Free Republic

The Justice Department has charged two former Twitter employees with spying for Saudi Arabia, The Washington Post reports. U.S. citizen Ahmad Abouammo on Tuesday was arrested for allegedly spying on the accounts of three users on behalf of the kingdom. Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi citizen, was charged on Wednesday with accessing the personal information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts in 2015 on behalf of Riyadh. One of the accounts Alzabarah allegedly hacked belonged to Omar Abdulaziz, a known critic of Saudi Arabia, who later became friends with Jamal Khashoggi, The Washington Post columnist that was killed by the Saudi...

A former employee of Twitter was found guilty Tuesday of spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia in federal court in San Francisco after a two-week trial. Al-Asaker had Abouammo access the email addresses and phone numbers (which could reveal the identity of anonymous accounts) of Twitter users who were critical of the Saudi royal family. Abouammo enlisted a coworker, Ali Alzabarah, a site reliability engineer, into the espionage scheme. As an SRE, Alzabarah had even more access to user information than the average Twitter employee.