In December 2022, former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty of taking a bribe from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for sensitive account information about dissidents using his website. Now, Abdulrahman al-Sadhan’s sister, who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured for operating a Twitter account critical of Saudi Arabia, has filed a new lawsuit accusing Twitter of breaking the law for allowing its employees to reveal her brother’s identity.
Areej al-Sadhan filed a complaint on behalf of herself and her brother under the Blackmailer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law. His brother, Abdulrahman, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for supporting terrorism. In her complaint, Areej accuses Twitter of blatantly violating the terms and conditions of the law by giving her brother’s identity information to the Saudi Arabian government. He continued, “This puts every Twitter user at risk. As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and – after a false trial – sentenced my brother to 20 years just for criticizing the Saudi pressure on his Twitter account.” The Saudi government is also preventing Abdulrahman from contacting his family, who apparently have no idea whether he is alive or not.
The case file states that Abouammo and another former Twitter employee named Ali Alzabarah accessed confidential Twitter user data 30,892 times in 2015. It then claims to have provided Saudi Arabia with identifying information about 6,000 Twitter user accounts, including usernames, dates of birth, device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses, and session IP histories associated with user accounts.
While Twitter will likely defend itself by saying that Saudi Arabia does not approve or is unaware of its spying activities, the lawsuit also states that US intelligence agencies warned Twitter in late 2015 that Alzabarah had provided user information to Saudi Arabia. The filing states that six months after this warning, Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, met with Mohammed bin Salman “despite being well aware of [Saudi Arabia’s] malicious activities and various crimes.”
As the Washington Post noted, Twitter has faced two other lawsuits over Saudi Arabian website spying activities. One of these cases was withdrawn three years later after it failed to link the information leak in 2015 to the hacking of the plaintiff’s phone that put her family and friends in jail.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is not the only country to spy on Twitter. Peiter Zatko, the former security chief of Twitter, who later revealed the company’s behavior, said in a statement last year that the company had been warned that Chinese intelligence agents were among its permanent staff.
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