The charges come one day after the arrest of one of the former Twitter employees, Ahmad Abouammo, a US citizen who is alleged to have spied on the accounts of 3 users, including one whose posts discussed the inner workings of the Saudi leadership, on behalf of the govt in Riyadh.
Abouammo was also charged with falsifying an invoice to obstruct an FBI investigation.
The second former employee, Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi citizen, was accused of accessing the personal information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts in 2015.
The second former employee, Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi citizen, was accused of accessing the personal information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts in 2015.
And here is the punchline: one of those accounts that was accessed belonged to a prominent dissident, Omar Abdulaziz, who later became close to Jamal Khashoggi, the WaPo columnist who was killed by Saudi government agents last year.
A third individual, Saudi citizen Ahmed Almutairi, allegedly acted as an intermediary between Saudi officials and the Twitter employees. He is also charged with spying. Alzabarah and Almutairi are believed to be in Saudi Arabia.
Analysts said it is the first time federal prosecutors have publicly accused Saudis of spying in the United States.
The DOJ alleged that the employees — whose jobs did not require access to Twitter users’ private information — were rewarded with a designer watch and tens of thousands of dollars funneled into secret bank accounts.
It gets better: the three men are accused of working with a Saudi official who leads a charitable organization belonging to MbS. Based on a description of the charity, the official is Bader Al Asaker.
Asaker’s charity, MiSK, belongs to Mohammed bin Salman, who is referred to in the complaint as Royal Family Member 1.
Asaker began cultivating Twitter employees in 2014 in an effort to gather user information the Saudi government could not obtain elsewhere, the complaint alleged
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