Washington: The US Department of Justice announced on Wednesday night that a federal court in San Francisco charged two former Twitter employees and another man with spying on social media users who criticized the Saudi royal family.
Alhurra quoted the Justice Department as saying that the three defendants, two Saudis and an American, worked together for the Saudi government and the royal family to reveal the identities of opposition account holders on Twitter.
According to the indictment, the three men were following the instructions of an unidentified Saudi official, who works for a person whom investigators call "a member of the royal family-1", while the Washington Post reports that he is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The defendants are Twitter employees, Saudi Ali Alzabarah and American Ahmad Abouammo, while Saudi Ahmed Almutairi is a marketing official linked to the royal family.
The accounts targeted by the espionage included a well-known journalist with more than a million followers and other prominent critics of the regime. In exchange for their information, the defendants received tens of thousands of dollars that were transferred to secret bank accounts.
US Attorney David Anderson said in a statement "The criminal complaint unsealed today alleges that Saudi agents mined Twitter's internal systems for personal information about known Saudi critics and thousands of other Twitter users."
Anderson also said in the statement that US laws protect US companies from such illegal foreign penetration, adding that they won't allow US companies or technology to be used as a tool for external repression and violations of US laws.
"We recognize the lengths bad actors will go to try and undermine our service. Our company limits access to sensitive account information to a limited group of trained and vetted employees," Twitter said in a statement.
The criminal complaint filed by the Department of Justice indicated that the FBI requested to monitor two Twitter employees in 2014 and contacted Twitter at the end of 2015 to inform them that the Saudi government was using employees to access Twitter users data.
The complaint said that the Twitter employees had contacted Saudi intelligence officials, noting that Ahmad Abouammo received USD 300,000 from the Saudi government for his role.
The indictment comes at a time when relations between the US and Saudi Arabia remain tense over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at his country's consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
