Anybody remember way back in 2018 when Jeff Bezos’ cell phone was hacked and a lot of data was slurped and then published in the National Enquirer, including evidence of an extra-marital affair leading to a divorce? Juan Cole over at Informed Comment has a major update (via the Guardian). A forensic examination of Bezos’ phone found that the spyware (Pegasus software from an Israeli company) was delivered via a Whatsapp message sent from Mohammed bin Salman’s cell phone number.
MBS has been communicating with a lot of movers and shakers via Whatsapp, including Jared Kushner and tRump (ok, twitchers and twitterers), and who knows how many people MBS has communicated with in his attempts to draw more influence and investment to Saudi Arabia. As Cole says:
One question I have long had is whether investigators looking at the Russian element in the election of Trump are not unduly downplaying a United Arab Emirates and Saudi angle. That is, did those two oil monarchies help put Trump in power in the first place, and is there a prehistory to their entanglements with his circle?
Go read Cole’s article and follow on to The Guardian article. And remember, don’t open any Whatsapp messages from MBS. 😈 Oh yeah, National Enquirer’s David Pecker is up to his eyeballs with the Saudis.
I wonder if MBS is going to award Whatsapp one of those “Purveyors of Malware By appointment to His Royal Highness Mohammed bin Salman” plaques.
Wednesday, Jan 22, 2020 · 8:10:44 PM +00:00
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DButch
Talking Points Memo has a clearer explanation of the “UN” angle.
What appears to have happened is that investigators hired by Bezos (this point isn’t explicitly clear in the reports) have developed evidence which they shared with two United Nations officials working on the extra-judicial murder of Jamal Kashoggi. They looked at the evidence made available to them and released a statement asserting that they found it sufficiently credible to warrant an independent investigation by the United States and other authorities.
Wednesday, Jan 22, 2020 · 8:55:26 PM +00:00
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DButch
The Register is now chiming in — should increase the play of this story in the the tech community. A couple of additional tidbits show up in El Reg that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Bezos’ investigator De Becker said he had turned the results of his investigations over to “federal officials”. And:
Asked about the investigation carried out by UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings, Agnès Callamard, The Guardian reports that she “said she followed all UN protocols that require investigators to alert governments about forthcoming public allegations.”