Former Twitter employee convicted of charges related to spying for Saudis | Hacker News Reader

Former Twitter employee convicted of charges related to spying for Saudis

politpost.com

126 pointsdavidclark2252 comments

2020: How Saudi Arabia Infiltrated Twitter

> When the conversation Cybersecurity protection costs Lost revenue due to customer Litigation and legal risks, Increased insurance premiums Reputation damage Damage to competitiveness, stock In order to comply with SOX, // MARK: - DO // MARK: - "SLUG-VERSION-BMLT" "SLUG-VERSION-KEYCHAINSWIFT" "SLUG-VERSION-LGVCLEANTIME" "SLUG-VERSION-UICLEANTIME" "SLUG-VERSION-AUTOFILL" "SLUG-VERSION-GCD" "SLUG-VERSION-CHECKBOX" "SLUG-VERSION-OBSERVER" "SLUG-VERSION-GST" "SLUG-VERSION-MB" "SLUG-VERSION-PP" "SLUG-VERSION-UKT" "SLUG-VERSION-WHITEDRAGON" It's from my Settings bundle concluded, management seized Alzabarah’s laptop, put him on administrative leave, and escorted him out of the building.

> At 5:17 p.m. he called a handler, identified as Associate-1 in the FBI complaint, who arrived in a white SUV two hours later. Driving around Alzabarah’s neighborhood, the two men called “Foreign Official-l” — al-Asaker, according to the Washington Post — at 7:20 p.m., and again at 7:22 p.m. and 7:31 p.m. They then called Dr. Faisal Al Sudairi, the Saudi consul general in Los Angeles, at 8:30 p.m., 8:38 p.m., and 9:26 p.m. Shortly after midnight, the consul general called Alzabarah back and spoke with him for three minutes.

> Early the next morning, Alzabarah, his wife, and daughter boarded a plane for Saudi Arabia.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud...

Twitter basically let him walk out. Probably afraid of backlash in case they called the cops on him.

Will the cops really come and arrest people on the spot for breaching internal company data access protocols?

I’m curious about it if the authorities act on it as an urgent situation.

By cops I meant FBI/... And the way this is done is you notify the cops first and then coordinate with them if needed. It's not like Twitter learned about this 5 minutes before.

Okay, so does it really happen?

To me it sounds like it’s a civil case where domain specialists need to prove the wrongdoing in court.

It is absolutely the case that employers can and do involve Federal law enforcement when they believe an employee has committed a Federal crime.

Depends on who is doing the complaining, but yes there is precedent to arresting an employee for "theft of trade secrets" [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov

Was this page written by his lawyer? It seems like he downloaded source code from his employer and gave it to some other company.

It seems like he largely got off on what is effectively a technicality, but I doubt anyone would seriously argue what he did _should_ be legal.

The FBI obviously doesn't enforce internal company policies. However, if the company has evidence that the employee is engaging in serious violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) of 1986, or engaging in espionage for a foreign power, then the FBI might send agents to investigate.

Someone I know had been working for twitter and they said they were blown away at the lack of internal protections built in to the system. I guess it could be a goldmine of data for spies.

And political activists

Not to defend the incompetent jerks who run Twitter or anything, but only a complete idiot would have ever trusted them with private or damaging information (including metadata such as locations). Twitter never made any reliable, verifiable guarantees about security or internal controls.

What I have found, as a technical person, is that things like metadata which are obvious to me may be unknown to most regular people. A person can be very smart and yet not know about how computers work, or how silicon valley works.

It's not a matter of Twitter giving guarantees about optional data. This is PII, which has to be protected legally.

Internal controls at a company of the size of Twitter is no longer optional. You don't have to intend malice to be guilty of negligence.

Equifax never gave guarantees of security and data safety either, but it's understood that they should be responsible.

Wrong. Under US federal law, Twitter has no legal obligation to protect PII. Internal controls for user data are optional.

https://pro.bloomberglaw.com/brief/data-privacy-laws-in-the-...

To be clear, I am not thrilled with this situation. But even if social networks were legally required to protect PII they would still suffer occasional breaches by advanced persistent threats and state intelligence agencies. Don't post anything important on social media. Just pictures of family vacations and such.

While you may be correct about criminal law, I'm certain this would impact their SOX compliance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act) and would put their ability to participate and operate in US securities markets in serious jeopardy.

Has an SOX compliance case regarding personal information ever been tried in court?

I don't know. I'm a techie assisting w/ audit not finance/legal.

Wrong again. That law only covers financial controls. It doesn't address user data.

SOX compliance has expanded in recent years to cover a gamut of Cybersecurity process and policy. Go look it up. I recently compiled all the documentation necessary for a client I am serving in order to pass. It includes handling of PII, access controls for code repositories and production environments, and tools for ensuring code quality like performing static analysis and mitigating DDOS attacks such as a decent WAF.

Yes I have looked it up and you obviously have no clue what you're talking about. The law is the law, and regardless of what nonsense some random corporate trainer might have fed you, SOX compliance requirements haven't expanded in recent years. Go read the actual law instead of spreading misinformation.

Some businesses do require their partners to have additional controls on PII handling. But that's purely a business issue and has no relationship to SOX.

This is in the medical and recreational marijuana space which may have additional Reqs, but I am telling you exactly what the auditors themselves are asking for. I'm not talking out of my ass here.

You're talking out of your ass here. Your auditors may be checking various things for a variety of unrelated reasons, but it has nothing to do with SOX.

Read the law. Seriously, it's posted online. You can just go look.

https://securityscorecard.com/blog/what-is-sox-compliance

"SOX itself never mentions cybersecurity. However, in 2018, the SEC released a “Commission Statement and Guidance on Public Company Cybersecurity Disclosures (the Guidance).” (https://www.sec.gov/rules/interp/2018/33-10459.pdf) The SEC realized that increased technology use and data breach risk impact corporate financials. In fact, the Guidance lists several financial risks linked to cybersecurity:

Remediation costs churn after an attack including regulatory fines price, and long-term shareholder value public companies need to ensure that they establish appropriate controls and security monitoring programs that mitigate risk.

In 2020, the SEC released new guidance “Cybersecurity and Resiliency Observations” (Resiliency Guidance) (https://www.sec.gov/files/OCIE%20Cybersecurity%20and%20Resil...) through its Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE). This revised guidance offered greater specificity for organizations that need to file public financial reports."

You’ve linked to guidelines that do not have the force of law behind them.

Wrong and small minded.

Twitter is an international company with international users, and the law protects the users of that country/legislation.

Under GDPR, and other international laws, PII is legally protected.

Even if you're an American company, you can't disregard laws of other countries if they're going to be using your product.

> it could be a goldmine of data for spies.

Wait until you hear about cell site location data...

applies to pretty much all social media and b2c platforms.

The F.B.I. began monitoring the Twitter employees in 2014, according to the complaint. Investigators did not contact Twitter until the end of 2015, when they informed executives that the Saudi government was grooming employees to gain information about the company’s users.

[...]

During his employment at Twitter, Mr. Alzabarah had grown increasingly close to Saudi intelligence operatives, Western intelligence officials told executives. The operatives eventually persuaded Mr. Alzabarah to peer into the accounts of users they sought information on, including dissidents and activists who spoke against the crown, multiple people have told The Times.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191107003511/https://www.nytim...

Mr. Khashoggi’s online attackers were part of a broad effort dictated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his close advisers to silence critics both inside Saudi Arabia and abroad. Hundreds of people work at a so-called troll farm in Riyadh to smother the voices of dissidents like Mr. Khashoggi. The vigorous push also appears to include the grooming — not previously reported — of a Saudi employee at Twitter whom Western intelligence officials suspected of spying on user accounts to help the Saudi leadership.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191107062324/https://www.nytim...

Charges were for acting as foreign agent without notice and records falsification.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200920010209/https://www.washi...

I wonder how many people are murdered each year due to communications platforms that haven't implemented end to end encryption for private user communications, since all these large platforms are easily infiltrated by agents of homicidal regimes.

Twitter or Facebook is one thing, but imagine the iCloud hacks (not the ones which exfiltrated porn, some apparently single actors using home connections) but those from nation states targeting individuals.

I'm sure the death toll is large and the harassment tool even higher.

Apple has access to the plaintext of pretty much every iMessage and the vast, vast majority of iOS users' photo libraries.

They are required to turn over data to the US federal authorities without a warrant (under FAA702), and they do this over 30,000 times per year per their own transparency report.

The mind reels. Can you imagine how much this is used for blackmail, extortion, coercion, parallel construction, etc?

Is iMessage not end to end encrypted? Facebook Messenger has end to end encryption. How does Apple not?

iMessage's "end to end encryption" has a key escrow backdoor which sends your endpoint keys to Apple and is maintained for the FBI. It's more like "end-to-end-and-Apple encrypted".

It's "end to end encrypted" but then the device's private iMessage syncing keys ("Messages in iCloud") are included in an iCloud Backup, which is not end-to-end encrypted, backdooring the crypto. This means that Apple can decrypt the iMessages as they transit Apple's servers in realtime, using the device private keys you backed up (without e2e) the previous evening.

Even if you turn off the non-e2e iCloud Backup backdoor, your iMessages will still get compromised because it's on by default and all of the other people you iMessage with haven't turned it off.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

iCloud Photos isn't end to end encrypted at all. It syncs every photo you take to Apple servers effectively unencrypted. Apple can see all of them, and so can the US government (without a warrant). Turning off iCloud is indeed an effective mitigation for this, which keeps your photos on-device.

Why would a high suit shmoozing media partnership manager have access to user info? Seems like an issue of data access at Twitter.

For a long time many social networks were just any employee god mode.

Access controls are just not a priority while blitz scaling and then very difficult to patch on after the fact.

> Access controls are just not a priority while blitz scaling and then very difficult to patch on after the fact.

That's why the app that I'm writing now, started off as seriously tinfoil. In fact, I've had to [reluctantly] loosen some of the armor, in order to add a few features.

I won't say that it's Fort Knox, but it ain't gonna be easy to crack.

The demographics of its target user base are pretty paranoid, so I have to do my homework.

Is there somewhere we can learn more about the app?

I am not at liberty to disclose the app, itself, but it uses many of my open-source contributions.

The backend is a modified version of my BAOBAB server[0], which was actually a "learning" project, for me, but it works quite nicely.

This is the Security document[1] for the generic BAOBAB server. The customization was to add support for a specific workflow that is designed for the app, itself, and the customization is proprietary, as is the source for the iOS app.

This is the dependency manifest of the iOS app:

    // MARK: - NOT TRANSLATE BELOW THIS LINE - =   "BMLTiOSLib: 1.5.3"; =   "KeychainSwift: 20.0.0"; =   "LGV_Cleantime: 1.3.5"; =   "LGV_UICleantime: 1.1.1"; =   "RVS_AutofillTextField: 1.3.0"; =   "RVS_BasicGCDTimer: 1.5.0"; =   "RVS_Checkbox: 1.2.1"; =   "RVS_GeneralObserver 1.1.0"; =   "RVS_Generic_Swift_Toolbox: 1.10.1"; =   "RVS_MaskButton: 1.2.0"; =   "RVS_Persistent_Prefs: 1.3.2"; =   "RVS_UIKit_Toolbox: 1.3.2"; =   "White Dragon SDK: 3.2.2"; localization file, so the syntax is strange. These are all open-source. I did not write KeychainSwift, but I wrote everything else (I have control issues. I don't like using code that other people wrote, unless it's really good, absolutely necessary, and is something I completely trust). They should be easy to find on GitHub. They are all SPM modules.The app, itself, is fairly large, at over 30 screens (it was a lot more, but I'm doing the "Thoreau" treatment -Simplify, simplify, simplify- to it). I have been working on it for over a year and a half.
[0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/work/open-source-projects/#ba...
[1] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/BAOBAB/PDFs/Security.pdf (Downloads a PDF).

1. Pass law. 2. Put people in jail. Oh...wait this is America..

Odd that the defendant used a federal public defender instead of a private attorney and the lack of a plea deal here (in exchange for cooperation?)

He fled the country probably had no reason plans of defending himself.

> He fled the countryWe don’t convict in absentia. This is the one who got left behind.

Perhaps it was explained to him that he better go down quietly or his loved ones might get bonesawed.

> Ali Alzabarah, another former Twitter employee who was also charged in the scheme, fled the country before he could be arrestedApparently “Alzabarah [is] believed to be in Saudi Arabia” [1].
What the fuck?! Sooner we can decouple from that regime the better in my book.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-twitter-employees-...

Not happening until the oil runs out in the eastern desert and gulf.

how did they try him in absentia? I'm pretty certain that's illegal in the united states.

> how did they try him in absentia?They didn’t.
“Abouammo was arrested in Seattle, Washington, on Nov. 5, 2019, and made his initial federal court appearance in Seattle at 2:00 p.m.on Nov. 6, 2019” [1]. He is the one they left behind.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-twitter-employees-...

What led you to believe that the United States can’t try defendants in absentia?https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/trial-ab...

There's a fascinating profile of the crown prince, 'MBS', in this week's Economist double summer edition. I have a print copy, paywalled link is:https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/07/28/mbs-despot-in-the-...

doesn't seem paywalled to me, but maybe there's a limit on the amount of articles that can be read. Anyway: https://archive.ph/JQFiG

I find it super fascination that this guy, as a strategic partner, is at the same time:1) Completely out of his f---ing mind!
2) Indisputably important and in control.
3) Remarkably easy to please.
Now, sure, I could be wrong about any of these -- my sources of information are almost exclusively the US/EU press, which are not free of bias and might hold a globally minority definition of "truth."
But when you consider what's at stake, and which other famous defenders of Human Rights we're in bed with, I honestly can't understand why we (US/EU) are not working more actively with the most transparent one.

> What the fuck?! Sooner we can decouple from that regime the better in my book."The Saudis, a despotic, murderous regime who...  er, what's that?  Gas prices are where?  The Saudis, a heroic, brave people, living in a wonderful country with a deep culture of..."
"Yeah, hey, buddy, pal, MBS-o, think you could maybe squeak out a couple more MBPD?  Elections coming up and... oh... really?  Few hundred thousand, tops?  Well, I guess, see what you can do... thanks!"
sigh :(

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