Friends of slain writer are being watched
And U.S. can do little as other governments have gotten surveillance tools
| Orlando Sentinel
WASHINGTON — For years, Ali Al-Ahmed felt grateful to be in the United States, enjoying a safe life, much like his friend, the slain writer Jamal Khashoggi did.
Now the dissident Saudi says he is “freaked out.”
Al-Ahmed feels hounded even in his suburban Washington home. He’s been sent dozens of emails tainted with malware.
He grows uneasy every time he turns on his car’s ignition.
And he blames the Saudi monarchy, which U.S. intelligence has concluded killed Khashoggi while The Washington Post columnist visited his country’s consulate in Istanbul in October.
“This morning, when I was putting on my socks, I thought: ‘I could be killed in a matter of weeks or days,’ ” Al-Ahmed said.
It is a nervousness shared by many migrants who fled their homelands because of fears of persecution, only to find themselves subjects of surveillance in a country they thought would offer them protection. They worry that their cellphones are hacked, their computers hijacked and their communications intercepted.
Governments around the globe have obtained electronic surveillance tools, and some are using them to spy on their nationals inside the United States. Researchers say there is strong reason to believe Mexico, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia have done so.
But Chinese, Iranians, Tibetans, Uighurs, Vietnamese and other groups say they believe they have been targeted as well.
As such spying increases, American government at every level, but are not legally or effectively protected from surveillance by foreign governments or persons. Intuitively, this is a peculiar state of affairs,” said Joel Brenner, a former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, the top-secret body that sweeps the globe for electronic signals.
“The practical reality is that neither the United States nor our own surveillance targets abroad can do much about this state of affairs, anomalous though it may seem,” Brenner said.
Since the U.S. government is arguably better at surveillance than any other government, including Russia and China, it is not eager to wade into any debate about establishing a global legal doctrine limiting such snooping.
Some migrant communities have taken to public education to warn members that one click on a malicious link or email attachment could install spyware to read their chats, listen to their calls on Skype, activate their microphones and cameras and take their files.
“We worked on a lot of simple memes. ‘Detach from Attachments’ is one of our most successful,” said Ladhon Tethong, director of the Tibet Action Institute, which teaches safe technology practices. She said the slogan worked “because of the Buddhist concept but also because everybody could relate to, ‘Oh, I’m getting all these strange emails and attachments, and I clicked on that one and something strange happened.’ Just don’t open them.”
Tethong said Tibetans are subject to constant surveillance in their homeland, which China claims as its own. Tibetans in the United States and Canada are deeply concerned over Chinese electronic monitoring within North America as well.
It is the case of Ethiopia, though, that has drawn attention to the gap between U.S. criminal law and judicial remedies for those saying they have been spied on from abroad.
The Wiretap Act bars anyone from intruding on another’s communications, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act prohibits breaching into a person’s computer. But federal prosecutors are swamped by other computer crimes, and a federal court ruling last year gives foreign governments some cover, leaving victims with the option of seeking civil remedies. prime minister relaxed political control and freespeech restrictions.
“I frequently got different spearphishing (email) that is trying to have me open some kind of link, some kind of document,” Jimjimo said. “It’s scary, but you just learn to live with it.”
Spearphishing is when hackers send a tailored email or text message to a target, hoping that the victim will click on a link that will load malicious software onto their computer or cellphone.
Private firms that make surveillance tools, ostensibly only for law enforcement and counter-terrorism purposes, are coming under pressure.
A Saudi dissident in Montreal, Omar Abdulaziz, sued an Israeli spyware company recently in Israeli court, saying the NSO Group’s Pegasus surveillance tool was employed by the Saudi government to monitor his communications with Khashoggi.
Al-Ahmed said he was unnerved that electronic and physical surveillance of him seemed to blend together.
In late May, Al-Ahmed, who is a director at the Institute for Gulf Affairs, attended a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. Afterward, he received an email purportedly from a photo vendor showing him at the event. It contained a prompt to see more photos. The email was a spearphishing attempt, according to an analysis by Citizen Lab, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.
Al-Ahmed, 52, who said he has U.S. permanent residency but has lost his Saudi citizenship, essentially making him stateless, now worries as much about physical surveillance as spyware.
“There are what I call eyeballs here,” Al-Ahmed said. “They are surveilling.”
Saudi Embassy spokeswoman Fatimah Baeshen acknowledged a query seeking Saudi response but did not offer one.
Another case of electronic espionage targeted one of the most recognized journalists in Mexico, Carmen Aristegui, and her teenage son, Emilio, who attended a prep school in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.
Aristegui and her investigations team uncovered some of the biggest corruption scandals under the former government of President Enrique Pena Nieto, including that his wife accepted a custom-built $7 million mansion from a government contractor on extraordinarily generous terms.
Aristegui’s son began getting dozens of text messages to his cellphone in Massachusetts in early 2016, his mother said. Some messages appeared to be from childhood friends, or referenced purported events near his home in Mexico City, she said. All contained malicious links that would trigger installation of Pegasus spyware on his cellphone.
“This was despicable conduct by people seeking private information from an adolescent boy with the only aim of damaging me,” said Aristegui, who hosts a news program on CNN en Espanol, a radio program and an online news site in Mexico.
Several texts appeared to be from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City telling Emilio that there was an urgent problem with his student visa.
In a Nov. 27 report, Citizen Lab said it has identified 24 cases in Mexico of journalists, lawyers, politicians,