Abouammo Ahmad (Ahmad AbouAmmo)

Abouammo Ahmad (Ahmad AbouAmmo)

Biography

2022: Sentence - 3.5 years in prison for spying on Twitter

In mid-December 2022, a federal court in San Francisco convicted a Twitter employee who had previously been suspected of spying for Saudi Arabia. The man will be imprisoned for three and a half years.

Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty by a jury in August 2022 after a trial in federal court in San Francisco. Prosecutors sought a prison sentence of just over seven years, saying they wanted a "severe enough sentence to deter other members of the technology and social media industry from selling vulnerable users' data." Abouammo faced a maximum sentence of decades in prison.

Lawyers for Ahmad Abouammo asked U.S. District Judge Edward Chen for a suspended sentence at his Seattle home without a prison sentence. They cited Abouammo's ongoing health problems, lack of other criminal records and family issues that affected him while working on Twitter from 2013 to 2015.

The case involved Abouammo's attempts to find information about two Twitter users. It is known that among the accounts that the defendant followed was the profile of Omar Abdulaziz, a dissident and confidant of journalist Jamal Hashokji, whose murder is suspected of the Saudi authorities. The Saudi authorities handed over to Abouammo for the work done more than $350 thousand and expensive wristwatches worth $42 thousand.

Prosecutors said Abouammo, who oversaw Twitter's relationships with journalists and celebrities in the Middle East and North Africa, passed classified information from the company's systems to help Saudi officials identify and find Twitter users of interest to them, potentially harassing them.

In their sentencing petition, Abouammo's lawyers said that while working on Twitter, his family "struggled to pay for and deal with the serious upheaval of his sister's life," including specialized medical care for her newborn daughter. The lawyers also said Abouammo's actions paled in comparison to those of Ali Alzabarah, another former Twitter employee who was accused of gaining access to thousands of Twitter accounts on behalf of Saudi Arabia. Alzabara left the United States before being charged.^[1]

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