Spies in Silicon Valley: Twitter Breach Tied to Saudi Dissident Arrests
Access of internal data by Twitter employees in 2015 presaged the disappearance of Saudi dissidents
An internal breach at Twitter Inc. a half decade ago yielded data that was later used by Saudi Arabia to harass or arrest people critical of the government, according to lawsuits, human rights groups and the relative of a person apprehended in 2018.
In 2015, two Twitter employees allegedly accessed more than 6,000 accounts while acting as spies for the government of Saudi Arabia. Some details of the incident have been disclosed by U.S. prosecutors, who charged the two men last November, and in recent lawsuits by people who alleged their accounts were among those breached. But few other details have emerged about what the Saudi government may have done with the data.