MIDDLE EAST: Twitter president met bin Salman months after the Saudi spy was exposed

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman six months after the social media giant learned that a spy working for Saudi Arabia had infiltrated the company's data, Middle East News website reported.

Bin Salman has been waging a crackdown, mostly online, against human rights defenders and opponents since he became de facto ruler in 2017, according to a report by Syrian-American journalist Dania Al-Akkad.

Al-Akkad quoted lawyers for one of the Saudi dissidents targeted by the crackdown saying that Dorsey's meeting with Mohammed bin Salman raises questions about what the CEO of Twitter knew about the espionage incident and when he knew it.

Twitter, one of the world's most popular social media networks, has received huge investments from Saudi Arabia in recent years.

Employee and information
According to a complaint filed in a U.S. criminal court in California last month, Twitter discovered in December 2015 that one of its engineers, a Saudi national named Ali Al Zubara, had access to Twitter users' personal information.

A week later, the company warned dozens of its users that their accounts were in a small group of accounts "may have been targeted by foreign-sponsored entities".

Press reports said last Thursday that the Justice Department had accused two former Twitter employees of spying for Saudi Arabia on accounts critical of its policies.

The newspaper said that the charges came a day after the arrest of the American citizen Ahmed Abu Amo former employee in Twitter, the first defendant, and the second defendant is a Saudi citizen named Ali Al Zubara, has been accused of accessing personal information of more than 6,000 Twitter accounts in 2015 .

Training and investment
In June 2016, Dorsey met Mohammed bin Salman when he was crown prince and discussed ways of joint cooperation in "training and qualifying Saudi cadres," the Middle East Eye reported.

He revealed that the meeting, which was held in New York City, was documented by pictures posted on social media sites, Bader Al-Asaker, director of the private office of the Saudi Crown Prince for Private Affairs, who is believed to be the Saudi official named in the judicial records on the person who supervised the process of collecting information from inside the headquarters of Twitter.

Later, according to information contained in a second complaint filed by the US government this week, it was found that those targeted by the spy operation were not a small group of users, and that Zubara was not alone in accessing their data.

The Ministry of Justice said that the defendants Ahmed Abu Amo and Ali Al Zubara worked together for the benefit of the Saudi government and the royal family in order to reveal the identities of opposition account holders on Twitter.

Omar Abdulaziz
Among the accounts targeted was the account of Saudi dissident Omar Abdel Aziz, who was close to the late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The lawyer, Mark Clement, said he and his colleague Ben Gragozle, both representing Saudi-based Saudi activist Omar Abdul Aziz, had notified Twitter of the Zubara before the company referred him to administrative leave in early December. December 2015.

"It's hard for Dorsey not to know about it after six months," Clement said.

Mark Owen Jones, a social media analyst and assistant professor at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, said it was "unlikely" that Dorsey would not be aware of US intelligence warnings that foreign-sponsored actors had infiltrated Twitter accounts.