The piracy and espionage scandals of the Saudi regime were met with strong European condemnation after the fact that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was involved in the penetration of the Amazon CEO and owner of the Washington Post newspaper, Jeff Bezos in 2018.
The president of the European Parliament’s Human Rights Committee, Maria Arena, expressed her amazement at “the alleged Saudi mobile phone piracy of Mr. Bezos, as revealed by United Nations experts.”
This came in reference to both the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions Anis Calamar and the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression David Kaye, who stressed in a joint statement, that Bin Salman’s piracy “requires the immediate investigation of the United States and other relevant authorities.”
Arena asserted that the allegations of espionage against Bezos are a source of great concern, as it embodies that no one is immune to cyber-attacks and cyber bullying, with the possibility that this manipulates their personal data either by the countries or the organizations that operate with those countries.
She considered that these allegations confirm that Saudi practices are part of an expanded strategy through which Riyadh spies on those it considers to be dissidents or opponents, including Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and columnist for the newspaper “Washington Post” who was killed inside the Kingdom consulate in Istanbul in October / October 2018.
She called on the European Union to take further measures to ensure the citizens ’personal data remains safe, and urged the union to express the utmost concern and reconsider its participation in the G20 summit in Riyadh in November.
The British newspaper “The Guardian” revealed a few days ago that the Bezos phone had been hacked by the bearer of Deben Salman.
According to the newspaper, it all started on May 1 of 2018 as Bezos received a message on his phone via the WhatsApp application from the private number of the Saudi crown prince. The message, which turned out to contain a malicious file.
The Guardian said that large quantities of data were extracted from the Bezos phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter, without specifying what this data is.