Former employee of the company Twitter Inc, who was found guilty of espionage on behalf of of Saudi Arabia – the transfer of information about users to the secret services of the Sunni kingdom that may have exposed them to persecution – was sentenced yesterday Wednesday (14/12) to serve three and a half years in prison, prosecutors of the USA.
THE Ahmed Abouamo was found guilty by a jury in August following a trial in federal court in San Francisco.
The prosecution sought a seven-year prison sentence, arguing that it was required “penalty heavy enough to deter others in the tech industry and social networking sites from agreeing to sell data of vulnerable users”. Mr. Abouamo faced the risk of serving a prison sentence of up to decades.
Mr. Abouamo’s defense attorneys instead wanted him to be sentenced to house arrest in Seattle, not to serve prison time. He cited health issues, his otherwise white criminal record and the fact that he was dealing with family problems while working for Twitter Inc from 2013 to 2015.
The hearing focused on Ahmed Abouamo’s efforts to gather information about two specific Twitter users, the $42,000 watch he received from a Saudi official and two $100,000 wire transfers.
Prosecutors said Mr Abouamo, who was in charge of Twitter’s relations with journalists and celebrities in the Middle East and North Africa region, transferred sensitive data from the company’s systems to help Saudi intelligence services identify and track down users of the social networking site they were interested in, potentially exposing them to stalking.
Mr. Abouamo’s defense did not respond when Reuters asked for comment. Neither Twitter Inc, recently acquired by multi-billionaire Elon Musk, nor the Saudi embassy in Washington responded when the agency asked for comment on the sentence.
The defendant’s lawyers stressed that his family was struggling to deal with his sister’s serious issues, especially covering the costs of her newborn daughter’s health problems, when Mr Abouamo was working at the social networking site.
They also pointed out that Mr. Abuamo’s actions bear no comparison with those of Ali Alzabara, another former employee of Twitter Inc, who allegedly passed data on thousands of users of the platform to the secret services in Riyadh. Mr. Alzabara left the US before he was charged.
The case, which is linked to the persecution of Saudi dissidents and activists, took on even greater proportions after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a one-time palace man turned critic, a contributor to the Washington Post before he was killed, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul at the beginning of October 2018.
Source: News Beast
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