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Several sites are reporting that several of Twitter's staff were allegedly spying for Saudi Arabia against its critics.
From Wired: Twitter Insiders Allegedly Spied for Saudi Arabia
In charges released Wednesday, the Justice Department accused two former Twitter employees, Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah, of abusing their internal system privileges to spy on target users and pass the information they collected to Saudi Arabia. The criminal complaint also alleges that it was trivial for them to do so—a chilling reminder of how much damage an insider can cause.
The court documents, first reported by The Washington Post, also reference a third suspect, Ahmed Almutairi, who allegedly worked as an intermediary between the Twitter insiders and the Saudi government. Alzabarah and Almutairi are both Saudi citizens, while Abouammo is a United States citizen. He was arrested in Seattle on Tuesday.
From Variety: Twitter Ex-Employees Accused of Spying on Saudi Dissidents
Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah each worked for the company from 2013 to 2015. The complaint alleges that Alzabarah, a site reliability engineer, improperly accessed the data of more than 6,000 Twitter users.
Abouammo, who handled media partnerships for the Middle East region, is alleged to have received $300,000 from a Saudi official as well as a Hublot watch, valued at least at $20,000. Abouammo is accused of repeatedly accessing the private information of a prominent critic of the Saudi government, including an email address and phone number.
Even after leaving the company, Abouammo allegedly contacted friends at Twitter to facilitate Saudi government requests, such as for account verification and to shutter accounts that had violated the terms of service. Abouammo, an American citizen, was recently arrested in Washington state.
Twitter has a long history of ties to Saudi Arabia, not just in what it chooses to filter and/or shadow ban.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @10:04PM
Wow, you've got a strange idea how intelligence collection works. Plus you didn't read the arrest warrant affidavit.
In a nutshell.... While it might just be possible that these folks from Saudi were Intel all along, it's far more likely that they were contacted after they got their positions at Twitter. They aren't operatives, they're assets or agents, depending on the country of origin's terminology. The "Operative" is an Intelligence Officer: the recruiter, controller, or case officer. (Which can be three separate people - a case officer may stay out of the target country so that they can't be arrested, and the controller may have legal cover under diplomatic immunity. The recruiter might be a civilian who puts the asset in touch with the controller or some sort of deep cover spy). Anyway, the Officers try to recruit Agents. Agents do the spying and report their results back, maybe through the case officer or maybe through a different channel (so that if the case officer is compromised reporting can still go on, and if the assets are compromised they probably only know their case officer).
A controller or case officer may try to press their assets to switch jobs and/or find more sensitive jobs that the foreign country can get better intelligence from, or try to have the asset get deeper into where they currently are and get access to more. Typically they don't push if they get good intel from where the asset is currently at. Nothing better than an asset that just sits in place year after year providing good information.
And not an expert here, just read enough nonfiction about the intelligence world to know a few things. Some official sources [mi5.gov.uk] will even tell you a lot, because the outlines of how things work aren't all that secret - a lot of the work is constrained by resource or logical limitations.