[Thread] 1/ Following are some thoughts on the criminal charges on the case of the United States versus the two Saudis and one American citizen accused of spying through Twitter for a foreign government (Saudi Arabia)
2/ "Foreign Official 1" who gave the US citizen Ahmed Abouammo $300,000 and a $20,000 Hublot watch, listed the Royal Court as his employer. This would have put him in the same orbit as Saud al Qahtani - the alleged orchestrator of @JKhashoggi 's murder 
@JKhashoggi 3/ One of those involved, Al Mutairi, who ran a social media marketing company, is interesting. I would be curious to know the role of this company in promoting disinformation, using bots, and running troll networks. "Marketing" is often a euphemism for this kind of activity
@JKhashoggi 4/ The ability of Abouammo and AlZabarah to access IP addresses is crucial. When not masked (and they tracked IP access, didn't just check it one time), IP addresses can reveal exact home addresses in many Gulf countries. i.e. an anonymous account can be identified.
@JKhashoggi 5/ Thus Twitter's failure to adequately protect the information of Saudi users has directly exposed those users to possible threats of torture, mistreatment and arrest - the violation of their human rights.
@JKhashoggi 6/ It seemed that at least prior to 2015, when Twitter made relatively unknown changes to its mechanisms to secure user data, all they relied on was a signed agreement between employees and the company to honour the Twitter Playbook. Not very robust...
@JKhashoggi 7/ The document indicates that the Saudi Embassy in the United States, through their PR company, played an active role in ensuring certain Saudi personalities had verified Twitter accounts - this was tasked to Abouammo
@JKhashoggi 8/ A group of Saudi entrepreneurs were given a tour of Twitter HQ on June 13 2014. It included Foreign Official 1, who later became head of Royal Family Member 1's 'private office'. This is another indicator of the proximity of this operation to the Saudi royal family
@JKhashoggi 9/ Ahmed AL Mutairi, the head of the charitable organisation , met with Abouammo and claimed he was the 'advisor' for the "VVIP 1st Degree Member of the Saudi Royal Family". Now who could this be...
@JKhashoggi 10/ Abouammo after having been given the Hublot watch immediately attempted to sell it on craigslist! If you wanna buy one why not go here > hublot.com/en/collection/…
@JKhashoggi 11/ A week after December 6 2014, when Abouammo met with the Foreign Official 1 and received the watch, he began to access private Twitter user information of interest to the 'Saudi Royal Family'. Abouammo then accessed the details of a prominent critic of Saudi government
@JKhashoggi 12/ It is not quite clear what the document means when it says Abouammo accessed on multiple occasions the 'email address' of the Saudi user. Surely if he was just finding it he would write it once, could he have been sending the Saudi user communiques from Twitter, i.e.
13/ emails that appeared to be coming from Twitter? I wonder if this is possible - would be an important question to ask the defendants imo.
14/ Another strange aspect of this is that Abouammo, after speaking again to foreign offical 1 in January 2015, accessed the account of @KingSalman - the King of Saudi. Why?
@KingSalman 15/ Abouammo's relative in Beirut setup a bank account in Lebanon - Bank Audi. Money was then transferred into this account and sent to Abouammo's account in the US. This was shortly after he revealed sensitive user info on Saudi Twitter User 2 - a critic of the Saudi gov.
@KingSalman 16/ What is interesting, is the FBI interviewed a Twitter engineer. They specified that a Twitter employee's access to user information depended a) on their level of access and b) the actual amount/type of information provided by the user.
@KingSalman 17/ After Abouammo resigned in May 2015, he still contacted other colleagues in Twitter to honour requests made by Foreign Official 1. This includes request to verify, requests to shut down accounts. The documents says 'colleagues' - who else was potentially involved?
@KingSalman 18/ Abouammo was also asked to verify the account @saudiarabia to be used by 'the king's team'. I checked the Way Back Machine and I am not sure it ever was. Could this suggest waning influence in Twitter from Abouammo?
@KingSalman @saudiarabia 19/ This bit made me lol. When the FBI agent interviewed Abouammo about the watch and money, he described the watch as 'plasticky' and 'junky' - said he thought it was worth only about $500 😂The FBI agent also caught him deleting direct messages between him and Foreign Official1
@KingSalman @saudiarabia 20/ Another amusing tidbit, when being interviewed by the FBI at his home, Abouammo disappeared into his bedroom to produce a 'document', and asked the agent not to follow him...
@KingSalman @saudiarabia 21/ It would seem that Ali AlZabarah began accessing thousands of Twitter accounts, including 33 for which Saudi Gov had submitted emergency disclosure requests, at around the same time Abouammo had left Twitter - May 2015. I am not sure why Abouammo resigned...
@KingSalman @saudiarabia 22/ Presumably Twitter User 9 is Omar Abdulaziz. His account was accessed on June 19 - 2015 and July 5 2015. Presumably the repeated access was to attempt to find any revealing information through the continual IP logs kept by Twitter.
@KingSalman @saudiarabia 23/ Upon resigning and returning to Saudi Arabia, Al Zubarah worked for the company of which Foreign Official 1 is sec general - MiSK. The document explicitly states his role was to monitor and manipulate social media to benefit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
