By Eric King-
Twitter is having to bear the shame of the recent news that two of its former employees have been charged with spying after obtaining personal account information for critics of the government of Saudi Arabia.
A complaint was filed on Wednesday at the U.S district court in San Francisco revealing a sustained effort by Saudi officials to recruit employees at the social media giant to look up the private data of thousands of Twitter accounts. The social media giant has so far handled the embarrassment well, and thanked both the FBI and the U.S Department in its role with the investigation.
The U.S justice department said that the remit of the employees’s job description did not include access to Twitter users’ private information. Twitter has so far handled the embarrassment of the revelation well, but has not explained how and why the offending former employees were able to access the personal account information of the individuals.
In a statement, Twitter thanked the FBI and the US Department of Justice for supporting the investigation.
“We recognise the lengths bad actors will go to try and undermine our service,” Twitter said. “We understand the incredible risks faced by many who use Twitter to share their perspectives with the world and to hold those in power accountable.”
One of the former Twitter employees, U.S citizen, Ahmad Abouammo, was arrested on Tuesday on charges of spying and falsifying an invoice to obstruct an FBI investigation. The other former employee, Ali Alzabarah- A Saudi Citizen- was accused of accessing the personal information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts in 2015 on behalf of Saudi Arabia.
The charges allege that Ali Alzabarah and Ahmad Abouammo used their employee credentials to access information about specific Twitter users, including their email addresses, birth dates, phone numbers and internet protocol addresses. A third individual, Ahmed Almutairi, was also charged for acting as an intermediary between the Twitter employees and the Saudi government.
Alzabarah accessed accounts of a number of prominent government critics including that of Omar Abdulaziz, a prominent journalist with more than 1 million followers who was close to late Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi, a US resident, was killed by the Saudi government last year.
The U.S justice department also said that the remit of the employees’s job description did not include access to Twitter users’ private information. They were rewarded with a designer watch and tens of thousands of dollars deposited into secret bank accounts. Alzabarah claimed in an admission to his superiors that he accessed user data and said he did it out of curiosity. He was placed on administrative leave, his work-owned laptop was seized, and he was escorted out of the office.
WARRANT
A warrant for his arrest was issued after he flew to Saudi Arabia with his wife and daughter and has not returned to the United States, investigators said.