Two former Twitter employees were accused of working for the Saudi government to monitor Twitter user content. One of them has been arrested in the United States and the other has fled back to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government has not responded to the incident.
The Associated Press reported that the two employees included one from the United States and the other from Saudi Arabia. The Justice Department stated that they were looking for users who criticized the Saudi royal family on Twitter by monitoring Twitter content.
In the United States, the man was arrested on November 5, and he was charged with false evidence and obstruction of justice in addition to being charged with espionage. As for Saudis, men were accused of infiltrating more than 6,000 Twitter accounts during 2015, illegally obtaining user information, including Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi who was killed in 2018.
The report said that the Saudi employee’s behavior was broken by insiders of Twitter and was ordered to suspend his duties. After he was suspended from office, he left the United States and fled back to Saudi Arabia on the following day. The investigators found that the two had a secret bank account with a large amount of money transactions.
Twitter issued a statement thanking the Ministry of Justice for its assistance and actions, and the Saudi government did not respond to the incident.
