Former Twitter Employee Found Guilty of Spying on Behalf of Saudi Arabia

A former Twitter employee has been convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia.

The Justice Department said(Opens in a new window) in 2019 that Saudi Arabian officials convinced Ahmad Abouammo and Ahmed Almutairi to “use their employee credentials to gain access without authorization to certain nonpublic information about the individuals behind certain Twitter accounts.”

Twitter can be used to publish information that oppressive regimes don’t want to be made public. Many of the people sharing this information do so via pseudonymous accounts to protect themselves as well as their friends and family. But that only works if their identities remain secret.

Saudi Arabia “sought the private information of Twitter users, including their email addresses, IP addresses, and dates of birth, of persons some of whom published posts deemed by the Saudi Royal Family to be critical of the regime,” according to the Justice Department.

Abouammo has now been found guilty of “acting as an agent for Saudi Arabia, money laundering, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and falsifying records” following a swift trial in a San Francisco court, Bloomberg reports(Opens in a new window). He could be sentenced to 10-20 years in prison.

This episode, as well as the revelation that someone exploited a vulnerability to scrape data about as many as 5.4 million Twitter users, highlights the risks people take when they rely on pseudonymity to share information or express opinions that governments want to silence.