YouSaid · the spoken record

David Kaye

lines on the record: 113
first: 2020-02-14
most recent: 2020-02-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, look, at the end of the day, the problem in part is that we're all connected to other people. And so we rely on everybody's security around us. And this was one of the Jamal Khashoggi issues. I mean, in part, I think what we think is that he was tracked in part by the intrusion into the people around him, not necessarily him.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he's not going back. But this is the problem that these things happen. And what's the reaction? So I'm just a UN reporter basically on these things, but governments keep going. Governments keep, I mean, they continue to fail to regulate this industry. And they continue to let basically to let MBS be treated as if he's just another member of the ruling class of the world. And that's to me that's really disturbing. Obviously, it connects back to something you were alluding to earlier, which is, you know, the connections between Trump and Trump administration and the Saudis, but frankly. You know, Democratic and Republican governments have always been Silicon Valley.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely. Is disturbing to a lot of people. Totally agree. And on top of this, I think what's just really outrageous is how so many people, so many governments and so many companies continue to engage with the Saudis. So, you know, the Saudis hosted a cybersecurity event just this week. They host this Davos in the desert every year, which is actually something that Bezos after the Khashoggi murder, he decided he wasn't going to go to. It wasn't a public thing, but that really ticked off MBS. Yes.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's shocking. Package of things. I'm concerned about Bezos. If they can get him, they can get everybody. Everybody gets got, essentially. There's no protection for anybody, especially dissidents who are incredibly vulnerable in terms of being trackable, in terms of being able to find out. And one of the things that we'll never find out about Jamil Katovi is how much tracking they did of him in order to get him there, which is interesting. And then you start to think about where you can travel, where you can, even if you're even making comments, I mean, when I make comments about the Saudis being thugs and they should Silicon Valley shouldn't take money, I'm like, I'm not going to Saudi Arabia. There's no way I'm going to Saudi Arabia. You know what I mean? I'm not going to show up in places I'm invited. You know what I mean? And I'm like nobody. Like, you know what I mean? You just think about the ability to make valid criticisms about, you know, autocratic regimes, it chills. It's a chilling thing, which I think is disturbing to a lot of people.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he owned the Washington Posts. And the suggestion that anybody, even somebody at his level could be subject to this kind of intrusion. I think is really shocking. It's really disturbing. And I mean, I see the private surveillance industry generally, even if, and this is the thing, this isn't necessarily that your average iPhone user cares that much about for their own, but this is about the fundamental pillars of our democratic life. And if governments are able to target owners of the media or journalists or activists, that is a direct threat to the way we get information, the way we share information, and really to some democratic fundamentals for it. So it's not that I'm concerned about Bezos per se. I'm concerned about the whole package of things.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. So here's our WhatsApp Facebook link. But there's also an iOS link. I mean, basically, the vulnerability here, which was that you didn't even have to answer your phone, you didn't even have to click on the video in order for it to infect your phone. So again, I mean, that's not just WhatsApp. It's also a device security problem. And actually, since the time of the Bezos hack, WhatsApp and Facebook have soon...”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so actually there's a separate track here, which is WhatsApp was vulnerable to exactly this kind of, it was basically WhatsApp and iOS. This is my Facebook.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. So swing to me why this is important. I mean, it's such a bizarre stream of events, but I think here's the world's richest man being targeted and successfully at some point, whatever they pulled out from the phone. Also, that everybody's vulnerable, and he has probably the most would assume would have, I don't necessarily assume he has the best security, but he should for sure. And that's as easy as putting a video. Now, what I understand is he didn't even have to watch the video. Cork, did he click on it? He did not.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard to imagine any other explanation, but we're human rights fact finders. We're open to receiving other information. But it's really concerning”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close Yeah, no, exactly. And that's so, from our perspective, we're not saying to either the Saudis or to the public. So we did a public statement about this. We're not saying this is conclusive evidence, but there is enough here. One, that the Saudis have... Some questions to answer, and it certainly looks like they targeted Bezos. And in light of the kind of the entirety of the relationship between Bezos and the post, the post in Jamal Khashoggi, the allegations and demonstration of other hacking, we need information, but also it's the kind of set of allegations that we regularly go public with because people need to know about the risks. Now, it may ultimately be that there's some other explanation. I doubt it. When you look at the report and you look at the timeline.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And Jeff Fizz is around Kasho. You just, for those who don't know, Jeff Fazes owns the Washington Post, and there's been a lot of noise because it's been Trump has attacked it. Trump is very close to MBS, so it's alleged that they're trying to get it, Jeff Bezos in some fashion because they're angry about his paper, his ownership of the paper.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is his personal phone. I mean, I don't know if he used other phones or whatnot. I mean, most of these people have many, many phones. But this was his personal phone. And from our perspective, what we do in the UN, when we get information like that, we communicate with the government. Which is what we did. We sent a letter to the Saudis and said we've received this information. If it's true, this raises really grave concerns about freedom of expression and, you know, we laid out the relationship between Bezos and the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi, the connections between this particular hack or allegation of a hack and the hacks that have been alleged about the people around Khashoggi. Right.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That infected Jeff Bezos' phone, and what they show in this forensic analysis is there was a baseline of very little data coming out of Bezos' phone Over time historically. And then suddenly it spiked up like 29,000 percent And you would see these spikes over the course of a couple of months, actually over the course of a year, leading to one spike that was like four gigabytes. And Bezos didn't use iCloud to back up, so there wasn't really another explanation for this other than it being a hack and the taking of information. So from our perspective,”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it makes sense, right? If I need to talk to you. Just to share whatever. You know, billionaires have problems too. Who else are they going to talk to? So they share numbers and they actually do a quick, hey, it's Bezos. Hey, it's MBS kind of thing. So what happens is about a month later, and I can't say that MBS himself sent this. What we know is that a video was sent from the account of MBS to Bezos. And this forensic report shows how within hours of the sending of this video, there's this massive spike in exfiltration, the taking out of data from the phone to some unknown location. I mean, I should emphasize the report that we got was interim. It's not a conclusive report. It basically says we have medium to high confidence that it was this vector, the use of this video. Single video.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be in touch. Which is what, by the way, just so let me take a moment, rich people do this all the time. They get together at these dinners, and it's like I was at one with Jeff Bezos and Ruper Murdoch and all of them back in the day. And they all just, they socialize. They socialize on this weird, it's always strange and weird, but they do that and they do. They like to contact each other. It makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense, right? If I need to talk to you about Saudi Arabia, we might start an Amazon thing.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you might not have done what Jeff Bezos did, which was they were at a dinner and they exchanged numbers, you know, and MBS and Bezos. They're like, be in touch.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he met with, he did meet with, you know, apart from you, he met with everybody. Oh, he wasn't going to meet with me.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So basically, what happened was people might remember that MBS did this national tour. He came to the United States. He spent like three weeks.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what happened. That's Yeah, so what happened was it's funny you say WhatsApp and WhatsApp goes off you have this magic it's owned by them”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“MBS himself. So lay this out how this happened. This was a report that Gavin DeBacker, who worked as a security head for Jeff Aze. As you'd imagine, the World's Richman has security around him. And you'd imagine he would be safe because he's the world's rich man. But indeed, that is not the case. And there's all kinds of points of vulnerability. There's a lawsuit right now from his brother-in-law who seems to have taken his pictures and given them to the National Inquirer from what he looks like that's what happened. That's what the National Inquirer said happened. And I think that's what Jeff Bezos thinks. And his sister also thinks that who's dating Jeff Bezos. But that's a weird point of vulnerability. That's a strange little side note. But this is a real using WhatsApp. Is that correct? Yeah.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, basically that put on yes and I, it gave us some profile on these kinds of issues. And so we were basically handed this forensic report that looked at this allegation that Jeff Bezos had of Amazon had been hacked. Not just by Saudi Arabia, because that had been out there. His chief of security had made this allegation about a year ago, I think in February, March last year. But actually tied it directly to interactions with the Crown Prince, with MBS himself”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely. And there's a legitimacy to it, right? I mean, there's a legitimacy to saying in the context of fighting against terrorism or violent crime or child abuse and kidnapping. There's a completely legitimate use as long as it's constrained by rule of law, meaning warrants, judicial warrants for the use of those tools. There's a legitimate place for these. And actually a pretty important one. The problem is that these tools are abused around the world against journalists, against activists and human rights defenders and dissidents. So I did a report last year that focused on the industry. And I basically called for a moratorium on the transfer of this technology, at least until there's a legal framework around it. Transfer and constraint on its use.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And they're being hired across the globe. You've read about them in books, you know, spy thrillers, but the private companies that are hired to do surveillance by governments or individuals or companies or things like that. And there's been a huge growth of them using digital means.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Via phones, exactly. Okay, so that's happening on one track. On another track, I did a lot of work on the private surveillance industry more generally. I mean, it's an industry that basically operates without constraint. So, NSO group is just one instance. There's hacking team, there's Gamma Group, Fin Fisher, it's actually probably we only see the tip of the iceberg.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So, okay, so that's on one track. And as part of her investigation, she saw that there was considerable surveillance of people around Jamal Khashoggi. So dissidents, activists, journalists who are associated with him. And it was clear that they had been in citizen lab, an organization based at the University of Toronto that does a lot of amazing forensic work and advocacy. It had identified the well, there's this Israeli company that makes this malware, this spyware called Pegasus that is a tool for really invasive, intrusive surveillance.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wasn't a radical. Right, exactly. You know, he wasn't a flamethrower by any means. So after his murder, both Agnes Kalamard, who's the special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, both she and I had gotten involved in, at first we were urging the UN, basically the Secretary General, to launch a commission of inquiry or at least appoint a group of experts to investigate how it was and who was responsible for murdering Jamal Khashoggi in the Turkish city of Istanbul and the Saudi consulate, which is makes it an unusual set of circumstances. It's not our normal killing of a journalist. And then Agnes went on to do her own specific investigation of the killing. And her conclusion was basically the crown prince was behind that.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was indeed Rough turn against. And the behaviors that were happening. I don't mean to say it wasn't the worst Disney. He wasn't the most way out dissonant. He was very trying to change the society with criticism, with better criticism.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally fair criticism. He, I mean, in his reporting, he was becoming more and more critical. He was indeed. So in the year before he was murdered, his columns took a pretty rough turn against us, and in particular against the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salam.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I mean, Jamal in the past was actually a friend of the house of Saud, very much, you know, believed in it as a stable force in Saudi Arabia.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're here with David K. He is an author, and he also works for the UN around freedom of expression and opinion. And he is also a professor, a law professor. David, we were just talking about the idea of it being grim. Let's walk us through your involvement in the Bezos thing, because even though it was such a bizarre thing, but it sort of, it encapsulates what's going on. The world's richest man was hacked by another rich man, who was actually targeting him because he owns the Washington Post and all kinds of things. Talk a little bit about what happened here, how you all got involved.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is reporting Learning about all sorts of things. All right. This is Grim, Grim, and Dark. Okay, this is perfect, David. We're here with David Kaye, the special reporter for Freedom of Opinion and Expression at the UN. He's the author of Speech Police, which we're also going to talk about. We're going to take a quick break now. We'll be back after this to talk about his involvement with the Bezos phone hack.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the traditional approach of just targeting journalists. I mean, that targets, that imagines that everybody in a way is a journalist, everybody in a sharing economy is reporting, right? So governments are onto that. I mean, it's a dark time on the digital side for people who want to share information and learn about”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the trend is on the one hand, fighting back by governments against legitimate journalism. So there's criticism. So criticism of the government is converted into a crime. It's converted or redefined as terrorism. We see increasing use of digital space. So there have been a lot of laws over the last several years that are framed as cybersecurity laws, but they're actually laws about limiting what you can do online, what you can say, what you can post, what you can like. And those, I mean, those kinds of threats are very real, and they go well beyond.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Against the government. Yes. Of real dissidents around the world. So there's all sorts of trends taking place, but I think the overall trend is pretty grim.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both mass surveillance, but also this targeted surveillance of the kind that we could talk about around Bezos is really just a real surveillance.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I think many Americans see as public lying It's consistent with what we're seeing in places in Europe. We've seen it in Hungary, in Poland, in several other places. We see it in the context of Brexit, the kind of public lying in order to shape the kind of information and the kind of decisions of voters are able to make. I mean, that's really troubling. There's issues around digital. So we see mass surveillance and targeted surveillance. So there's distinctions between the mass surveillance in the United States and its allies intelligence sharing compared to, say, Saudi Arabia with”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of activity, that kind of repression. We see in a lot of different places, but there's a separate trend in democratic societies, which is, I think, especially troubling. I mean, obviously we see it in the United States with”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something else. But he was clearly pressured simply for identifying a medical emergency. So, I mean, I think it's, first of all, it's easy to say there are certain trends, but I would distinguish different parts of the world. So China, for example, is on the digital side. First of all, it's complicated. There's kind of a rich social media, but also a censored one, one that is both a subject to limitation, but also subject to the kind of flooding the zone that we're talking about before. I mean, China's at one end of the spectrum, right? There is a media, and actually there's been some interesting reporting over the last few days about how the media has really taken on the coronavirus in some interesting ways in the country, which is complicating for the government. But by and large, it's a closed media environment. And that's a trend that we see.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The country. And if you look at the whole global globally, where are the real problems from your perspective? Right now I'm just, you know, recalling what's going on in China today around this doctor who tried to essentially say there's a virus here and he died of the virus and was actually quite maligned by the government while he was doing it.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, anyway, so we do that kind of work in raising these issues publicly and with the government. And then we also do country visits. So I've gone to places like Turkey, Tajikistan, Mexico, Ecuador. I just went to Ethiopia in December. And we do these kind of concentrated investigations, fact-finding in a particular country and say, here's where you're doing fine. We like to see this, particularly in transitional countries. We say, look, here's where you need to be doing some more work to improve freedom of expression in your country.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would have been exactly Bart Gellman gets arrested for reporting on it. Yeah, exactly. Or Glenn again. But the problem with these kinds, there's many, many problems with these kinds of laws. I mean, they're designed to limit the flow of information, but they also don't give either the whistleblower or the journalist the opportunity to make an argument about public interest. So like Ed Snowden makes the point that when he's prosecuted under the espionage act, he doesn't have the opportunity to show, look, law changed because of these disclosures. You got to give me some credit for that”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning he was a journalist who accepted information whistleblower information, essentially, and is using it, which is very common. I've used lots of people get memos, internal memos, not quite. Exactly disturbing as that one, and you use them and you never get dinged by the company or anything else. You just never do. And in this case, they just didn't want it out. And so they're trying to blame not just the person who disclosed it, which they're within their purview to do so, just like they did with Edward Snowden and others. But in this case, they're targeting the journalists.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now the current president clearly doesn't like that. The current administration doesn't like that kind of disclosure. And there's been a criminal complaint lodged against. Meaning he was a...”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in Brazil, Glenn Greenwald is, you know, he's become quite, like we know him in the United States as active, but he lives there and he reports on Brazil. Like he's an active player in Brazilian journalism. And he reported on basically some material that was disclosed to him that identified kind of a conspiracy against the past president, Lulu.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oftentimes we do press releases on those. So, like yesterday we did a press release on the criminal complaint against Glenn Greenwald, which is expressing.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have kind of complete freedom to decide what I want to report on over the years. I've reported, the first report I did was on encryption and anonymity and how digital security is essential to protecting human rights around the world. And we actually have done, over the years, played a, I don't know if I would say significant, but we've tried to play a role in the debates around encryption to remind people that digital security is also about human rights and protection. So we do those kinds of thematic reporting. And then I communicate directly with governments. So we send letters, they're almost like demand letters, directly to government. So say they've detained a journalist. We'll send them a letter. And it's, I don't have any police force with me. But, you know, it's a signal to them that somebody's watching and all of those communications, even though initially they are confidential, we ultimately publish them all.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we do a few different kinds of things. So, first, just in the UN world, so I directly report to the Human Rights Council. And so twice a year to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly, I provide a thematic report.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right as well. Absolutely. All right. So you were doing this. And when you report to the UN, where does it go? You just say this is happening here, this is happening here. Can you talk about sort of the hot spots of where the most trouble is and what happens to the information that you report to the UN?”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely. Completely. But it's not as bad as, say, disinformation on Facebook is it gets a big boost from what's happening in the mass media as well. Right, absolutely.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is going on, which is I think it is effective. Actually, one of the things that I try in my own work to avoid is blaming it all on digital. Because obviously, Fox News as state media basically has a big role in this. It plays off with digital.”
2020-02-14 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: David Kaye · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source