A former Twitter employee was found guilty of spying for Saudi Arabia – It was reported last Tuesday that a former Twitter employee who had been accused of spying for Saudi Arabia had been convicted. The employee who was also convicted by a jury of money laundering, making false records, and conspiring to commit wire fraud was Ahmad Abouammo, a resident of the United States. He might serve up to 20 years in prison.
On April 11, 2010, Twitter purchased Atebits, the company behind the Tweetie iPhone and Mac clients for Twitter. Twitter bought Crashlytics on January 28, 2013, to expand the scope of its developer tools for mobile platforms. Trendrr was purchased by Twitter on August 28. MoPub was purchased by Twitter on September 9.
Twitter announced on June 4, 2014, that it would buy Namo Media, a technology company that specializes in “native advertising” for mobile devices. On June 19, 2014, Twitter declared that it has a deal in place to acquire SnappyTV, a platform for editing and sharing television broadcast content.
Abouammo worked for the business in the Middle East media relations between 2014 and 2015. He and another Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah, were apparently approached by the Saudi government, which offered them money and luxury items in exchange for their aid in acquiring personal information about Twitter users of interest. Twitter warned some users that their accounts had been monitored by state-sponsored actors in 2015 due to his association with the Saudi government.
Throughout the course of the trial, the prosecution alleged that a senior official in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s government sought Abouammo for help investigating his rivals. In the course of that cooperation, Abouammo reportedly gathered personal data from Saudi government critics, such as birth dates, email addresses, and phone numbers, and forwarded it to his friends there. According to Abouammo’s justification, he only had access to the data while doing his regular job tasks at Twitter.
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Former Twitter Employee Found Guilty of Spying for Saudi Arabia – Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who lived in Virginia and was a strong critic of the Saudi monarchy, was murdered and dismembered by Saudi government agents in 2018. Despite the strong proof that the crown prince ordered the killing to silence a political opponent, the United States and the Saudi authorities still maintain cordial relations.
According to a news outlet, the prosecution was not allowed to explicitly tell the jury about the severe punishment that Saudi Arabia doles out to its critics, but they were able to make references to this reputation through witnesses, like a woman who explained how her brother disappeared in 2018 after criticizing the country on Twitter.
Former Twitter Employee Found Guilty of Spying for Saudi Arabia – More Info About Twitter
Twitter, Inc. is a communications company with its main office in San Francisco, California. The corporation runs Twitter, which is a social networking and microblogging platform. It has previously run the Periscope live streaming platform and the Vine short video app.
Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass, and Evan Williams founded Twitter in March 2006, and it went live in July of the same year. By 2012, the service was handling an average of 1.6 billion search queries daily, with more than 100 million users posting 340 million tweets each day. In November 2013, the business went public. Twitter had more than 330 million active users monthly in the beginning of 2019.
The board of directors of Twitter approved a $44 billion buyout by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on April 25, 2022, potentially making it one of the largest deals to take a firm privately. On July 8, 2022, Musk cancelled the agreement. As a result, Twitter’s stock dropped, and on July 12, Musk was sued in the Chancery Court of Delaware by the corporation after it hired a US law firm to represent it in court.
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