A former Twitter employee suspected of spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia was found guilty.
The employee, U.S. resident Ahmad Abouammo, was also convicted by a jury of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, falsifying records and money laundering. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
According to the federal complaint, he and another Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah, were approached by the Saudi government and offered cash and luxury goods for their cooperation in collecting personal information on Twitter users of interest.
According to Bloomberg, the prosecution was not allowed to instruct the jury directly about the brutal punishment that Saudi Arabia doles out to its critics, but they were able to gesture toward that reputation through witnesses, including a woman who described how her brother disappeared in 2018 after criticizing the country on Twitter.