Spies really are everywhere, including Twitter

One of my classmates in business school was a Saudi woman. She was from a very well to do family but not, as far as I know, part of the royal family. After graduation, she stayed in the States. There was no way she could have had much of a business career if she’d gone home.

Saudi Arabia: no country for women, young or old.

It’s also no country for dissidents. male or female, young or old. Those who oppose “reformer” Mohammed bin Salman routinely end up imprisoned and tortured. In the case of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, it was torture, death, dismemberment…

Social media has afforded Saudi dissidents some element of “freedom” but, of course, the Saudi government invests in spying technology – and in spies - to try to sleuth out who’s saying what under cover of Facebook or Twitter anonymity.

And they’ve apparently gotten Twitter employees to help them figure out who’s tweeting anything that they perceive as against their regime.

“Saudi agents mined Twitter’s internal systems for personal information about known Saudi critics and thousands of other Twitter users,” U.S. Attorney David Anderson in San Francisco said Wednesday in a statement announcing the criminal complaint. (Source: Bloomberg)

The Twitter employees – both former employees – used “their employee credentials to gain access without authorization to certain nonpublic information about the individuals behind certain Twitter accounts.”

One of those ex-employees is Ahmad Abouammo, 41, of Seattle.

Now for all I know Ahmad Abouammo is the John Smith of Arabic names. And Seattle may be crawling with Ahmad Abouammos who are social media gurus who used to work for Twitter. But there is someone (still) on Linkedin who fits the bill, and his tagline is:

I build digital brands

Indeed.

Currently, Ahmad is the cofounder of a startup that focuses on redefining social media. Previousl [sic: the “y” is missing] Ahmad led branding and content strategy for multiple orgs in Amazon, developing and implementing strategic digital media and marketing at scale. Prior to Amazon, Ahmad was Head of Middle East and North Africa at Twitter, where he successfully helped launch Twitter in the region and drove users growth and content, making the Middle East the fastest growing market on Twitter.

So, he “successfully helped launch Twitter in the region and drove users growth and content…” Hmmmm.

In addition to being charged with “acting as [an] illegal agent of a foreign government,” the feds claim that Abouammo messed around with records that their investigation was after. Not a good look.

According to Abouammo’s Linkedin profile:

His time in the region enabled him to build a strong, comprehensive foundation of the region and how brands can transcend boundaries by understanding, contextualizing and adapting. Ahmad endeavors to forge stronger relationships between brands and consumers and transform and build brands for digital age. He is heavily influenced by creative art, innovative design, and social connections.

Well, the Saudi brand – other than in the White House – is pretty awful. But maybe that’s just me and my unwillingness to “transcend boundaries by understanding, contextualizing and adapting.”

But I’m struggling to see how, in giving Saudi agents information that puts dissidents at risk, he is helping “forge stronger relationships between brands and consumers.”

I do get how Abouammo is heavily influenced by social connections, especially  bad actors who got him to play footsie.

It’s one thing for those of us in free societies to wing something off in 280 characters worth of Twitter without having to worry about being rubbed out by our government. (For now, anyway.) But if you’re in a terrible place like Saudi Arabia, it’s very risky. And that risk is heightened when a malign government gets social media insiders to help them do their dirty work.

Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident exile living in Canada, is suing Twitter, claiming that Twitter never bothered to tell him that his account had been hacked. (The person Abdulaziz believes is responsible is not Abouammo but, rather, one of the other men charged.)

Abdulzaia, in his filing:

…claimed the hack led Saudi agents to discover plans for a social media protest that he was planning last year with Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Months later, Khashoggi was slain in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.

Aboudammo appears to be from Lebanon, not Saudi Arabia. Maybe he got duped (or blackmailed) into giving up confidential information that’s put others at grave risk.

On his personal Twitter account (dormant for a year now), he bills himself as a “social media preacher” and “digital believer.”

Something tells me that his career as a digital believer, building digital brands, is about to come to a crashing halt.

Career suicide is always painful to see…