“The suit also alleges that Al-Ahmed's Arabic-language Twitter account was suspended in 2018 and has not been reinstated despite multiple attempts at appeal, and accuses the company of keeping Al-Ahmed's account offline because of its interest in maintaining users in Saudi Arabia. "While Twitter may wish to play the victim of state-sponsored espionage, Twitter's conduct in punishing the victims of this intrigue, including Mr. Al-Ahmed, tells a far different story: one of ratification, complicity, and/or adoption tailored to appease a neigh beneficial owner and preserve access to a key market, the KSA," Randy Kleinman, the attorney for Al-Ahmed, wrote in the complaint.“
* do some companies have good enough insider risk controls to make it expensive or risky to access particular kinds of sensitive data?
* not all nation state actors are equally well-resourced (and not all of them have equally large populations of computer science grads from which to recruit potential spies): is there a difference between what (say) KSA or Iran could get, vs US/UK/China/Russia?
If you can't get to data handlers then you can go after developers and the software supply chain. You have to understand, people can cooperate with threat actors without implicating themselves by getting paid or coerced to allow an intrustion (fall for a phish link or email, install seemingly legit software, insert a USB drivr they found in the parking lot,etc..). Worst case they get fired.
Your phone number is the same as your home address, because it is linked to same in a million databases.
Twitter’s CEO is on the record being cozy with deep pocketed Saudi investors in Twitter. It was certainly not the fear of discrimination lawsuits that permitted Saudi agents gaining access to Twitter’s systems.
For spies to exist at all, they need to fool whatever supervision is in place. For missing them to be negligence, it would have to be easy to prevent spying from happening.
When a warbler feeds a cuckoo chick and lets his own chicks starve, is that because he's a bad parent who could be fixed with a lawsuit, or is it just a fact about the ecosystem?
> "While Twitter may wish to play the victim of state-sponsored espionage, Twitter's conduct in punishing the victims of this intrigue, including Mr. Al-Ahmed, tells a far different story: one of ratification, complicity, and/or adoption tailored to appease a neigh beneficial owner and preserve access to a key market, the KSA," Randy Kleinman, the attorney for Al-Ahmed, wrote in the complaint.
I have no idea if their allegations are correct, but the argument you're dismissing is explicitly not what they're saying.
Note that the quoted allegation does not even allege any misconduct on Twitter's part! The only purpose is to ask you to draw an adverse inference about what Twitter was thinking when they became the victim of espionage.
If Twitter could assess a huge penalty on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit, maybe.
Otherwise, no. We already know that Twitter specifically tried to deal with one of these spies when he came to their attention, shortly before he escaped. There is no reason to believe that Twitter did anything wrong, and excellent reason to believe they didn't.
Lawsuits aren't cost-free; the off-chance that, against all expectations, you might find something that almost definitely isn't there is not a good reason to entertain one.
The question at hand is whether Twitter belongs in that group. In the general case, I tend to believe no. Twitter has no deterministic means to tell whether a candidate is a risk or not, and they cannot be held liable for actions they couldn't know were illegal.
I do believe they can be held responsible for espionage in the event that they knowingly hired a spy, which seems to be the case here.
If the government believes it is important to national security to prevent Twitter from even unknowingly hiring spies, I think the onus is on the government to nationalize whatever parts need protecting. In this case, they could probably just nationalize the background check portion via security clearances. It doesn't sound like we're at that point, though.
I have a suggestion. In the future, keep the analogies to yourself and talk about facts.
> The claim filed Thursday in California alleges [among other things] that Twitter should have known that these two men were unfit employees
Well it is! Tech companies should not act as surveillance/intelligence companies: stop gathering personal info on people, and suddenly you've raised the bar considerably for spies to harm your users.
Sure, an insider spy could probably still setup a special-cased JS payload to infect a specific user, but that's more convoluted and more easily detected during review, compared to simply accessing one of the many troves of data companies keep on their users.
mayyybe they went amateur hour with the negligence angle, but maybe they didn't
As for the rest, it is just a matter of checking funding from inqtel and associated groups
The UK has information warfare agents on Twitter as well [2]
None of this is a disputed topic, back on the 70s with operation mockingbird US intelligence agencies bragged that they had an agent/asset on every important editorial board on the country [3] which all goes back to the church committee
[1] https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
[2] www.businessinsider.com/twitter-chief-also-works-for-the-british-armys-information-unit-2019-10
[3] https://schoolhistory.co.uk/notes/operation-mockingbird/
Now take a look at how many ex-intelligence run tech companies (may i remind you that former NSA head is on Amazon board?) and how many tech companies happily collaborate with intelligence services (Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir).
Has anyone seen this use of neigh before? Is it a legal term? What does it mean?
Even then, "nigh beneficial owner" and "near beneficial owner" are awkward constructions that would have broken the continuity of my reading comprehension.
But surely one is or is not a "beneficial owner". Being nearly a beneficial owner is the same as not being a beneficial owner at all.
That is the most awkward phrasing I've seen in a long time. I'm not even sure it's grammatically correct. I would've expected "beneficial nigh-owner" or something like that.
I found a couple of usages in academic publications, but they don’t give me any more context as to meaning. That leads me to believe that it’s not a legal term.
I can’t find any meaning other than the “sound a horse makes” in any dictionary, either.
ETA: Apparently, the old English “nēah” meant “near”. That seems to be the the root of the work “neighbor”.
Interestingly, it looks like “neigh” (like a horse) and “neighbor” both came into use in English in the 12th Century. Perhaps coincidental.
