U.N. Experts Call for Inquiry into Hack of Bezos's Phone

[erpowers]

Source: New York Times

A WhatsApp account belonging to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman appears to have been used to hack into the cellphone of Jeff Bezos in an effort to “influence, if not silence” reporting on the kingdom by The Washington Post, two United Nations human rights experts said on Wednesday.

Mr. Bezos, the billionaire owner of Amazon, who also owns The Washington Post, received an encrypted video from the crown prince loaded with digital spyware that enabled surveillance of his cellphone starting in May 2018, the United Nations experts said in a statement. At the time, the government of Saudi Arabia had grown critical of The Post’s coverage of the kingdom, and particularly the work of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the paper, whose writing criticized the crown prince.

Snip

Their statement referenced a 2019 forensic analysis of Mr. Bezos’s phone that assessed with “medium to high confidence” that his phone had been infiltrated on May 1, 2018, via an MP4 video file sent from a WhatsApp account utilized personally by the Saudi crown prince. The report, which was reviewed by The New York Times, indicated that Mr. Bezos continued to receive messages from the crown prince’s WhatsApp account after Mr. Khashoggi’s death.

According to the report, Mr. Bezos received a message from the crown prince’s account in late 2018 that suggested that the prince had intimate knowledge of Mr. Bezos’ private life.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/world/middleeast/un-experts-call-for-inquiry-into-hack-of-bezoss-phone.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

[Mike 03]

1. What are the odds MbS hacked Jared's and Trump's phones?

Maybe their "friendship" isn't what it seems. Another DUer just posted that six days after Khashoggi's death Trump authorized Saudi Arabia to receive information about US nuclear technology.


To state the obvious, we need to find out what's going on here.

[pangaia]

3. I hope our impeachment DEMS can get on this fast... tell ROBERTS ?.. something...

[Iliyah]

2. Yep . . .

I believe majority of t-rump's cronies, including himself, phones are hacked by a lot of foreign governments and that means Putin, Iran, Turkey, et al.,

The USA is less safe.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

4. "But Saudi spends billions of dollars on arms" Donny Dotard

[Haggis for Breakfast]

5. Given trumpie's person hatred of Bezos,

what are the odds that he told MBS that he'd get no flack from the WH about this. I don't believe for a NY minute that trumpie was in the dark about this. He probably encouraged it. And if the prince made remarks that he has "intimate knowledge of Mr. Bezos' private life," couldn't that be construed as intimidation of a high-profile US citizen ?