Dive Brief:
- Ahmad Abouammo, a Twitter manager who worked on media partnerships in the Middle East, was convicted last week of acting as a foreign government agent by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
- Abouammo’s job included providing content and strategy assistance to Middle Eastern journalists, celebrities and companies.
- He was convicted of accepting from a government contact a Hublot watch in 2014 that he later sold on Craigslist for $42,000 and subsequent payments of $100,000 each over two years in exchange for unmasking anonymous Saudi critics, including Ali Al-Ahmed, to whom the United States granted asylum.
Dive Insight:
Al-Ahmed, a leader of the Institute of Gulf Affairs, a human rights organization, filed suit against Twitter and Abouammo and a second employee, Ali Hamad Alzabarah, for fraud and other violations. The charges against Twitter were dismissed in May. The second employee, Alzabarah, an engineer who is alleged to have had a much deeper role in the spying than Abouammo, is at large.
Alzabarah’s absence came up during the recent criminal trial.
“As much as the government wishes that was Mr. Alzabarah sitting at the table right now, it is not,” Defense attorney Angela Chuang told jurors, according to news reports. “And that is on them. They let Mr. Alzabarah flee the country while he was under FBI surveillance.”
The Saudi payments to Abouammo were deposited in Lebanese bank accounts using the name of his father and transferred to the United States in small amounts using false wire descriptions.
“Abouammo violated a sacred trust to keep private personal information from Twitter’s customers and sold private customer information to a foreign government,” said Stephanie Hinds, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California. “Abouammo’s decision to accept bribes in exchange for providing to a foreign government the protected information of customers could have untold damaging consequences.”
Information accessed
Abouammo accessed personal information between 2013 and 2015 from Ali Al-Ahmed, including confidential information provided by some of his 36,000 followers and journalistic sources.
“Several Twitter users, who either followed Mr. Al-Ahmed’s Twitter account and/or had direct contact with him through the use of Twitter’s private messaging feature, have disappeared, been arrested, or have been executed,” the complaint said.
Abouammo left Twitter in 2015 to join Amazon. FBI agents questioned him in 2018 and he was arrested in 2020 for acting as an agent of a foreign government, conspiracy to commit wire and honest service fraud, international money laundering and falsification of records in a federal investigation, among other things.
The jury last week acquitted him of five of the counts pertaining to wire and honest services fraud and returned a verdict of guilty on the remaining counts.
He faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for the charge of acting as an agent of a foreign government and 20 years in prison for each of the other counts. In addition, each count for which Abouammo was found guilty carries up to a $250,000 fine and periods of supervised release to follow the prison term.
