Twitter and Saudis Face Racketeering (RICO) Charges as Lawyers Get Creative

RICO is a dragnet law which can subject people and companies to very serious penalties and jail time.

This is an extension of the negligence class-actions that use the principles of the Caremark Standard to go after companies with inadequate cybersecurity programs.

This is a shift away from the lawsuits the claim that “my social was stolen when data about me that you held was breached”. The response to those lawsuits is “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that, in the wake of thousands of breaches, our breach was the one that the hacker used to compromise you”. That is an impossible task.

However, while it is a novel tactic, it is probably much easier to prove that a company was negligent; the evidence is that they were hacked and data was compromised.

In this case, a US activist, Areej al-Sadhan has filed a racketeering lawsuit against Twitter and senior Saudi officials on behalf of her brother, a Saudi aid worker, who was sentenced to 20 years in Saudi prison for mocking the Saudi government. Normally governments have sovereign immunity from prosecution, but this may be one of the exceptions.

The lawsuit accuses Twitter of turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s systemic and documented repression of critics who were using Twitter as early as 2018.

US authorities have separately established that Saudi authorities illegally obtained confidential information about Twitter users from Saudi spies who were on Twitter’s payroll.

At the same time that these two alleged Saudi spies, who have since fled the country, were working for Twitter, the Saudis increased their “investment” in Twitter, who was losing billions of dollars a year.

A jury in California already convicted one spy, who didn’t get out of the US in time, of being an unregistered agent of the Saudis.

Not surprisingly, Twitter has declined to talk about ongoing litigation.

If it turns out that this case is decided in favor of the plaintiffs – and there are huge barriers to winning – it will create another vector to go after companies that don’t have adequate security programs. The company claims that once the feds told them what was going on, they acted, but I suspect that case may hinge on the “willful blindness” theory – that Twitter, at the time and way before Musk bought it, was more interested in the Saudis’ money than they were in the safety of some dissidents. It may be a factor in this case that the Saudis bankrolled at least part of Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

This is a mess that Elon did not create, but which he will have to clean up.

Credit: The Guardian

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