U.N. report ties Saudi crown prince to hacking of Bezos
Mohammed bin Salman upset over criticism by Washington Post.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wed, 22 Jan 2020 20:49:02 GMT
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The cell phone of Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, was hacked in what appeared to be an attempt by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince to “influence, if not silence” the newspaper’s reporting on the kingdom, two U.N. human rights experts said Wednesday.
The U.N. experts called for an “immediate investigation” by the United States into a report commissioned by Mr. Bezos that showed the billionaire technology mogul’s phone was likely hacked after he received an MP4 video file sent from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s WhatsApp account after the two men traded phone numbers in Los Angeles in 2018.
The video file was sent to Mr. Bezos’ phone five months before Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post columnist, was killed by Saudi government agents inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey that October.
At the time, the crown prince was being hailed for ushering in major social reforms to the kingdom, but Mr. Khashoggi was writing columns in the Post that showed the darker side of the prince’s clampdown on dissent.
The Post was critical of the Saudi government after Mr. Khashoggi’s killing and demanded accountability in a campaign that ran in the paper for weeks after his death.
“The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the crown prince in surveillance of Mr. Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, the Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia,” the independent U.N. experts said.
At a time when Saudi Arabia was “supposedly investigating the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, and prosecuting those it deemed responsible, it was clandestinely waging a massive online campaign against Mr. Bezos and Amazon, targeting him principally as the owner of the Washington Post,” the experts said.
Mr. Bezos first went public about the hack last year. He said the National Enquirer tabloid, whose owner has ties to the crown prince, was threatening to publish Mr. Bezos’ private messages and photos if he didn’t stop a private inquiry he’d sought into the hacking of his phone.
Iyad el-Baghdadi, an activist who worked with Mr. Bezos’ investigators, told the Associated Press it appears the hacking was about free speech. “It’s not about Amazon, it’s about the Washington Post,” he said.
The Financial Times, which first reported on and reviewed the report Mr. Bezos commissioned, noted the probe “does not claim to have conclusive evidence,” and “could not ascertain what alleged spyware was used.”
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, called the hacking allegations “absolutely illegitimate.”
“There was no information in there that’s relevant,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “If there is real evidence, we look forward to seeing it.”
The experts, tapped by the U.N. Human Rights Council, published their statement after reviewing the report by FTI Consulting, which was hired by Mr. Bezos’ security adviser to manage the investigation.
The digital forensic investigation assessed with “medium to high confidence” that Mr. Bezos’ phone was infiltrated on May 1, 2018, via the video file sent from the crown prince’s WhatsApp account.
The U.N. experts said that records showed that within hours of receiving the video from Prince Mohammed’s account, there was “an anomalous and extreme change in phone behavior” with enormous amounts of data being transmitted and exfiltrated from the phone, undetected, over months.
The report stated that Mr. Bezos’ phone was compromised “possibly via tools procured by Saud al-Qahtani,” the former adviser to the crown prince who was sanctioned by the United States for his suspected role in orchestrating the operation that killed Mr. Khashoggi.