The royal family of Saudi Arabia, which controls one of the most closed and intolerant regimes in the world, has for years infiltrated employees of Twitter, the social network most used by hundreds of Saudi dissidents to criticize the regime sheltered from censorship. . The story has been known for some time but was first told extensively by BuzzFeed News, which examined and disseminated allegations the FBI made against three people – two Saudis and one American – accused of espionage. and various other crimes.
The story seems to show that until a few years ago one of the most important social networks in the world was vulnerable to the pressures of one of the most repressive regimes in the world, and the problem may not be isolated to Twitter. “The United States has such a dominant position in the social networking and tech industry that it makes us a natural target for enemies and semi-friends,” Mark D. Rasch, former division head of the Department of Justice, told the New York Times. US that deals with digital crimes.
In reality, we still know very little about the damage done by vulnerabilities of this type. The main social networks are very careful to protect their image and very rarely disseminate information on such cases. Twitter, for example, had been aware since 2015 of the possible presence of Saudi Arabian infiltrators among its employees, but only commented on the allegations after the opening of an investigation by the FBI.
It all started in 2013, when Ahmad Abouammo was hired by Twitter to work in his press office. Not much is known about him other than that he is a communications savvy US citizen. BuzzFeed News says that in Twitter, Abouammo's task was to promote the use of the social network in Middle Eastern countries: the man “spent his days talking and socializing with some of the most important characters in the region – in various sectors including information, politics, sport, TV and music – encouraging them to tweet more often ”. In short, wrote BuzzFeed News, he was Twitter's “buttadentro”.
Thanks to the visibility gained with his work, Abouammo also received some very specific requests. In the spring of 2014, a communications agency working for the Saudi Arabian embassy in the United States asked him to “officially verify” a Saudi journalist, that is, to associate a blue check with his Twitter profile to certify that behind that account there was just that reporter. “That request led Abouam to start a working partnership with the Saudi government,” says BuzzFeed News.
Over the next two years, a Saudi official named explicitly in the FBI investigation paid Abouammo about $ 300,000, part of which was used to buy a house in Seattle. In return, Abouammo became Saudi Arabia's mole in Twitter. After organizing a tour of the company's headquarters for some people of the regime, Abouammo penetrated the system that allowed the company to “verify” its users, which contains various sensitive information such as telephone numbers and places of access to the social network. and gave the Saudi regime the data of two major dissidents, one of whom had more than a million followers.
Having no particular technical skills, Abouammo's ability to find further information on dissidents was likely limited. About a year after starting his collaboration with the regime, therefore, Abouammo recruited Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi computer engineer who had studied in the United States on a scholarship and started working for Twitter in 2013.
Alzabarah was one of the technical staff who, according to BuzzFeed News, “had the job of keeping the site running, and for that reason had ample access to the systems.” His colleagues describe him as a diligent and cooperative person.
As of May 2015, it is estimated that Alzabarah has illegally collected – on the recommendation of the Saudi regime – sensitive data and information on about six thousand users: among them there are at least 33 users on whom Saudi Arabia had requested information from Twitter, who had agreed to share them in only five cases. Alzabarah did not just collect a series of data, but kept an eye, for example, from where the various users connected to Twitter, and took note of the accounts they interacted with.
Several international newspapers have reconstructed that among the various accounts monitored by Alzabarah there was also that of Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi journalist who was considered the author of a well-known anonymous account very critical of the regime and was very close to Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and Washington Post reporter killed on October 3, 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Abdulaziz is now in Canada, which has accepted his request for political asylum, and recently decided to sue Twitter for having handled his case with little transparency (the social network only warned him in 2016 that his phone number and his email address were briefly visible to another account).
Abdulaziz told BuzzFeed News that all in all he did well, while other dissidents active on Twitter were arrested and tortured. Abdulaziz did not provide detailed evidence of his allegations, but some time ago Middle East Eye magazine told the story of Abdulrahman al Sadhan, a Saudi Red Crescent employee who ran another popular anonymous Twitter account very critical of the regime. Sadhan was arrested by the regime and was last seen in October 2018, in a prison in the capital Jeddah, where he was tortured according to a Saudi human rights association. Since then there has been no news of him. At the moment, however, no one has drawn a certain link between Sadhan's arrest and the information that the Saudi regime illegally obtained from Twitter thanks to Alzabarah.
In exchange for his work, Alzabarah obtained a prestigious job from the Saudi regime at the Misk Initiatives Center, a branch of a private foundation founded in 2011 by Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince considered the real head of the regime. The secretary general of the foundation is the Saudi official to whom Abouammo passed some information in 2014.
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Twitter discovered Alzabarah's irregular logins between November and December 2015, and suspended him from his post (but did not fire him). It is unclear whether he immediately reported his case to federal authorities, who were able to formulate formal allegations nearly four years later. Shortly after being suspended, Alzabarah flew back to Saudi Arabia, where he still lives today. The fear of some is that until recently, Twitter was not prepared to handle such sensitive cases that also involved national security.
“Nobody warned us that we would be approached – perhaps 'seduced' is the right word – or intimidated into giving away some of the information gathered by Twitter,” a former Abouammo colleague told BuzzFeed News. Another colleague of hers said that over time several US, British and Israeli intelligence officials have tried to obtain similar information by lobbying Twitter employees. It is unclear whether the same happened to employees of other popular social networks.
“We are constantly working to make sure that our methods of work and control protect the people who use our services,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “It also means learning things from cases like this. For example, we have made changes to our internal systems, the training of our staff and the safety of our facilities to avoid other similar situations “.
