With the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi still hovering over his head , Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, also known as MBS, has again caused outrage with allegations that he had tried to hack the phone of Mr Bezos.

Ironically, Mr Jeff Bezos is the owner of the Washington Post with which Khashoggi worked as a columnist until he was killed inside the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. According to the Guardian which first reported on the incident, the billionaire’s phone was hacked around May 2018, after the Crown Prince sent him a WhatsApp message. The encrypted message contained an infected video which exfiltrated large amounts of data within hours.

MBS has always been known for cracking down and silencing those he perceives as critics and business rivals. By 2017 the number of Saudi citizens fleeing to other countries because of his crackdown had increased from 575 to 1200. According to US intelligence sources, it was in the same year that he oversaw a clandestine operation that spied on, kidnapped, detained and tortured business rivals and Saudi citizens who held dissenting views. The intelligence further revealed how a number of women were detained and tortured for being vocal about women’s rights. They were detained in small dark rooms in an unused palace where they were tortured by beatings and electric shocks, and threatened with rape and murder.

The torture was so severe that one of the women tried to commit suicide. The Saudi Government claimed they were detained, “in connection with activities that threatened the kingdom’s national security.”

Confirming that MBS was behind this clandestine operation was a phone call which was intercepted by US intelligence. In November 2018 one Turkish online newspaper reported that the CIA had a phone recording in which the Crown Prince gave firm instructions for Khashoggi to be silenced.

“It is said that the Crown Prince gave an instruction to silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible and this instruction was captured during the CIA wiretapping,” wrote Abdulkadir Selvi in the paper. According to Selvi, during the phone call with his brother Khalid, who is the Saudi ambassador to the US, MBS was heard expressing his discomfort with the way Khashoggi was portraying the Saudi administration in his writings for the Washington Post.

This history of silencing those perceived as critics of Saudi administration, therefore, leaves no doubt why Bezos’s phone was targeted.

In a statement released after the hacking allegations were made public, the United Nations Office for Human Rights expressed its concern for what it believed was the “contravention of fundamental international human rights standards.”

“The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in the surveillance of Mr Bezos’s phone in an effort to influence, if not silence, the Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia ,” said UN experts Agnes Callamard and David Kaye.

They added: “The allegations reinforce other reporting pointing to a pattern of targeted surveillance of perceived opponents and those of broader strategic importance to the Saudi authorities, including nationals and non-nationals.”

Just after his phone was hacked, Bezos was widely targeted by Saudi social media accounts as an alleged adversary of the kingdom. This was part of a clandestine online smear campaign orchestrated by those connected to the Crown Prince. According to UN experts, among those who were involved in carrying out the smear campaign was Mr Saud al-Qahtani who was greatly mentioned in the killing of Khashoggi.

The fact that the hacking of Bezos’ phone took place just five months before the murder of Khashoggi is enough to bring into focus the involvement of MBS in the killing of the Washington Post columnist.

“The circumstances and timing of the hacking and surveillance of Bezos also strengthen support for further investigations by the US and other relevant authorities of the allegations that the Crown Prince failed to stop the mission that fatally targeted Khashoggi,” noted Callamard and her colleague.

But will the US and her allies act this time round?

They’ll have to because the mere fact that the head of a top US company can be placed under Saudi surveillance should be enough to raise alarm. But in his characteristic style, President Trump will most likely choose to bury his head in the sand as he waits for things to cool down. Members of his government have been giving lacklustre responses to avoid antagonising Saudi Arabia which is a key market for US weapons.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said that the government was obviously taking the situation seriously but quickly added that: “Saudi Arabia is obviously an important ally.” Treasury Secretary Mr Steven Mnuchin refused to discuss the matter during an interview with CNBC and urged American companies to continue doing business with Saudi Arabia.

The downside of this is that the more countries like Britain and the US display their reluctance to call out MBS over his clandestine and brutal activities, the more he will be emboldened in his operations. At the moment the extent of his surveillance on world leaders and top businessmen is yet to be known. But it is suspected that more phones belonging to top government officials and leaders could have been compromised.

Among them is British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who communicated with MBS on WhatsApp around the time, and White House senior advisor Jared Kushner. The latest revelations should be a wake up call to world leaders to put business interests aside and speak against human rights violations being perpetrated by MBS.

As Andrew Miller, a Middle East expert who served on the National Security Council under Obama said: “It is clear that the Saudis have no real boundaries or limits in terms of what they are prepared to do in order to protect and advance MBS.”

L'articolo The Saudi Crown Prince has gone rogue and must be stopped proviene da InsideOver.

Social media messaging app Telegram is officially banned in Russia, in spite of its 14 million users there. In embarrassing revelations, however, senior politicians have responded with outrage to being caricatured with memes on the platform, responding on the platform no one Russian is supposed to be on. Officially, no one – and especially not city majors and others – are supposed to be able to access Telegram in the country, yet the mayor of Krasnoyarsk, Sergei Eremin, has been complaining loudly after being pilloried on the platform.

Several memes on a channel on Telegram have made fun of the mayor, and Eremin has taken the bait. Telegram emerged mid-2013 as the darling of modern Russian messaging apps, having been founded by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, although Pavel Durov is the far more visible face of the company. The brothers are also the co-creators of VK, a massive social messaging network in Russia.

In rather draconian behaviour, during June 2017, the Russian comms watchdog Roskomnadzor demanded that Telegram give the Russian security police (FSB) its encryption keys. Pavel Durov refused, and a Moscow court ordered the blocking of Telegram thereafter. Durov had fled the country in 2014, after being forced to “sign over” his other platform VKontakte (VK) to businesses linked to the Kremlin. A typical strong-arm “engineering” of business outcomes common to Russian, it was obvious at the time that political heavyweights were robbing Durov to benefit their inner circle.

In April of 2018, a Russian court ordered the blocking of non-compliant Telegram in Russia, although it’s still alive and well on home soil. Many Russians at the time simply switched to open proxies available in other countries, although, in reality, the “ban” has proved impossible to enforce.

The sin of free speech

In part, because the Russian state is still broadly ill at ease with rank freedom of speech, Telegram had to be investigated. In an amusing depiction of the freedom that the internet began, the freedom that modern connectivity just keeps improving, the mighty Russian bear hasn’t managed to quash Telegram just yet, however.

Telegram allows users to send text, photos, voice notes and indeed all types of files. Groups on the app can also have up to 200,000 members. Those who employ the chat app WhatsApp will recognise Telegram immediately, as it employs the same one-click-sent-and-two-clicks-read status indicators, for one thing. According to 2018 figures, Telegram has around 200 million users, with around seven per cent being Russian citizens.

Interestingly, Pavel Durov recently alleged that competing app WhatsApp would “never be secure” and is possibly contaminated with government oversight. WhatsApp is the global leader in messaging apps, owned by Facebook, and possibly bedevilling users’ lives with spyware. With the company having recently flagged the possibility that spyware could have infiltrated users’ phones by using the app, Durov maintains this indicates the potential of “backdoor” access by government or other interests. Supposedly equipped with end to end encryption, it appears that WhatsApp is not as secure as most would like to believe.

It was precisely the strong encryption at play in Telegram that finally provoked Russian authorities to attack the app and its founder. The maverick programmer Durov maintains that such a warning from the company indicates the likelihood of bad actors involved with WhatsApp. The Telegram CEO expressed the opinion that WhatsApp would be perpetually open to surveillance, and said that “WhatsApp has a consistent history – from zero encryption at its inception to a succession of security issues strangely suitable for surveillance purposes.”

In his online post, Durov noted that each time a vulnerability appeared with WhatsApp and was patched, a new issue seemed to arise shortly thereafter. WhatsApp has around 1.5 billion global users, something Durov feels certain would be of huge interest to the FBI or other US government agencies. “For WhatsApp to become a privacy-oriented service,” Durov wrote, “it has to risk losing entire markets and clashing with authorities in their home country,” a reality Durov knows only too well.

Telegram shut down in Russia, yet rolling on regardless

Russian authorities in 2018 ordered local ISPs to block Telegram after Durov refused to comply with the demand for encryption keys. The “Yarovaya law,” which mandates that telecom operators preserve their clients’voice and messaging activity for six months, took effect in Russia mid-2018. Under this law, Russian courts pursued Telegram, trying to compel it to store all encryption keys and also hand them over to the FSB if and when ordered to do so. Durov maintains that since the keys are stored on individual users’ phones, this would be impossible or, at least, technically challenging, and unethical.

 Durov said that such a demand would violate the constitutionally enshrined right for Russian citizens to enjoy privacy in correspondence. The FSB had, even before the Yarovaya law taking effect, been badgering Durov for encryption keys while ostensibly in pursuit of six suspected terrorists who employed the platform. Durov responded by pointing out that, apart from the demand being an obnoxious violation of all users’ rights, the six targeted suspects had either never employed Telegram accounts, or had since been deleted because of inactivity in regular housekeeping exercises at Telegram.

Particularly shameless, the FSB at the time had also demanded that Durov either design or otherwise install monitoring technology on the platform, to enable clandestine surveillance by authorities in future.

Durov’s woes did not go unnoticed. During April 2018, protests in support of a free internet were staged in cities around Russia, with residents throwing paper aeroplanes (the Telegram symbol) from rooftops. No doubt raising the further ire of authorities, the protest actions were planned and coordinated via Telegram. Durov came out in support of the protests but asked that protesters please pick up their paper planes when done.

Telegram is now also on the Indian government’s radar after that regime began clamping down on fake news. There are concerns that the app will soon face an outright ban in India. The app is among many being looked at as sources of fake news and is not alone in hot water. The reality of any countrywide ban, however, as Russian realities have shown, is that Telegram is likely to continue unabated, whether authorities in India ban it or not.

L'articolo Telegram App Hanging on in Russia But Facing an Uncertain Future proviene da InsideOver.