Twitter quietly fired a suspected Saudi Arabian spy in 2015, report says
We've all seen what can happen when nefarious interests weaponize a social media platform like Twitter. Now imagine how much worse it would be if some foreign agent actually got a job at the company.
That's what happened in 2013, apparently. In a sprawling Saturday New York Times report looking at the Saudi Arabian leadership's social media campaign to silence critics and influence thinking, one detail stands out: The story of former Twitter employee Ali Alzabarah.
Alzabarah joined the company in 2013 and worked his way into an engineering position that afforded him access to "the personal information and account activity of Twitter’s users, including phone numbers and I.P. addresses, unique identifiers for devices connected to the internet," the Times report said.
Intelligence officials alerted Twitter executives at the end of 2015 that Saudi leadership had been "grooming" Alzabarah to keep tabs on accounts belonging to dissidents and critics of the Saudi government. Twitter never shared this widely and didn't confirm it for the NYT report; the info comes instead from "five people briefed on the matter."
Although an internal investigation ultimately turned up no evidence that Alzabarah had shared sensitive data, three of the Times sources noted that Saudia intelligence agents "eventually persuaded him to peer into several user accounts."
Alzabarah was placed on administrative leave and investigated shortly after Western intelligence officials approached Twitter. He was fired in December 2015 -- after which he reportedly returned to Saudi Arabia and took a job there with the government.
While Twitter never issued any kind of public alert regarding the extent of the apparent intrusion, the Times report notes that steps were taken.
A Dec. 11, 2015 safety email went out to "the owners of a few dozen accounts Mr. Alzabarah had accessed." The list included "security and privacy researchers, surveillance specialists, policy academics and journalists," a number of which were involved in the Tor project.
The revelations about Alzabarah come in the midst of a larger report detailing Saudi Arabia's apparent playbook for silencing dissent on social media. Twitter has taken steps in recent days to shut down spambots pushing a pro-Saudi agenda, but the NYT report makes it clear that this kind of thing has been ongoing for a number of years.
Topics Social Media X/Twitter
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
