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UpInArms

(51,253 posts)
Thu Nov 7, 2019, 08:56 AM Nov 2019

2 Former Twitter Employees Charged With Spying For Saudi Arabia

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by Omaha Steve (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: NPR

Two former employees of Twitter were charged with spying for Saudi Arabia by snooping into thousands of private accounts seeking personal information about critics of the Riyadh government, according to court documents filed Wednesday in San Francisco.

The case represents the first time that federal prosecutor have charged Saudis with deploying agents inside the United States, reports The New York Times.

... snip ...

Between May 21, 2015, and November 18, 2015, Alzabarah, without authorization, accessed "the Twitter data of over 6,000 Twitter users, including at least 33 usernames for which Saudi Arabian law enforcement had submitted emergency disclosure requests to Twitter," the complaint said. Among the accounts he accessed were those belonging to well-known critics of the Saudi government.

"One of those accounts belonged to a prominent dissident, Omar Abdulaziz, who later became close to Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who advocated for free expression in the Arab world," according to The Washington Post.

Read more: https://www.npr.org/2019/11/06/777098293/2-former-twitter-employees-charged-with-spying-for-saudi-arabia

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2 Former Twitter Employees Charged With Spying For Saudi Arabia (Original Post) UpInArms Nov 2019 OP
Another reason why feudalism died out in most of the world. Farmer-Rick Nov 2019 #1
No wonder Jack decided to clean up Twitter political advertising bucolic_frolic Nov 2019 #2
Yahoo was overrun with nasty RW trolls and Russian bots in 2016 FakeNoose Nov 2019 #3
Yahoo Groups? or Yahoo Message Boards, now known as "Conversations" bucolic_frolic Nov 2019 #4
I think it was the message boards FakeNoose Nov 2019 #5
After a review by forum hosts....LOCKING Omaha Steve Nov 2019 #6

Farmer-Rick

(10,072 posts)
1. Another reason why feudalism died out in most of the world.
Thu Nov 7, 2019, 09:01 AM
Nov 2019

Because kings and dictators are murdering psychopaths.

bucolic_frolic

(42,679 posts)
2. No wonder Jack decided to clean up Twitter political advertising
Thu Nov 7, 2019, 09:16 AM
Nov 2019

Wonder if Zuckhead will ever see the light, or wait until subpoenas start flying. His Board of Directors seem to be non-thinking yes men.

Corporations come and go. Enron, Worldcom, Lucent, Sears, Kmart, BonTon. At the top they are invincible, but problems are ignored as manageable.

Interesting that Yahoo! has broken its Groups area into PRIVATE groups, only via email. Exactly the opposite of Facebook's searchable data and postings. Yahoo! must know something, they've been doing this a long, long decades-long, time.

FakeNoose

(32,356 posts)
3. Yahoo was overrun with nasty RW trolls and Russian bots in 2016
Thu Nov 7, 2019, 09:47 AM
Nov 2019

I was on there for a while before I discovered DU, and I'll tell you it was really unpleasant. There was no oversight either, because the right-wingers all ganged up on any poster who dared to disagree with anything THEY posted. It's all anonymous of course and I suspected that many of them had multiple accounts so they could "agree" and vote-up their own posts. Now that I'm in DU I'll never go back there.

bucolic_frolic

(42,679 posts)
4. Yahoo Groups? or Yahoo Message Boards, now known as "Conversations"
Thu Nov 7, 2019, 09:51 AM
Nov 2019

Yahoo message boards, comments on news articles, were always like that. We did fight battles in 2000-2008. Groups were slow to grant owners the tools to filter out spammers, but they came eventually. Once there was no conversion advantage, Groups died down. Conversations are still full of trolls, left but mostly right. I give them a whack once in awhile. I doubt they are much of a factor in political discourse anymore.

FakeNoose

(32,356 posts)
5. I think it was the message boards
Thu Nov 7, 2019, 10:06 AM
Nov 2019

I wasn't on there for very long though. After the Gawker Media bankruptcy and changeover, I felt homeless for a while and I wandered around trying this and that. All that was over as soon as I discovered DU.

Omaha Steve

(99,074 posts)
6. After a review by forum hosts....LOCKING
Thu Nov 7, 2019, 10:24 AM
Nov 2019

Dupe. See the earlier post here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142391936.

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