45-year-old Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty
of sharing confidential information about Twitter users with Saudi officials,
and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange, the attorney's
office said.
Prosecutors originally wanted to sentence
him for over seven years "to deter others in the technology and social
media industry from selling out the data of vulnerable users," according
to Reuters.
"This case revealed that foreign
governments will bribe insiders to obtain the user information that is
collected and stored by our Silicon Valley social media companies," said
U.S. Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds.
"In handing down today's sentence, the
Court emphasized that defendant shared the user information with a foreign
government known for not tolerating dissidents, and he did so working with his
even more culpable co-defendant who fled the country rather than face trial.
This sentence sends a message to insiders
with access to user information to safeguard it, particularly from repressive
regimes, or risk significant time in prison."
Angela Chuang, a public defender
representing Abouammo did not immediately respond to Insider's request for
comment about the case, made outside of business hours.
Abouammo, formerly Twitter's head of media
partnerships in the MENA region from 2013 to 2015, started receiving payments
from a Saudi official close to the Saudi Royal Family in 2014.
He shared the email addresses and phone
numbers of over 6,000 Twitter users, some of who were critics of the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia including the anonymous account "Mujtahidd" and
prominent activist Omar Abdulaziz.
Abouammo received a $42,000 luxury Hublot
watch and two $100,000 wire transfers into a Lebanese bank account set up in
the name of his father, in return.
He was initially arrested in November 2019
and found guilty of money laundering, wire fraud, and falsifying records in a
federal investigation. He was acquitted of five charges of wire fraud by a jury
in August 2022, but found guilty of the remaining charges.
Abouammo was convicted alongside another
ex-Twitter employee Ali Alzabarah, who fled the US before being charged, per
Reuters.
"The government hasn't proven beyond a
reasonable doubt" that he was an agent of Saudi Arabia, Chuang said in
closing arguments at the trial, the Wall Street Journal reported. "We just
spent the last two weeks in a glorified HR investigation," she added.