A former Twitter employee who was found guilty of spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia by sharing data pertaining to specific individuals has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.
Ahmad Abouammo, 45, was convicted earlier this August on various criminal counts, including money laundering, fraud, falsifying records, and being an illegal agent of a foreign government.
Abouammo was arrested on November 5, 2019, after being accused of abusing his access to Twitter’s internal systems to gather information about Saudi Arabia’s critics on the social media platform. He was employed at Twitter from 2013 to 2015.
“Mr. Abouammo violated the trust placed on him to protect the privacy of individuals by giving their personal information to a foreign power for profit,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
“His conduct was made all the more egregious by the fact that the information was intended to target political dissidents speaking out against that foreign power.”
images from Hacker News
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