Saudi, UAE crown prince sued by Al Jazeera anchor for her hack and leak

In a 93-page complaint filed in the Southern District of Florida, Al Jazeera news anchor “Ghada Oueiss” files a lawsuit against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed accusing them of hacking and extorting her with fabricated nude photos.

The lawsuit says the operation is connected to larger efforts by rulers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to stifle reports about the two regimes’ alleged human rights abuses. Oueiss has been critical of both nations’ leaders as part of her work as a principal anchor and presenter for Al Jazeera, a news agency based in the nearby Persian Gulf state of Qatar, which has strained ties with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Oueiss and her lawyers say the scheme centered on disseminating manipulated financial documents and photos of the journalist meant to “sully her reputation” and spread “disinformation.” The suit also alleges Oueiss has faced a series of escalating threats to her life.

Oueiss and her lawyers from the Miami-based firm of Marcus Neiman Rashbaum & Pineiro LLP name 19 defendants in total, including DarkMatter, a UAE cybersecurity firm.

Earlier also it was reported that UAE used powerful surveillance tools linked with NSO group for targeting their journalists and dissidents. Human rights advocates and security experts have accused NSO Group of selling its products to human rights abusers and governments around the world. NSO Group has claimed its products can only be used for legitimate law enforcement or intelligence reasons.

According to the complaint” Oueiss had earned much attention of the Saudi while covering 2018 state-sanctioned assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul”.

Moreover, she accused “private photos of me in a swimsuit had been stolen from my phone and posted on Twitter with offensive, misogynistic and false claims that the photos were taken at the private residence of Al Jazeera Media Network’s Qatari chairman, Sheikh Hamad Bin Thamer Al-Thani,” Oueiss wrote in July. “I watched aghast as the number of retweets increased by the hundreds each minute. Within just a few hours, photos of me in a hot tub — some of them pixelated to make people believe, incorrectly, that I was nude — were tweeted more than 40,000 times.”

It is interesting to note that though this time the allegations are made by Qatari journalist, Qatar too have been under radar for such operations .For instance, Qatar took help from Global Risk Advisors (GRA) a US based consulting firm, to extract information out of Broidy’s personal emails. Few months back, Qatar signed an agreement with Plantir technologies a US based software company for handling their big data analytics. Turkey signed a bilateral agreement with Qatar on various critical areas including Technology of which cyber operation may prove an important sphere of cooperation.

Such incidents have also occurred in the past wherein individuals with public reputation have been hacked and their data is been leaked by state actors to achieve their interests.