A jury in California must judge the fate of a former employee of Twitter, accused by American justice of having extracted personal data from his own platform for the benefit of Saudi Arabia, who sought to know the identity of critics of the regime.
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According to the prosecution, Ahmad Abouammo, a “corrupt employee”, sold for tens of thousands of dollars to Riyadh detailed information on specific anonymous accounts.
The defense, before the jury retired to deliberate on Thursday, countered that he was just doing his job, simply accepting a few gifts.
“The evidence showed that, for money and when he thought he was doing it out of sight, the defendant sold his place to a relative” of the Saudi royal family, said federal prosecutor Colin Sampson. in his last words to the jury.
Ahmad Abouammo was arrested in Seattle in November 2021, believed to be working illegally for a foreign government.
Together with another Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah, they are accused of having been approached by Ryad at the end of 2014-beginning of 2015 in order to transmit user data accessible only internally (email address, telephone number, date of birth, etc. .) that could allow Saudi Arabia to identify hitherto anonymous critics on the social network.
If Mr. Abouammo left Twitter in 2015 to move to Seattle, Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi, left the United States.
For Angela Chuang, Ahmad Abouammo’s lawyer, her client is on trial instead of Mr. Alzabarah. “And it’s their fault, (American justice) let Mr. Alzabarah flee the country while he was under FBI surveillance!”, She said.
The lawyer, if she recognizes that a Saudi operation could have been set up seven years ago with the aim of obtaining information on opponents from Twitter employees, assures that the prosecution has not not proved that his client was one of them.
“It’s obvious that the defendants the government was looking for are not there,” said Ms. Chuang.
She mocked the proceedings, which are ending up as a “human resources investigation disguised as a federal lawsuit.”
His client is indeed accused by Twitter of not having respected the rules of the company by not declaring to his superiors having received 100,000 dollars and a watch worth more than 40,000 dollars from a close associate of the Saudi monarchy.
It was “pocket money” for Saudis accustomed to affluence, Ms. Chuang told jurors.