A former Twitter employee has been found guilty for his part in gathering confidential data on specific Twitter users and giving it to Saudi Arabia.
After a two-week trial in federal court in San Francisco, Ahmad Abouammo, 44, was found guilty by a jury, according to a report from Bloomberg on Tuesday. Upon conviction, he may spend up to 20 years behind bars.
The decision was made close to three years after Abouammo, Ali Alzabarah, and Ahmed Almutairi (Ahmed Aljbreen) were charged with serving as “illegal agents” of Saudi Arabia in a federal investigation. The first of the four was also accused of deleting, modifying, and forging data.
Prosecutors accused Abouammo and Alzabarah, both of whom joined Twitter in 2013, of being enlisted by officials of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for unmasking its critics on the social media platform.
According to court documents, both individuals leveraged their access to internal systems to unauthorizedly get hold of nonpublic information about users of specific accounts that were critical of the regime.
This information encompassing email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, and dates of birth, were then handed over to the officials in return for which Abouammo received $300,000 in cash and a Hublot Unico Big Bang King Gold Ceramic watch valued at $40,000.
Abouammo is also accused of lying to FBI agents when confronted at his Seattle home in October 2018 in an effort to obstruct the investigation, claiming the watch was “junky” and only worth $500. He is also alleged to have provided a fabricated invoice claiming to have only received a $100,000 wire for consulting and media strategy work.
While Alzabarah asked Almutairi for help in December 2015 to leave the country and avoid the trial, Abouammo was detained on November 5, 2019.
According to FBI Special Agent in Charge John F. Bennett at the time, “These individuals are accused of targeting and getting private material from dissidents and well-known critics, under the direction and control of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” “Our national security and American businesses are seriously at risk from insider threats.”
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