Jamal khashoggi

Tuesday

Michela Wrong

The psychological toll of being constantly tracked and harassed

In late 2018 a Saudi journalist living in exile in Canada, who liked to work out in between recording YouTube critiques of his government, ordered some protein powder online. When a text message landed on Omar Abdulaziz’s smartphone notifying him of a DHL delivery, he clicked on it without hesitating. The portrait Deibert paints is a million miles away from the Cold War binary world of John le Carré The DHL invitation was fake digital bait. By clicking on it, Abdulaziz had enabled Pegasus, a spyware program designed by a now infamous Israeli company, NSO Group.

Tuesday

Lloyd Evans

Bryan Fogel on turning Jamal Khashoggi’s murder into a film

Bryan Fogel seems to have done it all. It’s hard to think of a showbiz figure with a more varied career. He began as a stand-up and moved to play-writing and then to directing movies. In 2013, he reinvented himself as the producer of hard-hitting documentaries that focus on international scandals and cover-ups. He talks to me via Zoom from Los Angeles about his latest movie, The Dissident. ‘I was seeking what my next film was going to be – something that spoke to human rights and freedom of expression. It checked all those boxes’. The subject is the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident journalist who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018. ‘He’d left his country to be able to speak freely.