Social-Media
The US wants to drop charges against former Twitter staff suspected of spying to Saudi Arabia
Two former Twitter staff, who were charged with treason on behalf of the Government of Saudi Arabia last fall, may have dropped charges against them, according to Bloomberg, on the advice of US lawyers. It is not clear at this point why the US is calling for a lawsuit against the two men, Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah, to be dismissed. However, San Francisco attorneys sent a recommendation to the judge on Tuesday. It still needs to be authorised.
The third man, a Saudi citizen named Ahmed Almutairi, was also involved in the campaign as a recruiter who persuaded Abouammo and Alzabarah to spy on Saudi activists using internal Twitter devices.
Prosecutors are now requesting that charges against him be dismissed, Bloomberg says.
Twitter declined to comment on this article.
The project is alleged to have ran from November 2014 to May 2015, involving Abouammo and Alzabarah using Twitter passwords to gather email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses and other details from the accounts of those important to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Bin Salman is later assumed to be responsible for ordering the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a critic and Washington Post writer.
Bloomberg notes that only Abouammo, a U.S. citizen, is in jail, pleading non-guilty after being charged in Seattle, where he worked for Microsoft in November. Alzabarah left the country in July 2015, while Almutairi lived in Saudi Arabia. All three were charged with working as illegal foreign agents, and the FBI last fall released wanted posters for two of the large-scale men suspected to be living in Saudi Arabia.
At the time, Twitter said that it restricts access to confidential account information to a small number of trained and screened employees, and that it acknowledges the enormous threats posed by those who use Twitter to share their experiences with the world and keep those in government accountable. We have mechanisms in order to protect their anonymity and their freedom to carry out their critical research. We remain committed to defending all who use our service to uphold democracy, individual freedoms and human rights.
Earlier this month, Twitter experienced a massive attack in which hackers were able to use internal company software to reboot and eventually seize ownership of high-profile profiles, including high-profile tech executives, lawmakers, and large companies. The business and third-party experts are now working to understand how the attack unfolded. Yet Twitter's corporate security has also come under scrutiny because of the number of workers who may have had access to these rights and how staff and vendors have allegedly misused such tools in the past to spy on customers, including celebrities like Beyoncé, according to a study released earlier this week by Bloomberg.
To date, Twitter has acknowledged that hackers have conducted a coordinated social manipulation attack against their staff to obtain access to their databases, but it has yet to provide any additional information about the attack, who could have perpetrated it, and how.
