It turns out that the Israeli cyber-stalking firm NSO was hip deep in the plans to assassinate Jamal Khashoggi.
If this is what Middle East Peace means, maybe it's not such a good thing:
In the wake of the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the NSO Group emphatically denied that its government clients had used its hacking malware to target the journalist or his family.
“I can tell you very clear. We had nothing to do with this horrible murder,” Shalev Hulio, the chief executive of the Israeli surveillance firm, told the US TV news programme 60 Minutes in March 2019. It was six months after Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was killed in Turkey by assassins dispatched by Saudi Arabia, a client of NSO.
Now a joint investigation by the Guardian and other media, based on leaked data and forensic analysis of phones, has uncovered new evidence that the company’s spyware was used to try and monitor people close to Khashoggi both before and after his death.
In one case, a person in Khashoggi’s inner circle was hacked four days after his murder, according to peer-reviewed forensic analysis of her device.
The investigation points to an apparent attempt by Saudi Arabia and its close ally the United Arab Emirates to leverage NSO’s spy technology after Khashoggi’s death to monitor his associates and the Turkish murder investigation, even going so far as to select the phone of Istanbul’s chief prosecutor for potential surveillance.
4 days after the murder? There was a pre existing relationship.
Khashoggi was killed and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. While the investigation mostly points to Khashoggi’s close associates being targeted in the months after the murder, it also identified evidence suggesting that an NSO client targeted the phone of his wife, Hanan Elatr, several months before his death, between November 2017 and April 2018.
Yeah. Pre existing relationship.
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US intelligence agencies have already concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was responsible for ordering the murder of Khashoggi, a former Saudi government insider whose criticism of the kingdom’s regime in the pages of the Washington Post was seen as a threat to the Saudi heir.
………
The phone analysis discoveries and leaked phone records suggest that Saudi Arabia and its allies used NSO’s spyware in the aftermath of the murder to monitor the campaign for justice led by friends and associates of Khashoggi, while also showing an intent to spy on the official Turkish inquiry into his murder.
I understand the motivation of NSO, they wanted the money.
What I don't understand is the motivation of the US for continued support of the House of Saud.
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