> his position at the company did allow him access to the private information of many users, including their phone numbers
Yep, and this is after them for years claiming "not using" your phone number after alleged "verification" until EU forced them to admit they were lying.
Good to know. I was recently wondering if I'm not being too protective about my phone number, but apparently not giving it away to the likes of Twitter was the right call.
As of a few months ago, it is possible to make an account, but it cannot use the API unless you give a phone number. Since that is what I wanted to try out, I backed off after learning that and so I don't know if there are any other limitations.
> Twitter lawyers brought Alzabarah in the following afternoon, accused him of improperly accessing user accounts
I guess I have to side with the FBI on this one. There was no reason for Twitter to contact the employee, they could have seen what the employee was doing by accessing all these Saudi profiles and then giving the benefit of the doubt to the FBI.
In related news, the US seems fine with bombing Iran-backed militias in Syria, but when news about MBS OK-ing the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi came out, crickets.
> I know they imposed some sanctions on individuals from traveling to the US but that was it
No, it was sanctions (asset freeze, bans on US entities doing business with them) plus visa bans prohibiting them from entering the US, not just “sanctions from traveling to the US”.
> and none were imposed on MBS.
That's pretty consistent with what the US in other cases, short of imminent war situations, the US tends not to directly sanction top leaders directly, sanctioning subordinates and particular state institutions.
Seems like they decided to release it on a Friday so the outrage is minimized. But why did the Biden administration bother to release the report at all?
> In May 2017, President Donald Trump made his first overseas visit, a trip to Riyadh. Not long after his arrival, the president toured King Salman’s new anti-terrorism center, which focused on tracking extremists on Twitter. Afterward, the president, his wife, the king, and Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt gathered around an illuminated orb at the center of the room and posed for a photo. Standing just outside the frame was the kingdom’s new social media specialist, Ali Alzabarah.
I'm not really sure what the article is going for with this sign-off. The Saudi government hired a spy, he did good work, and when his cover was blown they gave him a domestic job related to his work.
And? That sounds like exactly what you'd expect on all sides.
Yes, but the context is that the government that hired the spy is the same one we now admit had an inconvenient journalist murdered. It's certainly true that this bit of espionage was more or less routine, but it's evidence that Saudi espionage against US interests was not a one-off thing.