SAN FRANCISCO – While working at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, Ahmad Abouammo was responsible for helping celebrities, journalists and other prominent figures in the Middle East promote their Twitter accounts. He handled requests for Twitter’s coveted blue verification badges and hosted tours of the San Francisco headquarters.
But the Justice Department says he abused his access to Twitter user data, collecting the personal information of political dissidents and passing it on to Saudi Arabia in exchange for a luxury watch and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Mr. Abouammo, who is accused of acting as an agent of a foreign power within the United States, for fraud and money laundering, will go on trial this week in federal court in San Francisco.
“We look forward to exonerating Mr. Abouammo and for him to have his day in court,” said Angela Chuang, a lawyer representing him. The government expects Mr. Abouammo’s legal team to argue that he worked legally as a consultant in Saudi Arabia, according to a court filing. Ms. Chuang declined to comment on the legal strategy.
The case, which illustrates the Saudi government’s intensity in pursuing information about its critics, is unfolding at a delicate point in diplomacy between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Last week, President Biden made his first visit as president to the kingdom, which he once vowed to make a “pariah,” in hopes of securing closer Saudi-Israeli relations and relief from high prices. of gas. Mr. Biden met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often known by his initials, MBS, and other Saudi officials. But human rights activists sharply criticized the visit, arguing that the president was covering up the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was killed in 2018 by Saudi operatives.
It’s also a difficult time for Twitter, as the company faces increased scrutiny over its data security practices and wages a legal battle against Elon Musk, who is trying to back out of a deal to buy the company. of social media.
While Twitter has said it limited employee access to user data after Mr. Abouammo left the company in 2015, it has continued to struggle with security problems. In 2020, hackers hijacked the accounts of famous users, including Mr. Musk, to promote a cryptocurrency scam.
In May, Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million fine to settle allegations that it misled users about how it handled their personal data. Twitter had told users it was collecting their email addresses and phone numbers to protect their accounts, but also used the information to help marketers target ads.
Mr Abouammo was charged in 2019 along with another former Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah. The Justice Department said the men had used their access to Twitter to find information on thousands of users and shared the information with Ahmed Almutairi, who the department said had served as their go-between with Saudi officials. Mr Almutairi previously ran a social media marketing company working for the Saudi royal family.
The men collected “private user data, such as device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses, all of which could have been used by the Saudi government to identify and track down the individuals behind the accounts, including political dissidents,” the Department of Defense said. Justice in a court file.
When Twitter management confronted Mr. Alzabarah, he fled to Saudi Arabia, the Justice Department said. He and Mr. Almutairi remain wanted by US law enforcement. Mr. Abouammo, who worked briefly at Amazon after leaving Twitter, was arrested in Seattle in 2019. He is free on bail but traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area for the trial.
In recent years, the Justice Department has cracked down on lobbyists and others who work to advance the interests of foreign governments but don’t disclose it. For years, prosecutors had largely ignored such cases; from 1966 to 2015, the Justice Department prosecuted only seven cases under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires lobbyists to disclose their work on behalf of foreign governments.
One of the 6,000 Twitter accounts that Mr. The alzabarah it is accused of seeing on behalf of Saudi officials in 2015 belonged to Omar Abdulaziz, a prominent Saudi dissident and confidant of Mr. Khashoggi, people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Abdulaziz sued Twitter for the breach; the case is in mediation, according to his attorneys and court records.
“The problem is bigger than Abouammo,” said Behnam Gharagozli, a lawyer for Mr. Abdulaziz. “Here the problem is systemic. The problem is the way data was handled at the time.”
A Twitter spokeswoman said that “Twitter’s information security practices are subject to rigorous audits by an external auditor – as they have been since 2012.” She added: “Twitter’s investment in its security practices is long-term, and those security practices are constantly evolving to meet new security challenges and deter and prevent external and potential internal bad actors. Twitter takes these threats extremely seriously.”
Mr. Abdulaziz, who lives in exile in Canada, runs a YouTube channel and maintains a popular Twitter account, where he shares satire and criticism of the Saudi government. “What happened as a result of this data sharing was that he went from being one of many prominent Saudi dissidents to one of a select few,” Mr. Gharagozli said.
Mr. Gharagozli said that the relatives and friends of Mr. Abdulaziz who remained in Saudi Arabia was jailed in what he called an attempt to “torture by proxy” Mr. Abdulaziz. A Saudi government spokeswoman declined to comment.
“What matters to Omar is that the platform is safe, or at least safer, going forward,” said Mark Kleiman, another lawyer for Mr. Abdulaziz. “He put it in a way that hit me very early. He said: ‘Twitter is our Parliament. To be attacked and conquered forever, which is essentially what has happened with the way MBS’s technological offensive has worked, is devastating.’
