A former Twitter employee was sentenced to three and a half years in a US federal prison after being convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, the45-year-old Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty of sharing confidential information about Twitter users with Saudi officials, and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange, the attorney's office said.
"In handing down today's sentence, the Court emphasized that defendant shared the user information with a foreign government known for not tolerating dissidents, and he did so working with his even more culpable co-defendant who fled the country rather than face trial. This sentence sends a message to insiders with access to user information to safeguard it, particularly from repressive regimes, or risk significant time in prison.
Abouammo, formerly Twitter's head of media partnerships in the MENA region from 2013 to 2015, started receiving payments from a Saudi official close to the Saudi Royal Family in 2014. of over 6,000 Twitter users, some of who were critics of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia including the anonymous account"Mujtahidd" and prominent activist Omar Abdulaziz.
He was initially arrested in November 2019 and found guilty of money laundering, wire fraud, and falsifying records in a federal investigation. He was acquitted of five charges of wire fraud by a jury in August 2022, but found guilty of the remaining charges.
The Saudis you say…
But Saudis currently own a part of the company. So?
The irony.