Jamal khashoggi

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. It proceeded to hoover up his emails, contacts, photos and WhatsApp exchanges, which included

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