Facts

Plaintiff Omar Abdulaziz, is a graduate student and political dissident. While in Canada and studying at a Canadian university, he became vocal on social media about the violations of human rights in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and its disregard for the rights and freedoms of its citizens. In return, Saudi authorities began to retaliate and harass Plaintiff. He then applied for asylum which was granted in 2014. Plaintiff's political activities and outspokenness gained him a large social media following: over 400,000 on Twitter and over 163,000 on YouTube.
Defendant, Twitter Inc., hired hired Abouammo and Alzabarah in 2013. At the time of their hire, Twitter did not investigate potential employees' political alliances or connections to foreign governments to determine if those potential hires would abuse their position to hack into Twitter users' private and sensitive data. Twitter gave several hundred employees and contractors software tools allowing them unrestricted access to users' private account information.

KSA recruited Alzabarah and Abouammo to access Abdulaziz's private Twitter information, including passwords, private email address, IP address, and telephone number.
When the FBI told Twitter of Alzabarah's activities in 2015, Twitter fired him and he fled the country.
Alzabarah was appointed CEO of a multi-billion dollar foundation in Saudi Arabia controlled by the Crown Prince. Twitter then sent out safety notices to the owners of accounts that Abouammo and Alzabarah had accessed. Abdulaziz and another leading dissident never received this notice. Instead, Abdulaziz received a February 2016 message stating that they just learned about and immediately fixed a bug that affected password recovery and that the bug may have exposed his email address and phone number. Abdulaziz was never warned that his account had been hacked by a KSA agent.

PLAINTIFF'S CONTENTIONS: Plaintiff contended that KSA agents interrogated Plaintiff's family in Saudi Arabia. Plaintiff contended that his brother's financial aid was cut off. Plaintiff contended that KSA agents demanded his return to Saudi Arabia and planted NSO's Pegasus malware on his phone (which he found out when they later mentioned an undercover project he was working on). Both of his brothers were arrested and imprisoned and tortured. Plaintiff contended that Twitter negligently supervised its employees and was negligent because it failed to maintain its security systems in a reasonably careful manner and gave the KSA spies the tools to access Plaintiff's private user data. Twitter's security system failed to meet industry level standards because (1) it did not have human monitoring of the alerts that were going off when Alzabarah was accessing private user data without permission (making the alerts meaningless); (2) there was no system in place to ensure that only those Twitter employees who needed access to private user data could access private user data (through an application process); (3) there was no system in place to restrict access of private user data in terms of time and scope.

DEFENDANT'S CONTENTIONS: Defendant Twitter denied all contentions and claimed that the harm to Plaintiff occurred because of Plaintiff's profile as a political dissident.

Result

The court granted the Defendant's motion to dismiss the amended complaint with prejudice due to a lack of causation. Plaintiff's appeal is pending.