Saudi Regime killed another journalist, Twitter played a role: Report

The British daily Metro reported that Turki bin Abdul Aziz al-Jasser was arrested in March 2018 for allegedly running a Twitter account called Kashkool, which exposed human rights violations by Saudi authorities and royals.

An anonymous source said a so-called ‘Twitter mole’ handed over information on Jasser who was killed in November 2018 while in detention.

“They (Saudi authorities) got his information from the Twitter office in Dubai. That is how he was arrested,” he said.

According to the source, Twitter has become insecure for dissidents or critics. “Everyone speaks under threat and pressure. The accounts of Saudi dissidents are spied on. We are not safe using Twitter.”

Dissident journalist tortured to death in Saudi jailSaudi journalist and writer Turki bin Abdul Aziz al-Jasser has reportedly died under torture during his detention in Saudi Arabia.

The source also said Saud al-Qahtani, a former adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, leads a “cyber spy ring” and has contacts inside the Dubai Twitter office.

Qahtani was fired after being implicated in the brutal murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashogg inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. The Saudi crown prince said in September that he took responsibility but denied that he had ordered the slaying of Khashoggi.

In a post on his Twitter account in 2017, Qahtani alluded to three methods Saudi officials use to unmask activists on social media, warning that fake names could not protect critics.

“Does your nickname protect you from the #blacklist?” he wrote. “No. 1. States have a way of knowing the owner of the name. 2. IP can be identified in many technical ways. 3. The secret I’m not going to say.”

The anonymous source said the tweet is “considered to be an intended threat.”

Twitter CEO met bin Salman: Report

The Middle East Eye (MEE) news portal on Saturday cited a complaint filed in a US district court that revealed a meeting between the Saudi crown prince and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in New York in June 2016.

It took place six months after the social media giant learned that one of its engineers, a Saudi citizen named Ali Alzabarah, had been accessing the personal data of users.

The MEE also referred to a second legal complaint filed by the US government that said it wasn’t just a small group of users whose information Alzabarah had accessed and that he was not alone.

“The thing that strikes me is when you look through the government’s complaint, this guy hacked 5,500 records in June. That’s not a small number. It raises the question about what Twitter did and did not want to know,” said Mark Kleiman, an attorney who represents Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident living in Canada.

Kleiman stressed that he and Ben Gharagozli, a second lawyer representing Abdulaziz, understood that “somebody from one of the three letter agencies in the US” tipped Twitter off about Alzabarah, before the company put him on administrative leave in early December 2015.

“It’s hard to imagine that [Dorsey] wouldn’t have heard about it six months later,” he added.

Saudis recruit Twitter employees to spy on criticsTwo Twitter employees in the US are charged with spying on the critics of the Saudi regime in cooperation with Riyadh.

The case needs to be analyzed against the background of the huge investments Saudi Arabia has made in Twitter in recent years.

Gharagozli said, “Instead of protecting their users, it appears as though they (Twitter) seem to have allowed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which owns a substantial percentage of Twitter, to get access to data that resulted in many people getting hurt.” 

Alzabarah was recently charged by the US Justice Department with spying for the Riyadh regime along with another ex-Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo, a US citizen.

A third person, Saudi citizen Ahmed Almutairi, who allegedly acted as middleman between Saudi officials and the two former employees, was also charged with spying.

Abouammo was arrested in Seattle on Tuesday, but Alzabarah and Almutairi are both believed to be in Saudi Arabia.