On Wednesday, 45-year-old Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter manager who was convicted of acting as a foreign agent on behalf of Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to 42 months in prison after being found guilty in an August trial in San Francisco.
According to the Department of Justice's website, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said, "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. 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."
"We are committed to holding accountable those who act unlawfully as unregistered foreign agents and advance hidden influence campaigns on behalf of foreign regimes," said Olsen, who works at the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
According to Reuters, Abouammo could have faced a maximum of a decade in prison and prosecutors asked for at least seven years for his crimes and said it would be a "sentence strong enough to deter others in the technology and social media industry from selling out the data of vulnerable users."
According to the DOJ, Abouammo, who was living in Seattle at the time of sentencing, was convicted of "acting as a foreign agent without notice to the Attorney General, conspiracy, wire fraud, international money laundering, and falsification of records" and was acting on behalf of the Saudi Royal Family and The Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia.
Abouammo was in Seattle as his defense team successfully asked US District Judge Edward Chen for their client for a probationary sentence as they awaited the final decision. Abouammo's lawyers said their client had been "struggling to pay for and deal with serious upheavals in his sister’s life," and was dealing with serious health problems.
Abouammo worked at Twitter from 2013 to 2015, and as Reuters reports, "oversaw Twitter's relationships with journalists and celebrities in the Middle East and North Africa, conveyed sensitive information from the company's systems to help Saudi officials identify and locate Twitter users of interest, potentially exposing them to persecution."
Unnamed Saudi officials gave Abouammo a $42,000 watch and two $100,000 wire transfers for his work on behalf of Saudi Arabia.
Assistant Director Alan E. Kohler Jr. of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said, "This case exposes attempts by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to illegally obtain personally identifiable information in order to target critics and dissidents."
"Anyone working to advance the agenda of a foreign government is required by law to register as a foreign agent of that country. Mr. Abouammo brazenly disregarded this law by exploiting his role at Twitter to not only locate and peddle user information but to also launder money via the sale of gifts received from the Saudi Royal Family," Kohler Jr added.
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