Twitter headquarters.

A political dissident and "close friend" of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi is suing Twitter Inc. claiming the company hired an operative of the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia (KSA) who breached the company's privacy policies.

Omar Abdulaziz, an activist who lives as a refugee in Canada, claims Twitter, along with consulting firm McKinsey & Co., have exposed him, his family and his friends to "imprisonment, torture, and even death," according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday.

Abdulaziz claims Twitter failed to safeguard his user information, such as a Twitter password, private email address and telephone number, in August 2013, when the company hired Al Alzabarah, who the KSA allegedly hired to dig up intelligence on Abdulaziz and his connections.

Twitter jeopardized Abdulaziz's privacy when it "did not investigate potential employees' political alliances or connections to foreign governments to determine whether such potential hires would abuse their positions to hack into the private and sensitive data of Twitter's users," despite the platform's role in the Arab Spring, wrote plaintiff's counsel Mark Kleiman of Kleiman/Rajaram in Venice, California, and Ben Gharagozli of Ben Gharagozli Law Offices in Marina del Rey, California.

Twitter found out Alzabarah was accessing and transmitting confidential information in 2015, and fired him after an investigation into activities, according to the complaint. Later that year, Twitter issued a notice to several dozen accounts that the alleged KSA agent hacked, writing "As a precaution, we are alerting you that your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors," according to the complaint.

Abdulaziz contends he never got that message. Instead, a year later, Abdulaziz said he received a message from Twitter saying that the company "recently learned about-and immediately fixed-a bug that affected our password recovery systems for about 24 hours last week."

Abdulaziz is accusing Twitter of invasion of privacy and violating the Stored Communications Act by essentially ratifying its former employee Alzabarah's actions. "In hacking into and accessing Plaintiff's confidential Twitter information, Alzabarah intentionally exceeded his authorization to access that facility and thereby authorized access to electronic communication while it was in electronic storage," write Kleiman and Gharagozli, who did not respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.

About a decade ago, Abdulaziz began amassing a Twitter following for speaking out against his home country's ruling body after moving from Saudia Arabia to Montreal for graduate school. Abdulaziz has said that he was granted asylum in Canada after receiving threats from the KSA. Abdulaziz is now verified on Twitter and has grown his follower count to 405,400, with 166,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Last summer, Abdulaziz began working with Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist for the Washington Post whose criticism of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's is suspected to be related to his murder in October 2018, to organize fellow Saudi activists on Twitter through a project called "electronic bees," according to the complaint.

Abdulaziz first learned of Alzabarah's infiltration of his Twitter account in a story The New York Times published last fall. The article also mentioned that not even two weeks before Khashoggi died in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he wrote on Twitter that the Bees were coming.

The complaint also links McKinsey & Co., which reportedly owns "a politically connected Saudi consultancy," to the harassment of Abdulaziz's family and friends. A McKinsey PowerPoint report names Abdulaziz as "one of the three loudest voices of discontent against KSA's policies," according to the complaint.

"In other words, McKinsey's PowerPoint presentation filled a crucial blank space in how KSA would be able to pursue delicate and important economic reforms by identifying those who were spreading the most criticism of such reforms," Abdulaziz's lawyers write.

The activist asserts McKinsey set in motion events that led to KSA agents planting malware on his phone and the torture and arrest of two of his brothers, who are kept in prison without trial to "pressure Plaintiff to stop his activism."

Twitter and McKinsey & Co. did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.