Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, has become the target of a scathing social media campaign inflated by fake accounts originating from Saudi Arabia on social media.
The New Yorker magazine reported that Saudi authorities target Soufan, an American citizen of Lebanese origin, apparently for his work with the "FBI" in linking Saudi Arabia to Al Qaeda and the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the bombing of the American destroyer "USS Cole" in the port of Aden in 2000 , And the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States of America, whose families try to sue Riyadh for financial compensation.
The magazine pointed out that Soufan worked with the FBI until 2005, and won the director's award for excellence from the office, and was described in an American TV series as "the national hero" for pursuing the planners of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
A friend of Khashoggi
After the assassination of the late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Soufan helped establish a memorial to him on Capitol Hill, which was attended by several members of the US Senate and House of Representatives.
And last January, when Mike Pence, the former US Vice President, tweeted with a message blaming Iran for the September 11 attacks, Soufan replied by noting that 15 of the 19 kidnappers were from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi state has repeatedly denied any responsibility for the attacks, but it has a long history of collusion with al Qaeda, according to the magazine.
She commented that this biography of Soufan made it difficult for the Saudi authorities to attack and harass him directly as she did with his friend, Khashoggi, Omar Abdel Aziz, a Saudi opposition citizen residing in Canada, or Saad Al-Jabri, a former senior Saudi intelligence officer who lives in exile in Toronto, Canada, and others.
The magazine reported that when he started a social media campaign against him, Soufan asked his company's cyber security team, which he founded in New York after the end of his work with the FBI and employed external experts to advise his team, to track the campaign against him and find out its source and its operators.
Campaign officials were involved
And it published that the cyber security experts appointed by Soufan found that at least part of the campaign included one official in the Saudi government, and also included some of the people who targeted the late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The team found that this campaign was started by Saudi journalist Hussein Al-Ghawi, who claimed, among other things, that Soufan while working with the FBI had tortured a suspected Al-Qaeda operative named Ali Al-Marri, and Soufan denied this, especially as he was famous for his refusal to torture the defendant from Al-Qaeda. Abu Zubaydah in 2002, and testifying before Congress about the ineffectiveness of the CIA.
The deeper a tinder and his team, the magazine report says, the more disturbing details emerge. Khashoggi was also the target of a social media campaign that al-Ghawi helped incite. In the months before his assassination, Al-Ghawi published a similar series of tweets about Khashoggi, and many of them were retweeted by robots and mock accounts, writing "No one is greater than home, Jamal", and "consider yourself dead" as is the case in the current campaign against Tinder.
Classic signs of a state-backed campaign
Last December, Twitter announced that it had removed hundreds of accounts that were part of an "important state-backed information process on Twitter from Saudi Arabia."
Twitter said the accounts, most of them automatic, violated "company platform policies". Records show that at least five of them interacted with Khashoggi’s account before his death. The Soufan team also identified 37 accounts that re-tweeted or liked the critical posts of Khashoggi and Soufan.
"These are the classic signs of a state-backed campaign," said Zachary Shvitsky, an expert hired by Soufan to examine the data.
The magazine also stated that an interesting video on Twitter posted last May amplifies the claim that Soufan tortured Al-Qaeda suspects, and that "Hamad Al Mazrouei, advisor to the UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed", retweeted it.
This incident recalled that al-Mazroui had repeated several tweets criticizing Khashoggi in the months before his assassination, including one that read "God is not released, he deserves the code."