Two former Twitter employees and a Saudi national have been federally charged with working for the Saudi government to access private Twitter accounts.
Ali Alzabarah and Ahmad Abouammo allegedly used their Twitter credentials to gain access to certain non-public information for the royal family, which could have been used to locate critics of the regime, according to the criminal complaint filed Tuesday in the Northern District of California.
The pair allegedly were compensated for their actions with expensive watches, cash and other benefits, according to the complaint. "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 in a statement.
Abouammo allegedly began accessing private Twitter user information within a week of the meeting in London, according to the complaint. One of user's email addresses he obtained through Twitter's computer systems was a"prominent critic" of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its royal family and had more than 1 million followers. Abouammo allegedly accessed the user's email address at least six more times between January 2015 and February 2015.
In May 2015, Alzabarah met with a member of the Saudi royal court in Washington, D.C., and within a week of returning to San Francisco, he allegedly began to access,"without authorization," private data of Twitter users"en masse."
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