The first sentence was sarcasm. But if you need a reference, how about Iraq WMDs.
I'm not on the hook to prove anything. TFA provides literally zero evidence of their claim other than to assert it strongly.
In my opinion, the most strongly asserted claims accompanied by "we can't tell you the evidence, but we turned it over to someone else who also can't tell you"... well, haven't we seen how that turns out enough already over the last 2 years?
My point is simply that TFA asserts a lot and backs it up with nothing but hyperbole.
Funny you should mention the Iraq WMDs. WMDs were cited as justification to go to war against Iraq, a war that the Bush administration had a variety of political, ideological, strategic and economic reasons for wanting to engage in.
What incentives do de Becker and Bezos have that would cause them to falsely accuse the government of Saudi Arabia? It seems that such an action would be risky to say the least.
Of course, the potential risk doesn't mean that they don't have such reasons (or even that their inference based on whatever data they have is correct), but I am curious as to what you think are the likely explanations.
Bezos’ initial medium post seemed to me like wild conspiracy theory born of Messiah complex.
But the incentives are massive. The world’s richest man had a huge PR problem with stories coming out about how his wife actually was instrumental in helping build Amazon in the early days.
Half his fortune on the line. Perhaps his controlling stake in Amazon, too? How many Amazon shares will his ex-wife walk away with at the end of this? Aside from the divorce which will be the most damaging event in Jeff’s life, the PR hit is not insignificant.
If Jeff can tie AMI to illegal spying he can possibly take down the entire company. Is revenge not a good enough motive? He is certainly not a disinterested third party.
This is a great albatross to distract from an otherwise big story.
We know there was a conspiracy to murder and dismember a journalist. Your suggestion that it's outlandish to consider a conspiracy to blackmail an owner of a newspaper is intellectually dishonest. Frankly it's insulting.
To propose such a strawman of my position, and then accuse me of being “intellectually dishonest” and “insulting”. Wow.
I never said outlandish. I said people claiming Gavin said he had evidence were incorrect, because TFA literally never claims to have evidence. Let alone direct evidence. Let alone incontrovertible evidence.
I think it’s absolutely incumbent on the accuser to provide at least some general description of the form and substance of evidence that was obtained to support a claim such as this. This is not asking too much from a private citizen who apparently had unlimited funds from his boss (the richest man in the world) to exact revenge on someone who attacked him in one of the most financially damaging ways imaginable.
Since when does HN accept conspiracy theories with absolutely nothing to back them up? I’ve seen the post “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” upvoted to the top of many discussions. Why does that not apply here? Doubly so in a case where the accuser is so personally vested in the outcome.
You propose that because we know conspiracy A (through tremendous amounts of actual evidence) so therefore we must entertain a tenuously related conspiracy theory B without any evidence?
Please don’t accuse me of being insulting and dishonest on the basis of frankly basic skepticism of a conspiracy theory, particularly if that is the extent of your rebuttal.
The political skirmishes of the worlds richest men don’t really concern me. What does concern me is the posited existence of a remotely installable no-touch root access zero day for a presumably up-to-date iPhone, and secondarily, that it’s being weaponized by foreign government against private US citizens — meaning it apparently doesn’t require the carrier’s cooperation to deploy, which is what would shock me the most, because baseband exploit would be the most obvious vector.
You called it a "wild conspiracy theory". You're using "conspiracy theory" as a thought terminating cliche, which is intellectual dishonesty.
> "absolutely nothing to back [..] up [the theory]"
More intellectual dishonesty. The Saudis had the means, the motive, the opportunity and the disposition, as demonstrated by their murderous tendencies. The House of Saud are a family of thugs who are known to conspire to murder journalists. It's entirely rational to consider the strong probability that they've also conspired to blackmail people.
It is incontrovertibly nothing more than a wild conspiracy theory at this point;
- A remote access no-hands zero day iPhone rootkit.
- An international plot to expose an affair
- A plot potentially involving the President of the United States in cahoots with the National Enquirer to expose the richest man in the world
- A blackmail attempt to cover it all up
- Perfectly executed parallel construction to account for the source of the photos
Last week the President was accused of clandestinely exploiting the intelligence apparatus of the United States to steal Bezos' photos. Now that we know (the only actual evidence that we've seen -- in this case statements from the brother himself and AMI) that the photos were provided by the brother, a new theory emerges that this was merely parallel construction after the affair was exposed through spying by the Saudis.
To reach that conclusion, you would have to (1) have evidence that the Saudi's contacted AMI to give them the lead, (2) have evidence of the zero-day on the iPhone, and (3) be able to link some sort of network activity back to Saudi Arabia carrying the exfiltrated data. ('AMI was tipped off', 'by the Saudi's, 'after they spied on Bezos by exploiting his phone' are three separate facts which each need supporting evidence).
Instead... You use the words "means", "motive", "opportunity" in a colloquial which is at odds with their meaning in a court of law. "I think this guy doesn't like that guy" is true of an untold number of people in Bezos' orbit, including his ex-wife.
"I think this guy can remote root international iPhones at the click of a mouse" is not means" - it's utter speculation. Anyone* who knew Bezos was having an affair with Sanchez would be in the exact same position to approach the brother and ask for kompromat.
I don't know what you are claiming is the evidence of "opportunity" in this case?
I certainly don't support Saudi Arabia, and I'm looking forward to the day where there's no one left to buy their oil and they sink back into the desert. It is absolute fact that Saudi Arabia has murdered and blackmailed in pursuit of their political goals.
But you have literally nothing but a cute story and a blog post of a guy who said trust me because I have high confidence that they hacked Bezos' phone to give AMI the lead on his affair other than "Saudi Arabia bad".
You have not come even remotely close to substantiating any sort of claim, other than to basically say that it's not impossible that it was them. I actually agree that it's not impossible that agents of Saudi Arabia remotely accessed Bezos' iPhone using a no-hands zero day to root his iPhone, discover the affair, and then call someone at AMI to tell them to track down the girl's brother to get a copy of the texts. It's not impossible but there's also no evidence that any of us has seen it actually happened. I think that's pretty much the definition of a conspiracy theory right there! The correct response, IMO, is absolute skepticism, and to wait for evidence to be presented.
Or at the very least, a general description of the sort of evidence which allegedly has been found?
And I really think you should cut it out with the ad hominem. There's nothing dishonest about my skepticism, and I am not insulting you, just your utter lack of an cohesive argument.
> What incentives do de Becker and Bezos have that would cause them to falsely accuse the government of Saudi Arabia? It seems that such an action would be risky to say the least.
It seemed the implied incentive for Bezos to accuse the Saudis was to portray himself as the victim and not the victimizer. He also had beef with the Saudis before this happened. Finally, his medium posts and frantic behavior suggested he may have been letting panic and paranoia get the better of him.
BTW, not saying that I think any of this is true (and this article suggests it isn't). Just summarizing what others have suggested.
Sorry I mentioned it! It has nothing to do with my premise, as we're not even talking about intelligence agency assessments here.
My point was simply that this is a mealy-mouthed statement which does not assert anything about what, if any, evidence may have been obtained or analyzed;
> "Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information."
I'm not on the hook to prove anything. TFA provides literally zero evidence of their claim other than to assert it strongly.
In my opinion, the most strongly asserted claims accompanied by "we can't tell you the evidence, but we turned it over to someone else who also can't tell you"... well, haven't we seen how that turns out enough already over the last 2 years?
My point is simply that TFA asserts a lot and backs it up with nothing but hyperbole.