alzabarah was accused of accessing the personal information linked to more than 6,000 Twitter accounts on behalf of the country.
The three men allegedly worked with a Saudi official who runs a charitable organization belonging to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The unnamed official, identified by the Washington Post as Bader Al Asaker, was “working for and at the direction of” Mohammed “with respect to his online presence” on Twitter.
Asaker began pursing relationships with Twitter employees in 2014 in an effort to obtain information on users for the Saudi government, the complaint alleged.
Abouammo met Asaker in London is late 2014 and began exploiting his access to user data within a week of their meeting. One of their targets was a “prominent critic” of the Saudi kingdom and the royal family and had more than 1 million Twitter followers.
Asaker paid Abouammo $300,000 and gave him a watch work $20,000, according to the complaint. Abouammo left his job at Twitter in May 2015 and moved to Seattle, but continued to pass on requests from the Saudi official to his former colleagues.
An FBI agent interviewed Abouammo at his home about the watch and his interactions with Asaker. During that interview, Abouammo created a fake invoice claiming to show that he was paid $100,000 by Asaker for media strategy work.
Alzabarah, who worked as an engineer for the company, is alleged to have begun his work as a Saudi agent in May 2015. Asaker was by then the director of Mohammed’s private office and employed by the Saudi royal court.
Alzabarah flew to Washington, D.C., in May 2015, where he planned to meet with Asaker. Almutairi and Mohammed were also in the city at the time.
Shortly after he returned to San Francisco, Alzabarah accessed user data “en masse,” the complaint said. He also looked at the accounts of critics of the Saudi government, including one of lives in asylum in Canada. A person familiar with the matter told the Washington Post that the dissident, who was not named in the court filing, was Omar Abdulaziz, who was close with Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the paper who was killed by Saudi government agents last year.
Abdulaziz sued Twitter last month, arguing that the tech giant did not notify him that his account had been hacked by Alzabarah.
When Twitter was notified about the breach, it put Alzabarah on leave. He left for Saudi Arabia the next day.
The employees’ access to user data, including email addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, and IP addresses, emphasizes Mohammed’s efforts to silence his critics.
“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,” U.S. Attorney David Anderson said. “We will not allow U.S. companies or U.S. technology to become tools of foreign repression in violation of U.S. law.”
