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    Update: UN experts demand US inquiry into Jeff Bezos Saudi hacking claims Archived Message

    Posted by Tomski on January 22, 2020, 7:16 pm, in reply to "Bezos and the Saudi Arabian Prince"

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/22/jeff-bezos-un-calls-for-investigation-into-alleged-saudi-hack

    UN experts are demanding an immediate investigation by the US into evidence indicating that Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, was hacked with spyware deployed in a WhatsApp message sent from the personal account of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

    The special rapporteurs – Agnès Callamard and David Kaye – said in a joint statement they were “gravely concerned” by evidence they had reviewed about the apparent surveillance of Bezos in what they described as a possible “effort to influence, if not silence, the Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia”.

    The statement was released after the Guardian revealed on Tuesday that Bezos, who is chief executive of Amazon and the world’s richest man, appeared to have had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a message apparently sent from the personal WhatsApp account of Bin Salman.

    In one of the most extraordinary disclosures, the UN rapporteurs said that, according to forensic analysis ,“crown prince sent WhatsApp messages” to Bezos, in November 2018 and February 2019, “in which he allegedly revealed private and confidential information about Mr Bezos’ personal life that was not available from public sources”.

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    An annexe to their report provided further details of an alleged incident in November 2018 when a single photograph was texted to Bezos from the crown prince’s WhatsApp account “along with a sardonic caption”. The image, according to the UN rapporteurs, was of “a woman resembling the woman with whom Bezos is having an affair, months before the Bezos affair was known publicly”.

    Two months later, in January 2019, the National Enquirer published a special edition that exposed the affair. AMI, which owns the US supermarket tabloid, has not responded to requests for comment on the latest disclosures.

    In a day of dramatic developments that threatened to deepen the crisis for Saudi Arabia, the UN rapporteurs:

    • Released details of advanced technical analysis that established “grounds for a reasonable belief” that Bezos was the victim of “intrusive surveillance via hacking of his phone as a result of actions attributable to the WhatsApp account used by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman”.

    • Said Bezos’s iPhone was believed to have been infected by malware on 1 May 2018 via an MP4 video file sent from the crown prince. Within hours of receipt of the MP4 video file, a huge “exfiltration” of data began. The amount of data leaving the phone increased enormously and continued undetected for several months.

    • Alleged that the “most likely explanation” for the huge amount of data exiting the phone was that it had been infiltrated by spyware such as that developed by NSO Group, a private Israeli surveillance company. The assessment was attributed to “expert analysis of likelihood of cyberweapons”. NSO immediately denied involvement, saying: “We can say unequivocally that our technology was not used in this instance.”

    • Issued a stark warning to prominent attendees of the World Economic Forum at Davos, several of whom are known to have recently met with the crown prince. Callamard said she wanted to “raise the alarm” for people around the world who have had dealings with Saudi Arabia about the “fragility of their electronic systems”.

    Speaking to the Guardian about the Davos agenda, Callamard said: “I am disappointed the organisers did not put any emphasis on the question of surveillance on their agenda.” She added: “They are all extremely vulnerable.”

    She said the revelation that the future king of Saudi Arabia might have had a personal involvement in the targeting of the billionaire owner of the Washington Post should put a renewed spotlight on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

    Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist, was killed in October 2018, five months after the alleged “hack” of Bezos’s iPhone.

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