It seems like a lot of people are not reading between the lines of this post. Bezos apparently believes that he was hacked by either the US or Saudi government and that now one or both of those governments are using the National Enquirer as an attack dog against him. That accusation is much bigger than any other piece of this story.
EDIT: Here [1] is a reporter from the Washington Post backing that up. The Bezos' camp believes this is a politically motivated attack and the data was acquired by a "government entity" (logically the US or Saudis).
It really puts this tweet from POTUS last month in a crazy new context:
"So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!"
Not all Presidents or foreign powers are obsessed with finding and collecting dirt on their enemies with the intent to harm or influence them.
Wether you call it gaining influence or blackmail, it's usually the technique of authoritarians or the corrupt and not a path we want to advocate or even tolerate.
Head of the FBI and its predecessor from 1924 till 1972. So, for the US, we had a department "obsessed with finding and collecting dirt on their enemies with the intent to harm or influence them" for at least that time period.
Right, and Hoover's techniques were those of an authoritarian which few in Washington wished to support or tolerate. The problem was that Hoover's enemies included those very same Washington leaders, whom he'd quietly threaten.
By contrast, we've arrived at a point where those very same techniques, practiced openly and brazenly, are considered legitimate in the eyes of a significant plurality of both Washington leaders and the national electorate.
Corruption has always existed, but unless it's normalized you at least have a fighting change of containing it. When its normalized it will consume the whole system. Pervasive cynicism is sufficient to normalize it, and that's often how it metastasizes.
Let's be clear here: I'm the last person to defend the NSA, but there are huge differences in the restrictions placed on official US spying agencies and foreign ones. If a sitting President used his office to demand that the NSA spy on a US citizen for political reasons, it would be a huge scandal. When foreign governments like the Russians or Saudis do it, it's unprosecutable and "deniable", even if the President hints that he wants it to happen and expresses happiness that it has. That's the era we're living in, and it's dangerous as hell.
Sadly the era we're living in is that which blames Trump for every thing that goes wrong with no evidence whatsoever and many, many people cheer. That is dangerous as hell.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but to also be clear: there is zero evidence that Trump had anything to do with this.
> Sadly the era we're living in is that which blames Trump for every thing that goes wrong with no evidence whatsoever
Before a crime is proven, there's usually speculation. Just like people suspected Nixon of being involved in Watergate before there was actual proof. The truth can come slowly.
I agree that we need to follow due process, but it's just as dangerous to categorize any suspicion of criminal activity as "blaming Trump for everything". You're just on the opposite end of the spectrum as people who thinks he's guilty before we have proof.
Evidence takes time, especially with plea bargains where there's incentive to hold out until the evidence against you is overwhelming.
It's best to be somewhere in the middle where you're equally skeptical and open to whatever news and evidence comes out.
You're right, there's obviously a spectrum. I feel it's gone too far in one direction. There's literally no proof on this particular issue that Trump had anything to do with the NE story on Bezos so it seems like quite a leap to start creating conspiracy theories that he used national intelligence agencies to dig up the dirt.
I would have written it off as conspiracy theory nonsense myself, were it not for Trumps attack tweets a few weeks ago. While I don't think any US intelligence agencies are involved, it's absolutely possible that some foreign partners are providing "voluntary assistance" in the matter.
Zero evidence, sure. But a pattern of behavior that is deeply, deeply troubling and suspicious.
As others have pointed out, he tweet-taunted Bezos a few weeks ago in a way that seems rather connected to this recent revelation.
Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski wrote an op-ed (in the Post!!) about having been threatened with blackmail by AMI, seemingly in direct connection to the White House's desires. Ronan Farrow came forward yesterday to say that AMI tried something similar with him.
Sure, Trump may have nothing to do with it. But you and I aren't courts of law; we're people, and we're allowed to look at the evidence and come to our own conclusions.
If your conclusion is that this is an "era ... which blames Trump for every thing that goes wrong with no evidence whatsoever" then you're just doing a bad job of evaluating evidence.
A pattern of behavior is evidence. All evidence is circumstantial.
That realization is actually foundational to our system of criminal Due Process. It's why nearly every piece of evidence entered into trial, even simple documents and scientific analyses, requires a witness to vouchsafe. Facts cannot be divorced from their human origin, and any fact can be challenged by challenging the credibility of its origin.
All facts are messy things, and while some are messier than others there's no avoiding careful consideration in light of the available context. It follows that the distinction between fact and conjecture is one of opinion.
Espionage is nothing new. Trump or US govt. ordering this is an attractive idea to Trump haters. Self serving for Bezos btw. But I think unlikely. No need.
Like other smear attempts for instance Wikileaks on the Clinton campaign and also why its unlikely Mueller will EVER get the smoking gun on Trump. You don’t need to order these things, your allies will do it without your knowledge. Deniability.
I think the reference is to the DNC funding Fusion GPS through a cutout (to evade campaign finance laws) and then providing the Steele dossier to the FBI. Which proceeded to lie about it to the FISA court in order to spy on Americans. That sort of thing.
No, that's not "the only thing strange" about this. Perhaps you're unfamiliar with American history, but this is wildly without any remote precedent.
Not to say that previous Presidents haven't done bad things, abused laws, etc, (shit, even launched disinfo campaigns, used the press to attack enemies, etc) but this is just gobsmackingly different from what has come before.
Obviously caveat "if this is true" blah blah blah because my Lord who knows what's true anymore. But knock off the jaded pseudo-educated bs; this is radically fucking strange and a departure from history up until this point.
You need to read about the measures great past Presidents like Abraham Lincoln, amongst others, took. It's gonna be an eye-opening experience for you if your comment is in good faith.
But did Abraham Lincoln ever outright lie about it? Did he ever make a political speech where he categorically denied ordering the house arrest of a D.C. Circuit judge, or categorically deny that such a house arrest even occurred?
That's what's unprecedented. It's not abuse of power or corruption that's unprecedented. It's serial, bald faced lies to a willfully, spitefully credulous audience. Not even Nixon or his defenders were so unscrupulous, although it's fair to say that in Nixon lies some precedence.
I used to think it quaint that the dominant principle behind the 6th Amendment prohibition against compelling testimony against oneself remains the so-called cruel trilemma-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_officio_oat). But I realize now that, even without the metaphysical threat of damnation, a society must leave space for even the most corrupt and malicious individuals to avoid outright lying. Lies are the greatest poison to civil society by threatening the very notion of accountability and therefore of fairness or justice. Even when we know somebody is lying it's crucial that we grant them the fiction of plausible deniability, a quid pro quo for not violating the cardinal rule. In so far as the body politic permits and tolerates open lying, it destroys the last and perhaps only common bond between citizens--commitment to a shared truth, even if only nominally.
When a politician says that they can't remember, or even qualifies what would otherwise be a lie with "not to my recollection", that's actually a powerful gesture--submission to a critical civic virtue. When we get to a point when politicians, especially national leaders, don't bother with such gestures, and supporters don't even nominally demand them let alone exact some price, we're in a very bad place.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, there's solid evidence that Reagan openly lied when he denied any knowledge about Iran-Contra. But I think it's telling that we've convinced ourselves he was suffering from Alzheimers, forcing plausible deniability upon him. Even most Reagan detractors have reflexively internalized that narrative. (Obviously he was suffering from Alzheimers, but it's not very reasonable to believe that he was suffering to such an extent that he lacked the capacity for even complicity.)
I agree that Abraham Lincoln took some questionable measures but that smacks of "whataboutism" and has no bearing whatsoever on this situation. I have difficulty taking your comment in good faith because if there is truth to this (i.e. one of our spy agencies or a foreign gov't was spying on and leaking information about a U.S. citizen with the sitting president's knowledge and/or tacit endorsement) it is unprecedented.
It's as if our country being in a literal civil war was a bigger crisis than just trying to cover up the current president's crimes and attempts to hide his crimes!
"During the Civil War the federal government was responsible for
the greatest amount of newspaper suppression in the nation’s history.
More than 300 newspapers were shut down, most of them Democratic
papers that were sympathetic to the Confederacy. Some historians have
criticized President Abraham Lincoln for allowing such widespread
constraints on the press. This article reconsiders the nature of Lincoln’s
view of press freedom. Based on a letter the president sent to a Union
general, it concludes that Lincoln changed his thinking about midway
through the war and began to believe that suppression of the press was
not the appropriate policy."
See my reply to a sibling comment; I'm not unaware of history, though there's an incredible amount I am ignorant of, certainly.
But I'm familiar with Hoover; this is wildly different. For one thing, unless I'm mistaken, he was never actually President. "Arguably more powerful than the Presidents he supposedly served" is a neat line and not unreasonable, but doesn't really approach what I'm arguing: that this moment is without precedent in American (world?) history.
That's because the story here likely goes beyond simply AMI going after Bezos at the White House's direction - that would be a hell of a story but also hardly original.
A President conspiring with two separate foreign powers to undermine our elections in order to enrich himself is just one part of the overall story that I contend is novel here. It may not even be the seediest part, depending on what comes of, say, the Seychelles meeting.
Well, none of that has been proven yet, it's not even charged, perhaps (we don't even know for sure) it may be under investigation by the special counsel. I suspect we'll find out in some measure in the future.
If it happened, even then I think it would not be unprecedented -- I'd have to think for a bit about specific examples but I suspect we've even done it to other countries ourselves.
Me. I would say that this is an entirely novel state of affairs, without precedent in American history. As others have pointed out to me in this thread, "American history" contains lots of pretty salacious and wild stories of governmental abuse of authority.
Yet all the jaded Hacker News historians around here haven't really pointed out any actual incidents in history that approach this story. "You should read about Hoover" or "Abraham Lincoln did some bad shit during the Civil War" doesn't really approach the level of "President conspiring with two separate foreign adversaries/frenemies to undermine American elections, enrich himself and blackmail his enemies" to say nothing of all the juicy details we don't yet know.
Lots of smoke for sure, but I'd much rather follow due process and wait for a crime to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a legal setting. Otherwise you're setting a dangerous precedent.
“Beyond a reasonable doubt” does not apply to removing the President from office. The applicable standard is “whatever will convince half of the House and two thirds of the Senate.”
The Constitutional criteria for removal of the President from office are "treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors." Here's a good short description:
Yeah, which feels like a slippery slope into political takeovers, especially since the speaker of the house is 3rd in line.
If Republicans were guaranteed to keep the President and VP slot, you'd see an impeachment much more easily. I don't think any Republican will want Pelosi a heartbeat away from the Presidency unless Trump's crime was so clear and egregious that 2/3 of the country wanted him gone.
That’s been the standard since the adoption of the Constitution. If it was a slippery slope, you’d think we would have slipped down it at some point in the past 230 years.
Impeachment is a political process. The dangerous precedents have already been set, for Andrew Johnson and William Clinton.
The former was impeached for firing the Secretary of War without consent of the Senate, and refusing to reinstate Stanton in that position when it did not ratify the dismissal. Acquitted by one vote.
The latter was impeached for lying about inappropriate personal behavior, and obstruction of justice for witness tampering and impeding investigations. Acquitted.
Trump could be impeached by the House for a misdemeanor as inconsequential as littering in a national park. And the standard of proof for conviction in the Senate is not specified. It could be as low as "a police dog alerted on his hamburger wrapper" if his loyal contingent has 33 senators or as high as "we need to analyze, line by line, the source code for the video encoder of the camera that recorded the president dropping the wrapper on the ground, to ensure it has not been tampered with by terrorist immigrant caravans" if his contingent has 34 senators. It is not specified by the Constitution, so it is de facto determined ad hoc by the Senate and chief justice at the time of the trial.
It should be obvious that suspected crimes that are more severe than firing cabinet officials without permission, or covering up a political scandal--such as those imputed to Nixon during the Watergate burglary investigation, or suspected acceptance of foreign emoluments--should be impeached more readily. But as long as the Senate is needed to convict, and the burden of proof is not specified, then the House cannot realistically impeach, and expect a conviction with a president-supporting Senate in place, until the case against can meet the standard of "beyond even petty, unreasonable, and dubiously-contrived doubts". And that is solely so that when the Senate refuses to convict anyway, the evidence and the vote against conviction can be used against the party in subsequent election campaigns.
I have little doubt that the current president will be confronted by a stack of previously sealed criminal indictments on the afternoon of the next president's inauguration day. Those cases will be tried in courts with a fixed standard of proof--beyond reasonable doubt for criminal cases, and preponderance of evidence for civil cases.
--"I have little doubt that the current president will be confronted by a stack of previously sealed criminal indictments on the afternoon of the next president's inauguration day. Those cases will be tried in courts with a fixed standard of proof--beyond reasonable doubt for criminal cases, and preponderance of evidence for civil cases."
The precedent has already been set there also -- both Bill and Hillary Clinton have remained free of prosecution in spite of all the many criminal conspiracies they engaged in.
There's no debate there was just as much, if not more, dirt and conspiracy around them when they were in office as there is around the current occupant of the White House.
Actually, there's an awful lot of debate about that.
There are almost certainly more claims made about/against the Clintons than there are about/against the Trumps. But many of the claims against the Clintons haven't had enough "there" there for anyone but, well, conspiracy theorists to run with them. There have been, as far as I know, considerably fewer actual legal investigations against the Clintons, their associates, and their businesses than against the Trumps, their associates, and their businesses, and certainly far fewer actual charges and indictments.
There's a lot of political history behind the campaign against the Clintons, and a lot of it's fascinating -- but it's not actually a history of a corrupt criminal enterprise, at least on the part of the Clintons. It's the history of personal vendettas and rich conservative ideologues, and the history of the birth of the modern right-wing media movement, starting with the Arkansas Project.
The Trump Organization also has a lot of fascinating history, but you know what? From all appearances, it may well be a history of a corrupt criminal enterprise.
Hillary Clinton has never been president, therefore cannot set a precedent in this matter.
Bill Clinton's supposed "conspiracies" are mainly sexual assaults and their ensuing covers-up. Some of his accusers received cash settlements, and presumably would not testify against in any criminal trials. The remainder apparently did not leave enough evidence by the time Clinton left office to pursue criminal charges, or did not come forward until #MeToo emboldened them to do so, long after he left office, and possibly after any relevant statutes of limitations had elapsed.
If Bill Clinton was indeed as dirty as Donald Trump appears to be, he was certainly better at cleaning up the evidence of it. He may have also pursued a policy of being more honest in less critical situations, such that he could attempt a lie--and still be believed based on reputation--when a deception would benefit him most. Furthermore, fewer of Clinton's former aides, employees, and associates were indicted and convicted during his term in office.
It is possible that Clinton was not charged because he was a more cautious criminal. It is also possible the reports of his crimes were invented or exaggerated to weaken him or his wife politically. It is also possible that I think Trump's suspected crimes are so much more severe than Clinton's that the best fixers in the country can't massage them away.
In any case, that's a fallacy of distraction. It doesn't matter what anyone else did but Trump, when the states' attorneys come knocking on Trump's door. They have prosecutorial discretion, and many have political ambitions of their own, so it may well be a matter of whether going after a former president and getting the conviction will help them more in the future than permanently burning all of that president's remaining political allies. Clinton can still pull in some votes and some campaign contributions. Even Nixon had folks that would still go to bat for him after he resigned. Trump is burning his (R) bridges, and snubbing all possible networking opportunities with the (D) side. It's almost like he has no conception whatsoever about how he can stay politically relevant--or at least politically protected--after leaving office.
My point is that it's highly unlikely anybody is coming for him after he leaves office. It's simply not done -- it wasn't even done to Nixon, where there certainly would have been cause.
Lots of things being done in the political arena are things you could previously say "simply aren't done." All while things that simply need to be done are totally ignored.
You're confused in thinking republicans are the "political enemies of the clintons" -- many of them are far more an enemy to the current inhabitant of the white house than they ever were or have been to the Clintons. As I recall, one very prominent former Republican president voted for Hillary.
Washington is full of people who want power. They posture and make noise about political sides and beliefs, but in reality most of them are on the same side -- the side of the elite. They want power and money and don't like outsiders. The current inhabitant of the white house isn't part of the gang, and a significant portion of both camps (well, all of one camp and a portion of the other) are working very hard against him every day.
The factual and evidentiary bar for treason is quite deliberately high in the US; in this case, if Trump colluded with the Russian government it would represent a violation of campaign laws (and a scandal of historic proportions!) but (Russia not being actively at war with the US) not treason qua treason.
Something similar happened with the "secret wall street speech transcripts"-not a major story, but the fact that they weren't public became a major talking point for the Trump supporters I talked to-and lo and behold they did eventually leak.
I think he’s just implying they have more competence than the FBI in finding alleged missing emails. His comms is very non literal -and people take him literally. His whole campaign was off hand blue collar jokey remarks.
Pundits understood him literally, so they failed to understand him at all. His nomination competitors also saw him in this light and ultimately failed. Mostly, J think they failed to understand his communication style1[1]. Occasio on the Dem side uses some of this same comms style for the left and it works to a degree, but the left is more uptight about being PC in comms so cant go as far afield with it.
Kerry undermining foreign policy is closer to treason but no one bothers cuz he’s an old hand. Let’s say the Dems win the next cycle, but then as they try working with Russia or Iran on things, Bolton struts in on visits to give his two cents...
Basically, I think many people try using a standard/traditional comms framework to parse his comms, but he uses a different more blue collar style[2]. Not frat style of a GWB, or the ancient oratorical style of Obama.
Obviously people are disagreeing with me, but I'd suggest reading what some linguists and political theorists have to say.
You can't claim he doesn't mean what he says literally after he shut down the government quite clearly over a literal wall he wants built. Or has harangued the Justice Department in public over not going after Hillary Clinton as an extension of his "Lock her up" campaign. Or his attempt to literally repeal & replace Obama Care. Regardless of whether you're pro or con on these and all of his other policy statements, it's clear through his words and his actions that he means it all literally. Up until it either a) becomes clear it's simply not going to happen (Mexico paying for the wall) or b) a statement is revealed to be patently untrue (see his various stories about his involvement with payoffs for affairs).
I think you’re mixing remarks with his stated policies. Policies they published during the campaign. Remarks are comments. That said, for politicians there is a certain fluidity in meaning. “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”
I don't think you can separate what he says about his policies from the actual policies. They are part of a whole. "fluidity in meaning" is another way of saying they don't mean what they say. That doesn't mean they don't intend what they say to be taken literally. I don't buy the idea that people vote for candidates thinking "I know he/she was just making empty promises." The public may accept that politicians aren't always able to deliver on their promises, but not that the promises themselves were just some vague metaphorical allusion with no real intent behind them.
Let's put it this way, if he wanted to command the GRU to do some work for him, would he not be better off going though his channels rather than making on off-hand remark in front of an audience?
I'm sure he could use steganography to signal this or that, if need be.
I mean, come on, are you going to say Waters was "threatening" here: "I did not threaten [Trump] constituents and supporters. I do that all the time, but I didn't do that that time," Waters said to laughter from a crowd in Los Angeles."
I think he likes pushing the envelope to see how far the crowd will let him go.
He's widely known to have paid for and used dirt on his enemies to influence things to his advantage.
I think like most con men he likes to boast about what he's doing even if it's illegal. Or after getting away with it for so long and seeing others do it too, it just feels normal.
I think he did use back channels with Rodger Stone to execute the crime, but he probably didn't even know it was a crime because he's been getting dirt on people his whole career. The only problem with this time was it was a Presidential election and a foreign power.
The example Thiel used in the original "seriously but not literally" argument was the wall. Of course Trump wasn't talking about a literal wall, he said, it was more of a metaphor for, you know, something.
This argument was always embarrassingly stupid, but anyone still making it after Trump shut down the government for a month over literal wall construction has forfeited their right to be taken seriously at all.
Sadly, you'll still find people (even in this thread) that claim "of course Trump's campaign wasn't meant to be taken literally." With statements like "if you took what Trump said on the campaign literally, then you missed the point."
So then if _The Wall_ was figurative, why did he shut down the government over its funding?
"No he meant that one literally."
Okay... So what about the fact that the wall would be funded by Mexico? He claimed that he would literally make them write a check.
"That was obviously figurative."
An exhausting stretch of logic by those who can't burden themselves with introspection.
Like any politician, the "Mexico would pay for it" was an "argument" to get support. Did supporters care if Mexico itself would pay? No. But it fit their sentiment. It's win-win for him because the only people who would "care" would be people against the wall who politically don't matter.
It's like when Dems say they want to abolish ICE. That's what their base want to hear. Do they really think ICE is going to be abolished? No, do they like hearing that because it rings nicely in their ears. yes!
Let's abolish ICE is the lefts version of "Mexico will pay for the wall". When they say Abolish ICE, they mean we'll (try to) do the dreamer things and we'll be less literal on refugee interpretation (and include economic migrants as definition of a refugee) for example. And, if it doesn't happen (not enough internal support) we'll blame the Repubs, no loss on their side. This is how political comms works.
Don't try and hang them on each and every word. You'll miss what they are saying.
> It's like when Dems say they want to abolish ICE. That's what their base want to hear. Do they really think ICE is going to be abolished?
Yes, they do.
They may not think the functions are going to be eliminated, or most of the rank and file staff removed from government service, any more than when the predecessors of various parts of ICE, like the INS, were abolished before it.
It is intellectually dishonest to attribute literal intent to some of his statements, but others made with the same bombastic style only obviously more ridiculous are hand-waved away as "it was the spirit of the thing he meant, not literally". And whether or not his followers care about Mexico paying for the wall, his various statements clearly indicated a literal intent on the topic. And while some on the left may mean "let's massively reorganize ICE and rethink its operational policies", it's clear that some also mean this literally.
You're right about Occasio-Cortez: she is shaping up to be about as bad as Trump in this respect. I'm not quite sure which of them is worse, but I know the prospect of her someday getting to the White House is a chilling prospect, even though my political leanings are in that direction. She appears to be about as dangerously ignorant (and perhaps callous) of facts of situations. The only mitigating factor for her is that perhaps experience will temper this, and maybe she is just uninformed but not unwilling to learn.
I disagree with Thiel there, His base, and most independents want a literal wall (and, as he claims, Dems used to be for a wall) But his speeches are littered with these blue collar type speech patterns (boasting, exaggeration, put-downs, etc., when trying to “win” an argument).
> His base, and most independents want a literal wall
Can you back up that most independents want a wall? The polling I've seen says otherwise.
"CBS News polling from mid-November found that a majority -- 59 percent of Americans -- oppose building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. It's a partisan issue, though. A large majority of Republicans support the wall -- 79 percent. A majority of independents -- 66 percent -- oppose the wall, and 84 percent of Democrats are also against it."
Can we stop saying that "blue collar" people delve in boasting and exaggeration ? Most blue collar people I meet are very polite, mild mannered and focused on executing their tasks. The only people who talk like Trump are narcissists.
> This argument was always embarrassingly stupid, but anyone still making it after Trump shut down the government for a month over literal wall construction has forfeited their right to be taken seriously at all.
Whether his statements during the campaign were taken literally or not it appears he was taken seriously by enough people to win him the nomination and the election. I think more than anything they bought into his intent. And his values however we may choose to the define them resonated with them.
What’s really hilarious is that the wall was originally intended to be figurative. His staff came up with the idea as a way of keeping Trump’s scattered brain focused on talking about immigration. Except the moron ran with it.
This analysis has some merit if you don't jump to the conclusion that it's praise. The presumed reason for the downvotes is the issue of accountability. A President who can't be taken literally isn't viable. Oh and the part about Kerry and Bolton is nonsense. But other than that, it seems like obvious stuff.
Because what mc32 is doing is a rather cheap rhetorical tactic: asserting that, when Mr. Trump says something I (for the appropriate I) like, he is to be believed, but when he says something unappealing or rediculous, he's joking. It's a relative of the "no true Scotsman".
It's also a bit of a problem for a representative government, since it means you cannot take any of Trump's statements as a forecast of his policies.
Not quite. Trump is problematic. While he has attempted to execute his campaign promises, getting there the road is littered with inconsistency, opportunism, reversal, and some fluidity. But, but people take him too literally in the minutiae. The goal may be literal, but the tactics in getting there are not, the supporting verbiage is not. Counterintuitively the "vision" may be.
Like I said elsewhere, it's akin to the Dems "We'll abolish ICE". Some people will believe that literally, but it's not meant to be taken that way. They mean some reform and some policy changes. A redressing, but that's not what the base hears.
Well, now were' playing Trump's semantics, aren't we? It's not the INS, it's ICE. AS if they'll lay off 20k and then what? Nope. They may temper some things, do the dreamer things they promised, accommodate and redefine what refugee means (to include some poor economic migrants, but probably not rich economic migrants, etc.)
These sorts of things are always NP problems. If you know the answer, in hindsight it was obvious, because all the signs line up. But to think to look at the answer, to search the entire space of how to discredit someone, that takes resources.
Everything Bezos tells about seems to have happened very recently, after the divorce announcement, making Lauren Sanchez a very obvious hacking target for which password leaks are a very obvious easy strategy.
Taking on Amazon cybersecurity could be a job for the likes of the NSA, but accessing a cracked phone without being caught is almost amateur level hacking.
From GP's link: I find that her email addresses have been included in that recent dump of 770 million accounts called "Collection#1".
For background, see Troy Hunt's explanation for this data [0]. He certainly didn't add Ms. Sanchez's passwords to this. The MEGA uploader could have, one supposes, but that pushes the timeline back to early January. The idea that someone was sitting on all these creds (140M email addresses in this breach that HIBP has never seen before.), and then released them as a smokescreen for Ms. Sanchez's would be, let's say, conspiratorial.
I think the point is that it doesn't require the power of a government agency to get anybody's images off their phone.
It could be a government, it it could be Bezos' wife, Sanchez's brother or ex husband, or just someone with a knack for social engineering who thought there was a lot of money to be made.
I suppose it could have been -- depending on the phones involved. MMS isn't encrypted AFAIK, but iMessage is.
If you want exotic explanations, the images could have been recovered by Van Eck phreaking too, I suppose.
More likely explanation is something like the geek squad scandal where someone with physical access to the device (e.g. cell phone repairman, personal assistant, hotel maid) copied the photos.
So now it comes out that Sanchez shared some photos (no mention of which) of her and Bezos with female friends, and some SFW photos with her brother. Additionally she backed up her phone to her computer, and her computer was backed up to her assistant's computer. It looks like a lot of people might have had access to the photos.
>>> "Bezos apparently believes that he was hacked"
Hacking implies a sophisticated attack.
Not saying either government didn't do it. Following paxys line of thought I would however agree that hacking is not the most likely explanation in how the private data was taken.
Social engineering is sometimes also described as an "hack" but I doubt that is what Bezos implies with the word.
Depends on the audience I guess. The big majority of hacks are not sophisticated at all. There's also so many people that use it without an implication on the grade of sophistication.
But one thing is true, we can't possibly know for certain his intentions by using that word :-) so these are just our opinions for now :-)
to you and me, yes. probably also to Jeff Bezos. but to the general public (arguably the real audience here), hacking is anything between guessing someones weak password and sophisticated attacks like stuxnet.
This is harder than it seems nowadays (especially if you actually want to read the data you cloned later).
As an example: consider the FBI pushing Apple to help them decrypt a terrorists phone from several years ago. They finally got in because the phone was a particularly old model without a secure enclave and (from memory) they ended up buying a 0day for a considerable sum to do it.
If you select for all instances of phone hacking and then split it into two parts:
1. Government hacked
2. Not government hacked
I'd wager that count(2) is by far the largest. Sure governments do it, but they literally don't have nearly as much human-attention and interest available as the rest of the entire human race.
House of Saud, maybe, they are dumb enough to think this would work. Given their inept handling of the Khashoggi I wouldn't be surprised. I doubt anyone in the US intelligence profession would think Bezos would call off the WaPo because of some scandalous photos.
"Just blackmail the richest man on the planet, that will totally work!"
Individuals that are now or have been heads of state may have had opportunities to seize or otherwise employ state-owned property for their personal enrichment. Dictators over petroleum exporting nations are all likely richer than Bezos, in ways that we could never expect Forbes magazine to be able to verify, or even begin to investigate.
People whose wealth came mostly from publicly-traded stocks and real estate in nations with public records of title transfers can be more easily tracked and verified.
Didn't he pay off a former pornstar tons of money to stay quiet about having sex with him? Doesn't seem implausible when he's already paid millions in hush money to keep embarassing personal info from leaking.
Actually... yes. If you got some (obviously very narcisstic) person that's known to have paid (a lot) of hush money, then that person likely is a viable target for blackmail.
The issue isn't that blackmail works or doesn't work, it's that it only works on some people. Trump is an obvious and clear candidate for blackmail, given his personality. Bezos is not.
It would've continued to work just fine if Trump hadn't run for President. Breaking the NDA doesn't make financial sense when he's a C-list celebrity; it does when he's suddenly the President.
Generally people who think that think that Trump is being blackmailed with something _criminal_ (while the pee tape got a lot of attention, it's actually one of the less dangerous parts of that dossier from Trump's point of view). There's nothing criminal about taking a photo of your genitals.
I would disagree with that, a significant number of people think that Mr Trump is dependant on their _money_ and is ashamed to admit it, more than anything else.
It's a fact that Mr Trump has been bankrupt six times. It's a fact that he has not shown his tax returns. His business dealing with Russia are under investigation.
> Trump has never filed for personal bankruptcy, although in 1990 he came within one missed bank loan payment of doing so, agreeing to a deal that temporarily ceded management control of his company to his banks and put him on a spending allowance.
Well we know for s fact that Besos is wealthy. We’re not doubtful of that. We are just doubtful of claims of someone who says they’re rich and generally lies to the public, maybe a Trump tax return would help to make him more believable.
Trump has publicly been known to be negative net worth in a not too distant past. It is also public knowledge that no bank in America would do business with him.
It is not a leap to suspect Russian banks (that are on record as loaning him money) have financial leverage over him.
I wonder what happens to the supporters of the president once the walls come crashing in. The man is a criminal many times over, proven in court many times over. Why is it a surprise that his current endeavor is just another grift?
It's a non-falsifiable claim, unless they actually catch and prove whomever did it. If he can get an intel agency (Amazon customers by the way) to say they are reasonably sure it was [insert hostile government], then it becomes gospel and an excuse to declare war or shake down US politicians retroactively for associating with that entity. We saw it happen with Russia in 2016.
Not just Amazon customers, but WaPo customers. Every story in that paper with the slightest relation to national security or military spending is vetted and approved by the TLAs. It is exceedingly unlikely that these same TLAs targeted their good friend Jeff Bezos for this sort of abuse. If it hadn't been "dick-pics" [always a good idea, by the way...] but something less salacious we could possibly see it as some sort of convoluted "false flag" op. But Bezos is the good friend of these people. There is no way they would do this to him. If an underling did it without the permission of the top brass, that underling will be destroyed.
As observed elsewhere, Ms. Sanchez's phone could have been accessed by any number of parties. It certainly wasn't "inside the firewall". So it could have been the Saudis, and those murderers have incentives to embarrass Bezos. It could have been the Russians. It could have been Amazon short-sellers. It could have been Wal-Mart. It could have been the proverbial fat guy in his mom's basement. At least Guccifer 2.0 hasn't come up.
Pecker is a moron though. How could Bezos possibly respond to this in any other way than what we see here? Trump seems to surround himself with morons.
> Saudi Arabia paid $55 million to purchase iPhone malware made by NSO Group, according to a recent report by Israeli newspaper Haaretz
The Saudis really disliked the Washington Post digging into their murder of Khashoggi, it doesn't seem too crazy that they set their sights on the boss and ended up stumbling upon some juicy texts and pics. The really interesting part is how they got to AMI. I have to imagine there is a Trump connection somewhere along the way.
Citizen Lab (who uncovered a lot of NSO Group's work with governments) also recently had what seemed to be an attempt at character assassination targeting them.
Worth pointing out that the only mobile device that Bezos has apparently tweeted from (publically) seems to be an iPhone. Doesn’t mean he didn’t have a burner phone for conducting his affairs of course.
Can't you just picture him being on a call with Trump and casually saying this was something he could do, and Trump being like yes please thus creating yet another Putin-esque blackmail situation. My gut says that's what this is.
I thought Bezos' investigator had alluded to the leaks originating from Sanchez's brother? That also seems more likely to me than a nation state - in this particular case, at least.
Well Kashoggi is dead and MBS got away with it. Moreover, MBS's enemies know know what he's willing to do, and what he can get away with, and may be frightened into compliance. From MBS's perspective this sounds like a success.
I really doubt that it was done by a US government entity. Trump is the president and all, but to hack and release (by a third party) the personal information if a citizen (not suspected or related to any crime) seems to me to be something that even Trump or his supporters can't do, the intelligence agencies just wouldn't do it in my opinion.
The Saudis seem like a much more likely party to do it in my opinion, mostly because we know they are willing to do a lot worse against people they oppose (or who oppose them).
That being said, I also think that playing the "A government hacked my phone" is a much better play on behalf of Bezos then claiming it was done by someone accessing his or Sanchezs phone (for example her brother who is supposedly a Trump supporter, like the link in the end suggests).
What happens is something approximately like this:
Saudi military intelligence puts through a request via appropriate channels to the Five Eyes for a tap on some low-profile woman's phone, claiming it's necessary in pursuit of a counter-terrorism objective. This ends up with GCHQ rather than NSA (NSA spies on Brits, Brits spy on Americans, they work at adjacent desks and share info: this is the traditional work-around for laws banning domestic spying) who happily hand over the contents of a foreign POIs phone to an allied intel agency.
Nobody at any senior level has a clue what's going on under cover of surveillance: stuff like this happens thousands of times a day. Meanwhile, the Saudi officer in charge of the kompromat on Bezos now has the dodgy photos off his girlfriend's phone ...
If GCHQ doesn't work, route through some other allied SIGINT agency with cooperation via NSA, preferably in a country where the Khashoggi thing is just another "foreigners doing horrible things to each other" back page story and nobody has a clue about Jeff Bezos' divorce.
TLDR: the global war on terror has given us a global hairball of inter-tangled intelligence sharing arrangements, and these can be manipulated for pleasure and profit by any sufficiently corrupt party who is plugged in to it.
How many articles have you read about rogue Stingrays around DC? If the FCC wanted to take these down it would take 45 minutes of triangulation, but they never do it. Instead we get vague statements about the devious Chinese.
It’s hard to conclude that five eyes isn’t a domestic spying proxy program.
You've incorrectly attributed the argument from a specific offshoot (that foreign spy tools persist because of limited counterintelligence resources) and applied it to the root supposition (that nation states utilize parallel construction, through a conspiracy with known adversaries as a matter of course and that spy infrastructure is built specifically for that purpose).
I would quibble with "known adversaries". Saudi has been a close ally of both UK and USA for nearly 30 years. Haven't Snowden's materials proved the point for the rest of the root supposition already?
Of course it's more likely that someone (anyone, really) just pwned Ms. Sanchez's phone directly.
The Saudis are positioned as our allies in the war on terror. More accurately, they're regional enemies of Iran, and the western powers tend to run on the rubric "the enemy of my enemy is my ally" (even when a closer look at the situation would suggest that just ain't so).
They are huge customers for British arms sales (look up the Al Yamamah deal — roughly US $100Bn in business). They're known to have bought surveillance and intelligence monitoring software from Israel. They're in everybody's back pockets, and in their wallets.
As a Brit, I find your belief that US citizens are immune from monitoring by the intelligence services of other nations (when that kind of money is passing hands) touching ...
>The Saudis are positioned as our allies in the war on terror.
As are a lot of countries. Does not mean we will allow surveillance without any questions.
>As a Brit, I find your belief that US citizens are immune from monitoring by the intelligence services of other nations (when that kind of money is passing hands) touching ...
I never said or implied that.
Read the comment again:
>No Five Eyes member is going to randomly tap some US citizens phone because the Saudis asked without some serious investigation.
No no no. The UK has laws that facilitate surveillance of its citizens. The UK spying on US citizens in the USA is something that I would put into a risk category two (more??) orders of magnitude above brexit or suez. I'm sorry, but it would be lunatic recklessness, and to what advantage?
UKUSA treaty: goes back to 1945, GCHQ is used by the NSA as a convenient work-around for restrictions on domestic surveillance. This was all documented by James Bamford in his histories of the NSA, "Inside the Puzzle Palace" and "Body of Secrets".
(You're looking at the present-day for context, but these agencies run on protocols that have built up over many decades, dating back to the Cold War.)
Hi Charlie! It's getting increasing difficult for fiction to stay ahead of reality.
I would welcome your conjectures on how the spooks controlled Obama. His enduring legacy may be heavy use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, and a radical expansion of "death from the sky", which seem incompatible with his personality, creating a mystery: What leverage did/do the spooks have on him?
My read on BHO is that as a non-white guy super-achieving in a quietly racist political climate (we've subsequently had a refresher course in American racial politics: it never went away) he was at pains to avoid alienating factions that might work against him.
He was also a lawyer: not just any lawyer, but a former editor of the Harvard Law Review (a plum niche reserved for star pupils at the #1 law school in the United States, often an early sign that the individual is on the road to the Supreme Court). Instead of heading for the bench Obama went into politics, but he is above all else a legalist (and a constitutional expert). As such, he worked only within the established legal frameworks, carefully trying to build a platform for incremental adjustments.
The Espionage Age was already a feature of the system before he arrived in the Oval Office: he continued to use it as it was designed. He didn't rock the boat or try to impose a radical agenda on the DoJ. He wouldn't do anything that might give his enemies a lever against him. He was, in fact, a conservative politician: not "conservative" in the sense of Movement Conservativism (which is actually a very radical political platform), but a Burkean conservative.
The spooks didn't need leverage on him: he was theirs from the outset.
GP is saying the UK tells the US "Hey, we're gonna spy on your citizens", and the US says "Okidoki, just make sure to pass us the data you collect". And vice versa.
What usually happens in these kind of things is mistress or partner shares images with friends and someone looks to profit or take vengeance behalf of cheated friend. I'm baffled nobody brings this up.
We mustn't forget, the War Media is always agitating for more military action. "State actor" gets them a lot closer to their goal than "fat dude in his mom's basement".
>>Trump is the president and all, but to hack and release (by a third party) the personal information if a citizen (not suspected or related to any crime) seems to me to be something that even Trump or his supporters can't doTrump is the president and all, but to hack and release (by a third party) the personal information if a citizen (not suspected or related to any crime) seems to me to be something that even Trump or his supporters can't do, the intelligence agencies just wouldn't do it in my opinion.
For me it checks out - leaking informations sounds like something that Trump or his supporters would do. Why would not they, if they have the option to?
Per the intelligence agencies - are you sure that they are a single entity, where people are of uniform opinion? And every single person follows law to the letter of it? There is the example that those services employed Snowden - if the services were so organised as to avoid such hacks, we would not have heard of Snowden.
Sure, Sanchez' phone might have had leaks in it... but it is just as plausible as a government officials (US or non-US) accessing his phone.
There's a chance I'm mostly just being hopeful, and you're right in both that Trump would totally support doing something like that, and that the intelligence agencies aren't a single entity.
>>For me it checks out - leaking informations sounds like something that Trump or his supporters would do. Why would not they, if they have the option to? Per the intelligence agencies - are you sure that they are a single entity, where people are of uniform opinion? And every single person follows law to the letter of it? There is the example that those services employed Snowden - if the services were so organised as to avoid such hacks, we would not have heard of Snowden.
But from my experience in other government entities, I believe that doing something like hacking into someone's phone, would require approval and support from high enough officials in those organizations, and so far it seems that these organization do still seem to remain professional and not involved in political actions by the president.
I agree that there might be (and I'm assuming there are) private Trump supporters in those agencies, that for example, would do 'a Snowden' and release classified and private information that they shouldn't. But that information first needs to gathered, and I don't think Jeff Bezos has done something to warrant previous gathering of information about him.
(If information about Trump for example is released this way, it would seem more likely to me, because we know they collected that information while thinking he might be a spy).
But once again, I hope I'm not just being hopefully optimistic in my trust of 'the system'.
Kashoggi was an employee of the Washington Post, which Bezos owns. The WaPo have been highly critical of the Saudi response to the Kashoggi murder. It would stand to reason the Saudis are likely using AMI as a proxy for their campaign to blackmail Bezos and silence the WaPo. Trump protecting the Saudis, and Russia protecting Trump would be quite an analytical leap I'd think.
Reality can be stranger than fiction. With all the new revelations that come out about all these entities on a regular basis - what is to be believed anymore?
More interesting context: both David Pecker and AMI have cooperation deals with Mueller, and have admitted to killing stories about Trump during the election.
Is that true? I know Manafort's cooperation agreement was nullified, but my understanding is that's because he lied to the special counsel. Which is presumably a crime, but it also violates the spirit of cooperation. I'd assume that in this case the matters are separate. But IANAL, what do I know.
Mueller allegedly has a nude selfie filed under seal relating to the indictment of the 13 Russian individuals and three companies. There must have been something more to it to avoid revealing who it was.
But we don't know who Mueller's selfie was of. (there was a claim it was some random who was sexting Guccifer 2 but that doesn't seem like something worth filing)
Maybe the better question is how or from whom he obtained it.
Manafort or Cohen seem most likely sources as Mueller's got all their stuff or maybe the AMI handed it over as part of their cooperation deal.
It's all a little weird as attempting to extort Bezos right now seems insane given the legal peril they are in. This may be worse than their part in election contribution violation they were previously on the hook for.
Well, if Trump was stupid enough to have any remote knowledge of it or part in it - he is done. Esquirer will crack, Bezos has infinite funds, and determination, and is pissed. The truth will come out.
I wonder how Thiel will react if it turned out Trump directed national spy agencies to attempt to blackmail a rival oligarch to force him to provide favorable political coverage to their ruling coalition. Being the committed anti-tabloid blackmailer he is.
? Thiel targetted only one tabloid(a tabloid that previously openly outed him as gay with who knows what moral authority) by funding a case that another wronged individual cast against that tabloid.
gawker was crazy stupid during that timeframe for whatever reason. you can't apply anonymous social media rules to your online publishing business and expect not to be punished.
well last I checked Thiel supports Trump ideologically and the Saudis are large customers of his, plus he wants more defense/spy contracts so since he's so far proven to be a cheap date in terms of business, I think he'll just side with whoever gives him more money
Given the open rows Trump had with the FBI and the CIA, that these agencies are filled with democrats and even republican sympathisers who think Trump should be impeached, and that an abuse of power is the very raison d’etre of the impeachment procedure, I don’t see how he would get to give such an order without the whole world knowing about it. Doesn’t pass the smell test.
Foreign agency, different story. But there are enough people with a smartphone in the US that it doesn’t take a state-backed agency to obtain a compromising picture of a well known public figure.
Replied to a different comment - but the same question applies here.
Are you sure that they are a single entity, where people are of uniform opinion? And every single person follows law to the letter of it? Trump could request this task unofficially from someone as a 'favour' - the agency as a whole might not have access to the request.
Well, there were documents part of the Snowden leaks that showed how some NSA agents used the agency's tools to spy on (former) romantic partners and such, and I think he said something along the lines of this kind of thing not being prosecuted much. Sure, it's still a different level than a political case like this one, but it does call the internal oversight at the NSA into question.
If I was the director of the CIA I'd cover up any internal corruption, to avoid being subject to additional oversight or public criticism. We've already banked the public trust from having audit records exist, actually checking the audit records can only reveal bad news.
But lying to Congress is kind of a moving target. You can get away with it if you later when found out come back in with a "I was misinformed" or "I misunderstood the question" performance.
He could literally be locking his translator out of the room again when he talks to the Saudis, like he does with Putin meetings. He probably thinks he's incredibly clever for taking advice from the Saudis and Putin, in spite of the dems. Yes he is that dumb.
One would wonder if what happened to the WaPo journalist was Saudia Arabia providing indirect payback for Trump. At the very least, that may have been part of the logic. "Oh, it's fine, Trump hates the Washington Post as well"
Jamal Khashoggi was much more than a journalist, he was power player in Saudi Arabia. You might have heard of his uncle, Adnan, known as the world's largest arms dealer when he was alive.
Over the last six-months-to-a-year, ruling prince MBS has followed the program of whipping the Saudi Ruling class into submission (metaphorically and literally, with electrical chords). Part of the problem is the princes were stealing so much money that the state of this incredibly wealthy, absolutist theocracy was approaching bankruptcy. Khashoggi left the country at that point and was acting as something like external opposition to MBS, clearly something the prince would not brook.
None of this is to lessen the final brutal act but rather to explain it. If anything, the Saudis are probably extra pissed at the Post for "harboring" Khashoggi.
There is a conflict of interest between his role as employee and his statements regarding Bezos. But there would be a conflict of interest between his role as reporter and his statements regarding Bezos. You're not wrong per se, but my perception is that there is a very good chance this person is telling the truth, given that in every case I've known of where a reporter for a major newspaper has disagreed with someone on a matter of record, they've been right. (NB that may still be explained by biases on my end and I'd love to be given a more nuanced view).
If the CEO and Founder of AWS can be easily hacked by Saudis then what does that mean for the rest of silicon valley in general and 99% of YC funded startups who rely on AWS?
This is not a productive line of reasoning, and mostly acts as a red herring in this entire discussion. The security of AWS has absolutely nothing to do with the security of the CEO of Amazon, even if AWS is a product of Amazon. You can sell the best basketballs and be a terrible basketball player at the same time.
well it's a lot easier to "hack" one person's iCloud account (in reality you just need a well placed personal assistant or employee at apple) than an entire cloud infrastructure without being noticed
IME if you are a part of an org/feature-specific security team at a team at large company you will be made aware of potential security flaws before they are fixed and merged in prod... so if some employee at apple learned "hey, auth tokens are being leaked in the usage data" they could hack basically anybody if they wanted to before the fix was merged and deployed to the public
Apple is part of the PRISM surveillance program [1] operated by the NSA. Internal slides from the NSA indicate that said program is capable of providing "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" including email, video, voice chat, photos, and more.
When Apple was first approached about their role in PRISM they, unlike other companies, chose to outright lie stating that, "We have never heard of PRISM." along with the typical boilerplate about not allowing any government agency direct access to their servers. NSA access is presumably 'facilitated' indirect, explaining why most of all claims specifically state 'direct access' in their releases.
Other companies, for contrast, chose to offer misleading but technically honest responses. For instance Facebook said, "We do not provide any government organization with ~direct~ access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law.".
The point of this is that what companies say, especially as it relates to their involvement in government surveillance programs is pretty much meaningless. We live in a world where their lying about participation is not illegal, but telling the truth would be. Quite a dystopic reality in many ways. As an aside this is not to say that leaks came from the government, but rather that it's extremely likely that the government could trivially obtain access to Bezos' online devices if desired. And given his position in the national economy (let alone media and space industries), I would expect such desires have long since existed even if only for 'national security', which in today's world of wide net surveillance happens to overlap with dick pics. And from there all it takes is one bad actor who gets tempted by the potential value of direct evidence showing the world's wealthiest man cheating on his wife.
This, a thousand times. Besides, I recall someone saying (I think it was Bruce Schneier) that the way technology is making privacy something that cannot be taken for granted is similar to a process of pollution, in that the small effects accumulate until they become more visible in the future.
I think the analogy is even more appropriate, because the general attitude to pollution (especially Climate Metldown) seems to display that same cognitive mechanism you mention. There are the small cumulative effects, the ways in which taking any meaningful measure would uncomfortably interfere with our habits. The social fabric has just molded itself to the absurd reality, and our comfort and complicity is what makes the absurdity inspire oblivion and indifference instead of alarm and indignation. And then one day, unbreathable air, food insecurity, and nominal democracy become facts of life, and the dogma of progress (rather than progress itself) is what remains a constant.
> I would expect such desires have long since existed even if only for 'national security', which in today's world of wide net surveillance happens to overlap with dick pics.
Spooks like dirt and compromising materiel exactly because it is useful for blackmail.
Remember the fappening? It doesnt need to be remote grabbing, people just upload their nudes to the icloud. Maybe jeff did as well.
While apple says they are end to end encrypted, I also assume they work with the FBI/whoever to catch owners of illegal content, so they probably would have a way to get the unencrypted content.
"working with" the fbi usually means the fbi provides hashes of images containing illegal content like child pornography and image providers give up any accounts that contain images with those hashes(google does it this way)
they don't just give the fbi data access without a court order
Local client creates hashes and transmits them together with the metadata and the encrypted data, Apple compares incoming hashes with FBI/NCMC/... databases. Easy as that.
Whatever you think about Jeff, this is the correct way to handle such things. We should all have the same character in such a situation (despite how the situation arose; in this case via an affair). Jeff has MANY other issues of moral disfortitude (we all do to some degree, though not at these scales). However, this particular event is to be applauded and emulated.
Bezos himself writes, in the article we're discussing:
I asked him to prioritise protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter. - emphasis mine.
And that:
On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
Thus making it plain, simple, and obvious, that he recognises that having a net worth up around the US$137 billion[1] mark has it's perks.
But if humanity as a whole enforced social norms that rewarded blackmail-refusals, then the value of blackmailing would drop so low as to be not worth it and extremely uncommon.
Essentially we could develop a herd immunity to blackmail.
I think the user you’re asking tried to explain that not everyone has the means to handle things in such a way.
Fair point, but obviously someone like Bezos should be able to make use of his resources in cases like these and I‘m sure nobody is arguing against that.
In order to be blackmailed by the US and Saudi governments, you do not need to have a lot of money. They don't really care about that, because they also have a lot of money.
What they care about is whether you have something that poses a danger to their (hidden) agendas.
If this is true, it may also mean that it is more likely that you have a lot of money (because there appears to be a statistical correlation between having lots of money and having stuff that's dangerous to the agendas of state-level global actors, likely because having lots of money means having lots of power and influence, which results in getting access to "stuff" you wouldn't have otherwise), but the former does not automatically result in the latter, and it also isn't a requirement for the latter.
Hence you can very well, through an infinite amount of random circumstances, come into possession of material deemed "dangerous" by the US and Saudi governments, while still being just a normal person living a normal life with a 5-digit net worth. Resulting in you being blackmailed by the US and Saudi governments. Most likely with quite some success.
On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.
You’re right, most people are never going to face such an adversary personally.
But there are legions of other adversaries, at all sorts of levels, who are out to pray on almost anyone with a bit of money / fame.
It's worth noting that Jeff Bezos has a lot to gain from publishing these threats. While publishing the descriptions of the photographs may sting, publishing the photos themselves would hurt a lot more. Now that he's made the accusations public, AMI could not plausibly publish the actual photos.
I don't see how much public availability of such photos could hurt him. He's already divorcing. He probably had to accept many humbling things about himself over last few years.
The only thing those photos would change is undeniably confirm that richest man on the planet has actual human male body and some love life, which pretty much everyone already suspected.
Some people will get a kick of it but it will eventually blend into the background same as fappening or a photo of a hole in the sock of president of world bank.
They won't publish them. But I'll guarantee you they will anonymously leak out on the internet. There is no way to prove they are the only people with these photos. (and they of course aren't the only ones)
Can Bezos get a US court to impound the photos? Something akin to the UK 'super injunction'?
That would make being caught leaking the photos perjury. The stakes are so high that AMI might well not dare to do that.
Its easy to imagine that Bezos, whatever he is saying publicly, is also getting excellent legal consul privately and that two can play at the games that AMI is so infamous for.
Why? Because he doesn't want everyone to know that he has a penis?
The kind of people who care about "celebrity gossip" will have no idea who he is, and the people who do know who he is won't care. There is no market for these photos.
We all hate when the big guys use lawsuits to stifle the little guys, but getting AMI execs tied up in legal worries and costs seems, in this instance, to have popular appeal?
Revenge porn laws seem like a valid counterpoint to the Streisand Effect. Even without that, you’re going to share his nudes just because he doesn’t want you to? Gross.
All 50 States have statutes that allow for preliminary injunctions... If Bezos filed a lawsuit he could absolutely seek a court order restraining AMI from publishing the photos pending the outcome of a lawsuit. See, for example: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=7.40.020
You are giving too much credit to dirtbags. These photos will be routed to persons that are 45th degree from him and released aka leaked for free. Don't underestimate the power of revenge :|
This sounds too bad to be true , but if true i think it's how any sensible person should handle it. I mean, a dik pik who will care a month later. Did they really think that such misguided extortion would work? It really doesn't make much sense unless someone else was pushing forward this extortion
I'm gonna guess that the National Enquirer knows what the response will be when they say "we'll release your pics". They probably weren't expecting this move by bezos
Imagine if the material contained morally grey stuff, like something politically incorrect. Not even illegal - just monetary support for some alt right figure or someone.
Then imagine if the material was about this other woman before he got his divorce.
Then imagine if the material contained actual borderline illegal stuff or something like photos of his nieces on a beach holiday.
So in a nutshell, "Imagine if instead of normal pics they were of weird shit that might be illegal?" There isn't enough time in the world for me to think about that line of inquiry.
"Imagine if instead of simply walking down the street you punched everybody you passed."
Amazon could pull a CloudFlare and knock them off the internet as nationalenquirer.com seems to be hosted on AWS. My guess is Amazon/Bezos already has multiple backups of the Enquirer's digital assets for forensic purposes.
I'm not sure if you are joking, but that's exactly what they should not be doing. They also can't just go poke around their customer's data. That would be very unwise...
Blackmail and extortion is 100% against AWS terms of service, so they would be within their rights to discontinue service. I do agree that they gain nothing by doing so.
This kind of defeats the purpose of Probable Cause. AWS would only fight the subpoena if it was overly broad and could materially impact many customers. In this case, I want to see AMI taken down.
It would actually be fantastic PR for AWS if the DoJ obtained a warrant and then they fought the warrant to protect their customer, showing just how far they'll go to protect their customers, even the ones they hate.
Well come on - don't host your business on a company you plan on antagonizing. Pretty sure AWS has contract clauses that allow them to deny service or perform forensics when criminal activity is suspected, and blackmail would certainly qualify.
Pretty sure that AWS doesn't have permission to conduct criminal investigations. Those would need to be turned over to a criminal prosecutor. It would be a pretty scary world if corporations were able to police consumer and business data whenever they "suspected" something. Talk about political hit jobs.
Why does it need to meet the bar of a criminal investigation?
All they need to do is to tick one of the boxes in their ToS and kick them off their property. Heck, there's an entire sub-category of law colloquially known as "Amazon-law", where you hire folks who specialize in navigating the intricacies of Amazon's policies so your business doesn't get crushed:
No Illegal, Harmful, or Offensive Use or Content
You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services or AWS Site for any illegal, harmful, fraudulent, infringing or offensive use, or to transmit, store, display, distribute or otherwise make available content that is illegal, harmful, fraudulent, infringing or offensive. Prohibited activities or content include:
Illegal, Harmful or Fraudulent Activities. Any activities that are illegal, that violate the rights of others, or that may be harmful to others, our operations or reputation, including disseminating, promoting or facilitating child pornography, offering or disseminating fraudulent goods, services, schemes, or promotions, make-money-fast schemes, ponzi and pyramid schemes, phishing, or pharming.
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They don't need to change a thing! It is already there:
> You may not use, or encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to use, the Services or AWS Site for... content that violate the rights of others, or that may be harmful to others, our operations or reputation...
Character assassination of the chief head of AWS is damaging to the reputation of AWS in no uncertain terms.
(I think) the parent comment is implying that you might explicitly give such permission to amazon by agreeing to their terms when purchasing service.
even if that isn't the case, the amount of effort required for amazon to obtain a warrant from a magistrate judge or however they'd play it is negligible.
Don't we have that now? People expect universities, for example, to have some sort of shadow legal system to investigate crimes that occur on campus (such as sexual assault).
We're at a point in time where the public, politicians and the tech community itself are becoming wary of tech monopolies. Currently Amazon has avoided the brunt of it (mostly due to being consumer friendly unlike Facebook) and the scrutiny it has had, has been focused on it's retail business.
Bezos booting someone off AWS would bring a ton of public scrutiny to an even more powerful monopoly, one that the public and politicians are by and large ignorant of. Plus it would (rightly) shake the tech community out of its complacency around cloud lock in and encourage us to explore solutions. (I realise there's already a lot of good work happening around this, but it's not an issue I've seen the wider industry talking about much)
> Well, that got my attention. But not in the way they likely hoped. Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?
Can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a prominent person post the details of a personal extortion attempt out of defiance for all to see.
AMI picked the wrong person. Jeff, literally, has tons of money, extremely respected in the business world.
Forget about the embarrassment, if he secretly capitulates to this, then the real blackmail material would be the capitulation, not the photos. Cause if the owner of Washington Post bowed down to blackmail, every article published in the article will be called into question.
And who gives a shit if a billionaire cheated on his wife or sent dick pics. I don't care. Did he murder someone? Did he not divorce his wife by parting with half his fortune?
Agreed, if he gave into the request this time, it would have only escalated. Fast forward in time. Oh, we also want you to remove this article, or stop talking about that subject. If you now disagree, not only will we release the photos, but it'll also become public that you've been our puppet for years, and both you and the Washington Post have no credibility and everything you've written in the past cannot be trusted.
I imagine this was the goal. They have some nude photos which are embarrassing and a chance for them to get in the door. If they could get Bezos and Washington Post to bow down on that, they'd have much more power and leverage going forward that could potentially destroy them both. Bezos called them out, and now all they have are these fairly meaningless Bezos nudes, which are not in the highest of demand.
I heard some people suggesting that it was a really poor move to blackmail Bezos in writing. However, if you believe the above, then it makes perfect sense. They wanted a very clean paper trail of their requests, Bezos and the Washington Post accepting the offer, and the future outcome of those actions. This would provide them with blackmail material much more valuable than the photos.
Looking at descriptions of those photos, I honestly don't understand why it's even such a big deal. And I suspect that it's not nearly as big of a deal to Bezos as the blackmailers thought it would be. Perhaps a little projection at play.
Who knows why anyone thought it might have been a big deal. I can imagine reasons. Maybe not all the photos were exchanged with Sanchez. Maybe those descriptions are sufficient to identify the photos within Bezos' collection, but the description doesn't include the most salacious details.
The whole affair reminds me of nothing so much as that scene in "The Dark Knight" that ends with Lucius Fox saying ". . . and your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck."
If you count the weight of the servers required to service all the funds at the institutions his money resides at, and the percentage of his funds compared to the overall amount at that institution, it still might be tons.
Let’s go ahead and not debate this. You won’t come to a satisfactorily equitable answer, no one will change their minds and we’ll just have a thread of gray comments where nothing of value was gained.
His wife supported him after he left his IB job to start Amazon. Amazon would not be without her in all probability. I argue Jeff earned half; precisely half, which would otherwise be zero without his wife's 20+ years of support.
Not being sarcastic, but support for 20 years, is a bit far fetched. At some point after inception, Amazon was successful, even before it went public.
So are you saying Amazon rose in value because Jeff had the undying support of his wife?
I would say the support helped Jeff until the company was self-sustaining and successful. Of course, without the initial support of his wife, Amazon would not have started in the first place, or perhaps, started a bit late or grow a bit slowly. Think of the counter argument. If Jeff's wife was vehemently against it, Jeff did not start any company, and then after 20 years she divorced him, she would still get a share of his money. Do lawyers then argue that since she did not support him in his endeavors, she ought to bear some of his opportunity cost?
Day to day operations were taken care of by Jeff.
Extremely difficult decisions, ones that make or break a company were taken by Jeff.
Hiring and firing decisions were taken by Jeff.
Vision for the company originated with and sustained by Jeff.
I would not credit the wife with half of everything. Difficult to put a number to the situation. It's just sad.
I don't want this thread to devolve needlessly; in summary:
I treat my wife like my cofounder with an equal share of equity. I wouldn't let my cofounder take anything less than half of the total value of the business if a liquidation/separation/liquidity event occurred, so why would I treat my spousal relationship differently considering the work a relationship requires? If you're concerned about your partner entitled to half as not being equitable, you might consider your partner selection before the division of equity.
This applies whether I'm worth a thousand dollars, or a billion dollars.
EDIT: Was I being judgemental? It was intended more as "Choose Wisely" from Indiana Jones. As you mention sytelus, most of success is luck, but you can make every effort to pick the right partner.
Assume you need atleast $100K to start a business but you have only $90K. Your friend comes around and puts in $10K but only if you are willing to offer 50% ownership. Given no other choices, you agree and work your ass off for next 25 years to grow business to $100B while your friend did nothing else for it.
Does your friend deserve $50B? I am not asking from legal point of view because that answer would be yes. I am asking this from philosophical perspective. Clearly if your friend didn’t lend you $10K, you wouldn’t have your $100B business. But that’s the seed stage only work your friend did. Does he deserve fruits of your 25 years of labor? Does your friend deserve that stack because he took risk without knowledge of how future would turn out?
This is one the deepest question that has huge consequences all the way in to the concept of money, capital, debt, rewards, collaboration and purpose itself.
"She believes she is worth all her money, she believes she is more than Mark's sister, she believes she has valuable opinions. Anyone who disagrees is a hater. You're just jealous. "No, she's a fool!" Then how come she's so rich?
Those who are enraged by her are actually suffering from the same delusion she is [..] The standard criticism of her is that she didn't really do anything to deserve her money-- "she got rich because of her brother"-- but this is a profound disavowal of the reality: she got rich because of timing-- even though her job at Facebook was trivial, she was there from the beginning and got paid in stock options. What's interesting is that no one makes this criticism of her, because that's what her haters believe is supposed to happen to them.
[..] even her haters want the money to mean retroactively they were already deserving of it, this kind of fortune has bypassed reality testing and instead creates a new reality, it uses the truth in order to lie: of course I'm not rich because of my work product, duh, you can't measure a human being's value based on his labor. I'm rich because that's what I'm worth. "Isn't that specious reasoning?" Oh, dear, sweet, earnest, Lisa, I want to buy your rock.*
And so the hatred of her, like all hate, is revealed to be a defense. To her haters Randi is a buffoon, a step above relationship expert, she is too glaringly undeserving of that money; Randi is an obscene counterexample to the logic that the payout mirrors value and self worth. She is a narcissistic injury for everyone else. So she's disparaged in a specific way: she doesn't deserve all that money because she got it from her brother."
It's easy (and fun!) to go down the rabbit hole philosophically.
Does Jeff deserve billions of dollars more than the hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees who have collectively built the company? Are their fruits of their labor worth so much less than his, regardless of Jeff's hard business decisions and many more hours per week worked, simply because of how equity is constructed and distributed? Jeff has clearly spent over 20 years building his company, nights, weekends, missed time with family he'll never get back, but can you point to the decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Jeff alone?
Value, its attribution, and its equitable distribution is hard, and executed in an imperfect fashion.
But capital alone is no indicator of ownership interest grants (see: advisors or key employees who are granted equity for their contributions [1]).
Rewards in capitalism are to those who can convince others of value provided in exchange for an equity interest; capital is only a small part of that. Lots of equity is sweat equity!
I have seen this go both ways. Some spouses give everything for other to succeed while some become extra work in addition to what you already have. Lot depends on circumstances, personallies and loads of luck. Let’s not be judgmental here.
Jeff's parents supported him when he left his hedge fund job at D.E. Shaw. He was a quant and he had been there 4 years. He left his bonus on the table when he left but he was extremely well paid. He wasn't exactly hurting for cash.
It's already well established fact that Jeff's/Amazon's costs in the early days were paid for with his parents' life savings.
"The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Brad Stone, the author of the 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. “They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”
"In a 2010 commencement speech he gave at Princeton, Jeff himself acknowledged the gamble his wife had taken. “I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that,” he said. “MacKenzie … told me I should go for it.” (Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)"
And yet spousal support after a divorce isn't in the form of "yes, you should take the extremely risky move of living without my billions of dollars. I support your doing this."
Such are the perils of a billionaire's marriage dissolving in a community property state. Marriage and living in Washington state are voluntary actions. My argument was for more value of a partner's contributions to business success, regardless of statute.
EDIT: @busterarm: We're not going to agree on what defines "earned", good chat.
Yes, but then regulatory hazard isn't the same thing as earning the money. It's just being entitled to it.
Edit: I'm pretty sure Amazon shareholders won't agree with you about the definition of "earned" either. It's not just cash at stake here, it's voting power. Is that spousal support worth 8.5% control of the company? Up from 0%.
I'm not saying she isn't entitled to it, just that there's a difference between value through entitlement and value through work.
> Jeff earned half; precisely half, which would otherwise be zero without his wife's 20+ years of support.
No, Jeff's wife was not in the room making the business decisions that were needed to be made to amass their fortune.
Let's say she watched the kids and maintained the house with no help. That's a mighty contribution, but there are other stay at home spouses that do that too who would be entitled to far less in a separation solely because of the money their partner has made.
So why does she get billions and the average stay at home divorcee gets thousands? Was her contribution to the family a million times more valuable than the average stay at home spouse?
No, Jeff made the money and she's entitled to half. They both knew that going in and know that now. She didn't earn billions through parenting that was so much better than anyone else or create that much more value than the average spouse, but she is entitled to half by law.
To put it another way, if they had signed a prenup and he had paid her $1000/hr 24/7 for 30 years, she would have earned $262 million. Or about 250 times less than the ~$65 billion she could get.
Instead, she walks away with having made about $290k per hour every hour every day for the 25 years they were married. That's a lot of support.
David Letterman laid out the details of a blackmail attempt on air a several years ago. If memory serves, he had been having sex with a young staffer on his show. These sorts of blackmail blowbacks happen from time to time, and it's always people who are very secure - either with money or social status or both - who are able to pull them off.
Exactly - I'm trying to imagine being in his place and being open about all of this...and it's HARD. It's easy for me to want HIM to do it, but as much as I think being disgustingly wealthy would be great...I'm sure I'd still be really nervous about pressing that button.
And it's easy for us to say "Well I wouldn't be in that place to begin with", but as I much as I not be in this EXACT place, most of us have made mistakes that we deeply regret and fear getting out, or at least have the capability to. I don't have to assume I'd do this particular set of bad acts to be vulnerable. And once socially vulnerable, would money make it go away? No, not entirely, not enough. So how hard must it be for people who AREN'T disgustingly wealthy? Or even wealthy? Or even well-off?
Heck, with the quality of "deepfakes" or whatever now-a-days, all you need to do is find someone vulnerable to BEING vulnerable, and they don't even have to have done wrong. One marriage that has had no infidelity but is struggling, one person with a child/spouse who is suffering from serious depression/anxiety/suicidal/related issues. "hey, I have these pictures, and if you do X they don't have to see the light of day. You can deny them being real all you want...do you think that will really help?"
Or take the gross spectacle of releasing celebrity sex pics, or even just non-celebrity revenge pics. The only answer is for (1) we as a society to reject attempts to abuse this info and (2) to be less puritanical and judgmental about the victims here. To the Bezos example, one person can do wrong and we can oppose another using it to do wrong against them without condoning any of the original wrong.
Bezos has a hard time doing this, and it's far, far easier for him than for anyone else. I didn't care about his personal life before (note: Not the same as saying it doesn't matter) and I still don't, but even if I did I can find the blackmail efforts repugnant without letting adulterers off the hook.
During what appears to be an amicable divorce? With an age-appropriate woman? I'm not sure that rises to the level of "mistake," and certainly not to blackmailable acts.
AMI way overplayed their hand here, and we may yet find that they had gone all-in.
This isn't the 1950s. The conservative candidate in the last election is literally a serial philanderer. We're way past the point where the public at large is going to wring their hands about hum drum infidelity.
Blue Origin yanked a super bowl ad after it was disclosed Sanchez was involved in its production team (presumably she was not free, and the ad certainly wasn’t.) It was then shifted to Washington Post at the last minute, with a slapdash ad. [0]
> ... time on whatever he wants?
He can, but that time has to come from somewhere. It’s hard to believe Amazon is getting his full attention. He can own the stock, but I certainly question whether Amazon has a business-focused leader right now.
I think another interesting thing about these times, compared to when such things may have happened 20+ years ago, is that the photos they've described would cause rather little outrage or attract much beyond a few giggles from the public. Especially if released after their existence is already known about. I think the iCloud leaks of 2014 severely tempered society's salacious demand for more pictures of this nature.
As I read Bezos's post, I noticed that at the section where he describes the photographs, I found myself simply scrolling past them to get to the next part of the story.
100% — Let’s be realistic. Between two consenting adults is there anything non-violent that is truly that weird? We have a few pleasure bits attached to our bodies. Some people get excited by objects (fetishes). When you step back a level, the window dressing becomes laughably irrelevant. You’ve seen my dick? Oh no. You saw me courting another female? Private, but oh, the horror.... it’s just so silly in the scheme of it all. I would laugh and laugh at anyone that tried to extort me in this way. “Hey team, someone stole some dick picks of mine, don’t look at them if you want eye contact to remain comfortable, lol.” Life goes on. Am I being a little flippant, yeah, but seriously, step back, in 10 years this won’t even be a footnote on his Wikipedia page beyond the fact that he spanked AMI like the bad toddlers they are.
"I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."
--The President of the United States
Everything you mention pales in comparison to the quote above as long as it's between enthusiastically consenting adults.
Outrage? I doubt it, frankly. Max Mosley was literally filmed in 2008 having a BDSM orgy with hookers dressed up in Nazi regalia and even then the reaction was more muted than not. To the extent there was a public outcry it stemmed entirely from the Nazi themes more than the sexual acts themselves. Personally I give that a pass as well, but understand why it would ruffle feathers.
Probably more to do with the fact that there's so much high quality porn on the internet that we're honestly desensitized to amateur quality celeb nudes. Briefly intriguing, but overall rather "meh?"
Granted, I could just be projecting, but I don't think I'm alone here.
Well, it's sort of weird because I think at one time the thought was that "serious people" would never take a nude of themselves or have affairs, that this kind of action was somehow "beyond the pale" and an action only a few outliers engage in. Nowadays, everyone seems to have decided that these activities are actually very common, though likely still in the minority (I think??)
By and large, humans are sympathetic when they can empathise - or in other words when they can see themselves in another's shoes. At this point, I'd wager most adults in the developed world have learned that they too have an impressive capacity to grow skeletons in their own digital closet, and adjust their worldview and morality slider accordingly.
I don't know. To be honest, I'm a tad curious. The prospect of memes comparing him to Johnny Sins and subsequent bezos / Amazon porn parodies seems humorous.
Yeah, AMI really seems to be operating with an outdated world view here, whereas Bezos correctly assessed that the public at large will be more impressed by the act of standing up to a blackmail attempt than they're concerned about his marital fidelity. AMI's going to get dunked hard : being simultaneously amoral and stupid makes them the easiest target in the world.
I remember David Letterman doing just that. Apparently that's the conventional wisdom on this sort of thing: announce it yourself rather than let the other person take the first public move.
Are the people downvoting this (presumably Trump supporters), that AMI admitted guilt in attempting to influence the 2016 by using their well known tactics to snub a story damaging to the candidate, and that their plea agreement stipulates that they would no longer commit anymore crimes, and that by blackmailing Bezos, they're essentially broken their plea agreement?
This is the very definition of a criminal enterprise. Breaking federal election laws, blackmailing those investigating your crimes. If the connection to the Trump campaign bothers you, that too is factual, given that AMI's agreement involved assistance they gave to the Trump campaign that was illegal, and the owner, David Pecker, is a close personal friend of the President.
There's pretty good circumstantial evidence from this, and the Cohen tapes, that using power and privilege to "deal with" personal or political enemies does not give pause to these people.
I think it's that people are allergic to partisan flamebait, with good reason. Also, these comments usually break the site guidelines. So do comments alleging astroturfing and related things (bottage, shillage) without evidence, so could you guys please not post those?
Except that it is factual that AMI is involved in a criminal enterprise, since they plead guilty to crimes involving improper attempts to influence the 2016 election.
Ok, but I don't think it changes the point. Facts aren't neutral, because there are infinitely many of them and you have to select which ones to mention. Since different sides prefer different facts, they can just as easily amount to a partisan shot as non-facts can. More, actually.
Beyond that, there is huge variation in how one phrases facts and how they relate to context. None of that is neutral or factual, even if the selected facts themselves are.
> They are threatening to post photos of him sexting.
Is a photo published in a disreputable magazine significantly worse than the information already out so far which already got people thinking about him sexting anyway combined with losing custody of ~70 billion dollars in the coming divorce? I'm not so sure. Their privacy was already thoroughly invaded before this latest development.
It doesn't matter if it's worse. Going through a public divorce doesn't make one stop caring about an invasion of sexual privacy. It doesn't work like that.
> Is a photo published in a disreputable magazine significantly worse than the information already out so far which already got people thinking about him sexting anyway
Yes, unequivocally. I suspect any PR person would agree. You can doubt information published by a disreputable source, but most people believe the images they see, even in this deep faked era.
i don't know if "in the extreme". certainly not extreme enough to be extorted over. There is vastly worse things to be ashamed about, most people understand that other people are not flawless, esp. when it doesn't affect them.
To what bigot is "after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends" a scandal?
But if it was "HOT NEW SCANDAL! You'll NEVER believe who's getting a divorce!!!! Cha-ching!" then I'm sure a lot more people would call it a scandal and be inclined to read about it. Clickbait-y titles have been a thing for a long time, and AMI's (as well as basically all other gossipy) magazines use them practically every issue to try and get you to buy it.
Thought experiment: Try taking them at their word for a sec.
"...an exploration of Mr. Bezos’ judgment... is indeed newsworthy and in the public interest."
Wonderful! Looking out for my interests! My heroes, fightin' for me against all the bad judgment! So grateful!
But then, if he'll agree to comply with their demands, suddenly it's not newsworthy anymore.
"AM agrees not to publish, distribute, share, or describe unpublished texts and photos (the “Unpublished Materials”)."
What?! Sellouts! Traitors! What about the public interest?! All the bad judgment!??!?
So yeah, not only do they blackmail public figures; by their willingness to bury the story they also show that they can't be counted on to hold public figures accountable when the time comes. He's right, real journalists don't act like this. (Not that I ever believed that shit; like I said, it was just a thought experiment.)
All you need is a bit of dirt on them, and you're safe from being exposed. Actually that might be the one thing that made this case different and turned it into a blackmail attempt instead of just another in the thousands of sleaze stories over the years.
Yes. When they say it's newsworthy, the only reason they care about that is the legal protection it could offer them if they did publish the photos.
They clearly don't care about using journalism to benefit the public good. They've already admitted to that much when they openly acknowledged they helped bury the Karen McDougal / Trump story. ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/12/national-enq... ) If it's important for shareholders to know about a sex scandal involving Bezos, then it's important for voters to know about sex scandal involving Trump.
And now we have to live in a world where Mr Bezos' unpublished "materials" are patiently waiting to be found among other junk in somebody's hard disk. How can humanity sleep at night...
"proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter"
That's the richest guy in the world saying "I don't give a XXXX what it costs, find out who did it."
It's also the moment in your life when, if you get the result that guys wants, he'll be glad to write you a cheque for $20,000,000 and will be happy to do so and he won't be interested in why the number is that high.
That gave me chills, and the phrase, If you’re going to shoot the king, you’d better be goddamned sure you’re going to kill him flashed through my mind. Well, they missed spectacularly, and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.
I think Omar, Stringer and Machiavelli would have gotten along on some level.
"Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge." -Machiavelli
It’s amazing how many people in Trump’s inner circle love quoting mob movies, calling people “rats” and “stoolies” but can’t seem to get down even the basics of being a half-decent criminal. I mean, Roger Stone literally told people to lie to Congress via an email.
One can quote mob movies all day but that doesn’t make them a smart criminal.
I mean, they've lived in an era when being a white collar criminal is basically without legal penalty (as long as you're a white guy). It's really no wonder so many of them are so completely stupid, they would've had nothing to fear if their guy hadn't gotten himself elected.
There is a good reason for this. Real criminals don't aspire to be criminals... they just are, for whatever reason, necessity or lack of certain morals.
People who idolize criminals show an entirely different character defect, one that is in opposition to being productive in any task criminal or otherwise.
Random but sorta relevant:
In the video game Morrowind, there's a king who wears the best ring in the game - it provides constant life and stamina regeneration. The only way to take it is to kill him. But you better be prepared to fight a room full of very powerful guards. You better be prepared when you go at him.
Indeed! Even I was quite fascinated by that phrase. I really wonder if AMI folks did any what-if analysis before shooting off those e-mails. At least the best-case and worst-case scenarios if not exploring all possible branches.
I mean come on, you are literally taking on the richest person on earth and didn't even evaluate implications!? Just to belabor the point, he's not only the richest person right now, he's among the top 15[1] wealthiest persons of human civilization. And you are threatening him with, what, a bunch of nudish images and adult text messages!?
> and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.
It’s generally not blackmail to threaten someone with some action that, by itself, is legal. See, for example, the many civil settlements where rich people stop the people they raped from going to the police. And I’m unsure what the status is on publishing salacious private photos. Sure, there is a copyright issue. But that’s a civil matter, not criminal.
If it were a crime, it really wouldn’t be much of a threat because they’d be unlikely to follow through, would they?
Edit: there is one federal law where threatening embarrassment is enough, but that requires a demand for money or property, which this is explicitly not.
And because the downvotes are already rolling in: Note that I find this just as abhorrent as you do, and that sexploitation should absolutely be a crime. But the legal situation unfortunately is not at all as clear as the moral one. And the replies below are mostly embarrassing in that nobody even seems to have a clue on the difference between civil and criminal law. Carry on then...
> Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal embarrassing, disgraceful or damaging information about a person to the public, family, spouse or associates unless money is paid to purchase silence. It is a form of extortion. Because the information is usually substantially true, it is not revealing the information that is criminal, but demanding money to withhold it.
Correct. And it's important to note that AMI's claim that they could publish the photos at all is dubious at best. Whoever took the photos (presumably Bezo and/or his girlfriend) holds the copyright to the images and fair use only allows them to be reproduced by AMI if they're newsworthy. AMI claims the photos are newsworthy because they speak to his business judgment which is a serious stretch for the photos of Bezos and completely irrelevant with respect to the photos of his girlfriend.
Wikipedia says this: Blackmail is an act of coercion using the threat of revealing or publicizing either substantially true or false, and often damaging, information about a person, to the public, family members, or associates unless certain demands are met.
It seems its considered blackmail but in the strictly legal sense I'm not sure. There's probably a law to cover that though, extortion?
It only needs to be “something of value”... often money, but I think most reasonable people can see the potential value of the requested statement from Jeff Bezos.
Now if AMI wanted you or I to say those statements I’m not sure how valuable they’d be.
To elaborate, "something of value" is the language from the federal law. Under Washington state law, blackmail explicitly includes demands for services.
I would think that the demand for
a public statement would qualify, however, I'm not a lawyer, and this case is unusual enough that I would not be confident in my personal interpretation of the law.
> It’s generally not blackmail to threaten someone with some action that, by itself, is legal.
That's entirely untrue. The downvotes are rolling in because your assertion about blackmail is simply wrong. There are a myriad of local, state, and federal laws on blackmail that cover situations like this.
Blackmail can involve any threats to coerce using private materials, not just for financial objectives.
Apparently AMI and David Pecker's non-prosecution agreement for the Michael Cohen stuff is contingent on them not continuing to do crime. So i guess that's out the window now.
Blackmail is a law which forbids the possessor of some information from offering to sell it to the subject of the information. The possessor can sell it to anyone else in the world, but cannot offer to the subject.
If I had an affair with a celebrity, I can start a bidding war for my story between all the movies studios, television studios, and publishing houses. That's legal. If I invite the celebrity to bid, then I've committed a crime.
I've always found it hard to justify blackmail laws.
What you describe isn’t blackmail. Blackmail is offering the celebrity the chance to keep you from offering the story to the others, in exchange for a fee.
If you actually had a setup as you described, all of the news outlets would publish the facts of your story, without paying you anything, because facts aren’t protected by copyright. The only thing you could sell would be an exclusive interview.
So it's an ordering problem? It's only blackmail if I offer to sell my silence before making offers to other parties? So if I have an offer from a movie studio for the rights to my story and then allow the celebrity to make a counter-offer, that's not blackmail?
When I said publishing house I meant book publishers like Penguin Random House. I don't know where news outlets come into it.
You’re not offering the same thing to the publisher and the celebrity. To the publisher, you’re offering your version of certain currently unknown events that they may be interested in publishing. You’ll need to disclose the basic facts first before they will know if they even want to buy. To the celebrity, you’re offering the promise not to disclose even those basic facts to anyone, even to explain what it is you’re offering to other parties.
Whether the medium is a book or a newspaper or a website is legally immaterial. Thinking about the information as news is just useful because no one owns the facts, only their particular descriptions of them.
Weird, i always found it hard to justify the legality of either that type of bidding war or the operations and structure of an organisation that would participate it one.
I think blackmail is obviously wrong as is sensationalism and appealing to base desires over informing people. i am not sure where laws should apply, but these appear to be important levers in the control of our society we should pay special attention to due to their ability to enable and empower the unscrupulous. If we dont have laws to govern these thing we must accept the responsibility of society to educate everyone to a high standard (as an independent thinker, more than a rule follower) to mitigate the severe risk in this area.
Only analysis that matters in the end is the judge's. That's why when you're operating with something like that hanging over your head, you should keep your nose clean.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who sidestep trouble with a deal like that, and then go right out and burn it up like idiots. I just don't get it?
We are all human. Nobody wins this 'moral crusade' that takes up so much airtime.
We should be much more focused on the existential threats that the entire biosphere is dealing with, not the 'dick pics' of the world's richest man. He's just another dude at his core it seems, happens to be founder of Amazon though.
Nobody is perfect. Gandhi was apparently racist and John Lennon was an egomaniac, I admire them both still for their efforts to make the world better than what it was before.
Bezos still a human being like me and like you, whether you love him or hate him. I didn't say he cured cancer but last I checked, he puts ONE BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR into Blue Origin to help our species keep evolving towards a spacefaring civilization. How many other people are doing that?
I am aware of the grey-area Amazon operates in but it's still better than the oligarchs before Big Tech. I'll give my money to Amazon before Wal-Mart, I know that. Amazon invests billions of dollars in retraining warehouse employees who are getting replaced by automation for high-demand jobs. Amazon didn't have to do that, but they made a decision to and I'm sure Bezos signed off on it.
If you disagree with Amazon and AWS that much, build something better.
That's a subjective opinion. Amazon started out as a book store and I love books, so I naturally stuck with them from the late 90's til now. It's an incredible story to go from next to dead to where they are today. Only bigger 'comeback' is probably Apple, another company you probably hate. Right?
Facebook is the next AOL or Yahoo, just a matter of time now. People are loyal until they aren't, then they'll leave in droves. The reverse 'early adopter' stage is already happening...
Does Amazon do more good for society or bad? Serious question. I wonder this a lot. Can they be blamed for wanting to create something better than Wal-Mart? Can they be blamed for the fact that shareholders expect growth and customers expect lower prices all the time? Is this not a bigger problem than just blaming the billionaires for all of society's woes? Aren't all of us complicit for buying and supporting Big Tech in our day-to-day lives?
Fair points. I don't have the answers. I'm curious to find out like the rest of us though.
What are people expecting? The billionaires give up their money, redistribute it into the 'common good' and all our problems will go away? Yeah, I'm sorry but I think this situation is more complicated than that.
If we made a pro con list, what would you say are Amazon's greatest negatives to society? It saves people time and money, and AWS has enabled many start ups and small businesses. I can't think of any big negatives other than the general hate that people have towards big companies.
The only negative I can think of is 'monopolistic tendency'. Yet, this is almost inevitable for any prolifically innovative company like Apple or Alphabet.
I happen to like Peter Thiel a lot and agree with most of his perspectives. I'm not sure if punishing an extremely forward-thinking organization is the way forward for our society.
I don't know. I'm hungry to find out though. What are your thoughts on this?
I would agree about the 'monopolistic tendencies' but I don't think that's necessarily bad. Monopolies are not inherently bad. Being anti competitive and trying to coerce consumers is bad. But, by and large, Amazon is a "monopoly" because they offer a better product/service than everyone else at a better price.
In other words, bad behavior that's bad for the consumer is highly correlated with monopolies, but not synonymous. Sometimes companies grow large exactly because they are good for the consumer and so consumers prefer them.
Related to that, I think a lot of the negative feelings toward Amazon come from a fear about the power that Amazon holds as such a huge company without substantial competition. And while they do have a lot of power, I've not seen abuses from them that would warrant such fear.
Regardless of what you've typed, at least don't outright lie and completely expose your troll. A fundamental truth is 2+2=4, and the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. What is typed above is not.
You're really calling a user who joined in 2008 with 12k karma a troll? I think it's nonsense that parent's opinion against Bezos was flagged, instead of the erudite references to Batman and The Wire in these comments.
Politics is about alliances, and I can fight against Bezos' shitty business behavior while also supporting his fighting back against those who would scandalize common social behavior (yes, sexting is normal), and exploit the threat of scandal for undue gain.
It would be unethical because any media outlet he owns is an inappropriate place to select to air his personal business. Whether or not he pays for it is immaterial.
As Bezos states in his post, he already gets tons of crap from Trump and other idiots that he uses WaPo for personal ends (mainly because these other amoral characters couldn't believe themselves owning a newspaper and not using it as a personal propaganda outlet). He's wise to post this on a neutral platform and not give his enemies any more ammunition.
Sure, I don't think leaning on WaPo would have helped him here (and I did not suggest that). Plenty of other papers he doesn't own publish random letters to the editor.
Of course, we all know the only reason WashPo publishes articles critical of the administration is Bezos right? It mean, it's not like every other mainstream paper all over the world does it. And for no connection, no connection at all, the Whitehouse is suddenly talking about raising the rate Amazon is charged for postage. That couldn't possibly be vindictive retaliation by state power to get a newspaper to change, could it? Nah.
He actually seems to understand the relationship of publisher to newspaper in a way that fairly traditional. He ( in the form of Amozon ) has made it very easy to subscribe to the Post and helped raise it's paywall. But has assiduously left the editorial side of the house to the people he has hired to run it.
Personal stuff is for blogs. The Washington Post is a business, a respected newspaper, an internationally renowned journalistic publication. It’s not a soapbox for Bezos...
In fact, why not bring up that he owns one of the most heavily trafficked websites on the planet. Why didn’t he publish this letter to Amazon.com front page? Equally valid question, no?
Is there a good way to verify it’s actually written by him? Doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to set up a fake Medium profile and post this claiming to be him. There’s nothing else posted under this profile, almost no followers, unless he has linked to it from some other verified source I don’t think we can assume it is genuine.
Edit: apparently he verified it by tweeting it. Still a worthwhile thing to remember to check in the future though, I imagine this kind of thing eventually being gamed, especially in such a drama-filled escapade as this.
He doesn't need to use the Post. He's the richest man in the world, if he writes an article claiming someone is trying to extort him it'll get plenty of press regardless. And with Medium he can just publish it himself and it removes any biases folk have about the paper.
He owns a newspaper company, but the newspaper isn't his personal blog. It would be quite improper to use it as such, and a decent editor probably wouldn't allow it. He could maybe write an opinion piece, though even that seems dubious.
Apparently it's not a clear cut case of extortion, because no money is exchanged. A "thing of value" may do, but it's not clear that AMI's demands rise to that level.
AMI is willing to accept a loss of future profits gained from running the story, in exchange for Bezos’s capitulation. If you have access to AMI’s advertising rate card and a rough subscriber count you can estimate the USD value this information represents.
As others have mentioned, “thing of value” does not have to be monetary. For example, there are a number of cases where a person was found guilty of extorting another for sexual favors[0] or to exact a particular benefit (political or otherwise) from a victim.
No, it doesn't only mean "money". Still, it's not perfectly clear that the requested declaration is a "thing of value" and legal scholars are already debating it.
The idea of AMI foregoing a story is not a good argument in this case because this would mean AMI profits by Bezos ignoring the request...
Having read the whole thing, man Jeff Bezos has a great deal of courage.
It helps to be backed by untold wealth but here is a guy who stands tall in the face of ghastly behaviour and in the face of deep personal embarrassment.
I'm going to push back against this characterization as "ghastly personal behavior". For one, it's not clear if he and his wife were already separated, at least at a personal level, before this affair. But this general idea that it's somehow "ghastly" to send a paramour love notes and sexually suggestive pictures is a sad remnant of our puritanical history, and the sooner we rid ourselves of this notion, the better.
What struck me was how brazen AMI was about the blackmail. Then I realized: they were comoftable doing it that way, putting it in writing, because in nearly every other time they've done this, it worked.
The problem I have with most super rich people is that they consider genuine risk far less important than potential embarrassment. E.g. they won't dare taking a stand politically because of the chance that someone will go public with some scandalous nonsense. Bezos on the other hand seems willing to calculate differently. I have to say, this has changed my opinion of him a lot in his favour. On the very remote chance you're reading this Jeff, good on you!
One thought did occur to me is that he is basically daring AMI to release the pictures. What if he knows the providence of these pictures, knows how they got into AMI hands, and knows that if AMI publish them he can sue them, Gawker (not Buzzfeed) style, into the ground?
If AMI committed a crime by threatening to post them if he didn't keep quiet, and he posted this, AMI definitely also committed a crime if they then posted the pictures in retaliation.
Bezos is reasonably safe in airing this, because AMI will only dig itself a deeper hole if they post them. AMI botched the crud out of this operation by leaving a paper trail: They made accepting their offer completely unnecessary; I don't think there's any chance the pictures get posted now.
All the money in the world can't buy your pride / dignity back, especially if some "embarrassing" evidence get out there.
It's something in the way people would look at you, talk about you, etc ...
If you combine that with the Streisand effect, there's no way a public figure can take this kind of hit and walk away unphased. It's very much human nature, and that's why Jeff's move is bold.
A good reply might have been, "Sorry, Mr. Pecker, but I'm not interested in working with you on this. But I'd suggest you hold off for a couple of weeks before releasing those photos. Playgirl has an exclusive on them in their next issue, and their lawyers are probably better than yours."
Agreed. Bezos gained more respect (in my eyes, and I'm delighted to see a lot of others too!) by the way he's handling this than anything that could be lost by the "reveals". (My own carefactor is zero).
In fact offering the full text of the extortion attempt shows true courage, and at the same time claims back all the power the items might have had.
It just makes me despise these dickheads even more and totally root (the Australian version) for Bezos - go get them!!
> All the money in the world can't buy your pride / dignity back, especially if some "embarrassing" evidence get out there.
AFAIK we are talking about a naked pic. If that was really so dangerous, people would never take naked selfies in the first place. I think it's hyperbole, even by american's puritan standards
I suppose it is heavily dependent on one's personality and what one has actually been caught on camera doing. But assuming your average sexytime pics, if some of me were made public, I'd care very little about it. If someone started looking at me funny over it, I'd laugh at them; if my boss or someone else with power were to be a prudish twit, changing jobs would be a hassle, but that's the worst I could imagine, and, eh, I'm lucky that doing so isn't as huge a deal as it is for some.
I do of course realize that things can be very different for people in different positions, and of course sextortion of minors is a very different thing. But for someone reasonably secure both financially and emotionally, who cares? Only the sort of people I don't willingly spend time around anyway.
I don't know Bezos, but he's certainly OK financially, and this reaction seems to demonstrate emotional competence, too.
The "Principle of Least Regret" is an excellent way to make decisions, particularly binary ones:
Given a choice between action X and action Y, and given all the facts and experience and self-knowledge currently at one's disposal, which option will you look back on in future with fewer/lesser regrets?
You then commit to the path that you currently judge minimises your future contrition.
The very literal minded will take this at face value and miss the point of the construct, which is that having committed to a given path you have minimised your regret even if it turns out to be the wrong choice. Because you can look back and say "given the information I had, it looked like the right one". Which is another way of saying, "if I had my time again, I'd do it the same way", only now with rational evidence of this claim.
Thus turning confirmation bias into an affirmative and effective decision tool, by preforming the outcome around it.
If you follow this procedure, you may still turn out unhappy, but you won't blame yourself. It is especially recommended for people who may otherwise experience chronic decision paralysis comorbidly with crippling imposter syndrome.
>Given a choice between action X and action Y, and given all the facts and experience and self-knowledge currently at one's disposal, which option will you look back on in future with fewer/lesser regrets?
One practical issue with this advice is that it can lead to the "death of a thousand cuts" where any single binary event can be weighed one way but over the course of thousands of iterations, the aggregate would be weighed the opposite.
Sure, in theory one would take into account all possible futures where this could happen but in practical terms that is a tough thing to do and there is seldom a good point to stop.
That hasn't been a problem in practice. What you're describing makes it sound like The Dice Man, but decision regret hasn't turned out to be an aggregate function. Under the POLR framework each past decision becomes a sunk cost; each committed decision is the new baseline.
On the other hand I tend only to apply it for substantial life decisions. Quitting my job to launch a startup; getting married; moving to another country (x4); not eating the entire cheesecake; choosing Vim over Emacs etc.
Where at the end once the mc has the new ability, she can see her painful future, and yet she accepts it because, well, what can you do about predestination? Had me thinking, if an individual could perceive time non-linearly, would they see their future folly, and yet perform the same mistakes, at peace with their actions?
Nah. The public nature and embarrassment of the reveal may be a factor, as plenty of marriages survive cheating - and there are plenty of cheaters who don't get caught.
Taken from the point of view of the divorce court, this is a LOT more ammo for his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her side. These photos are very soon to hit the greater web/papers and WILL be used against him in the proceedings.
You are correct, this decision by him to speak out is likely to cost him Billions.
Why should his wife get more or less than half of their common property (Washington is a community property state) regardless of who had an affair with who? They're both multi-billionaires and will live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
I think they are pretty mature about their divorce. I'd assume they just split things in half, because they built it together anyways. Seems pretty straight forward - I doubt their will be any public drama.
> If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)
Sounds like precisely why he felt the buck had to stop somewhere.
Really? I'm at the other extreme: blackmailing me would be pointless as there would be no gain (not to mention in my boring case any unclad selfies would have to be synthesized).
And in the current world[+] there's so much exposure that such pictures will be drowned out by the sheer volume of stuff. Yes, we're still at a point where politicians can lose their jobs because of racialist photos or certain indiscretions, but at least the "indiscretions" have less and less power over non-politicians (actual bad deeds still do, but that's not an issue here).
And these pictures are all about consensual behavior that isn't extraordinary. There's not even a scandal.
[+] or in what I can imagine is a linear projection of today's world forward only a few years from now
This could become a replay of Peter Thiel episode, with Bezos destroying the tabloid or at least seriously wounding it.
Morality aside, I don't have any sympathy for tabloids like these. What bothers me is I don't think much will change, even if Bezos wins here. As long as the public has voracious appetite for celebrity juicy stories, someone will find a way to feed it.
I think there's an important distinction between Gawker and Pecker's rag. I get that people hate both for being celebrity gossip slime-factories, but only one of them seems to make a habit of extortion and (at the very least) gray-hat political operations.
The distinction is subtle I admit. Racist depictions would be a white person playing a nonwhite character (e.g. Fu Manchu, Tonto or Othello), or Shakespear's depiction of Shylock.
Racialism -- pretending or willfully wanting to believe that there are actual meaningful racial distinctions differences -- you can see in the photos of lynchings, slave era laws in the slave states etc. I think most of the people in those photos knew they were wrong, just as I believe some of those old laws I've read were written by people who knew they were wrong. Likewise modern laws that happen to "coincidentally" exclude some sections of the population from voting.
I believe some racist comments and representations can be innocent (though in this day and age, quite few IMHO) and they can also be intended to send a message (e.g. neither Alexander Hamilton nor Aaron Burr were black; you could purposefully either neuter or hyper-extend the portrayal of Shylock to make a point).
not exactly tabloid blackmail, but 'revenge porn' was and is still prevalent on the internet, and I don't doubt that a lot of small scale blackmail happens as well, and if I would guess I think many of the affected people have very little recourse.
Anyone with a job has means, more agencies just need to start thinking of it as a pipeline business. You can even go as low as to threaten to dox various meme authors for instance, unless they start paying $10/mo into a fund. Get enough of them over enough time and the methods used to de-anonymize or uncover whatever other information you want to charge people for the privilege of not releasing will pay for themselves.
If you ever find yourself with scandalous or incriminating material on someone remember this: Blackmail will always fail in the long run.
It's commonnly known in espionage tradecraft that it's an absolute last resort or totally off limits tool. The risk you take with coercive trade craft are insanely high.
Interestingly up, but responding with 403. Being unfamiliar with AWS' web hosting platform, is there a service that would fall back to denying access if certain sub-modules or instances were pulled?
This is literally the best thing he could have done. Would love to hear more about other people who have been black-mailed too - perhaps there is something much larger afoot. Hell, if they are this bold about taking on Bezos, potentially the other black-mail-ees are some very influential big hitters (billionaires, politicians, etc).
As others have pointed out, the big story is that he's directly accusing them of political motivation (US and/or Saudi), with them threatening him almost confirming that this is correct. For them to show their hand so badly hints strongly towards some guilt. Digging further seems like the last thing they want, so I think it's what should be done.
Would just like to add - regardless of how embarrassing the photos may or may not be, any "news" agency that publishes them goes straight to the top of my shit list and hopefully everybody elses too. Would be good if there was some organized way to show solidarity against black mail of this kind.
He's taking an ostensibly 'strong stand' - but he's also furthering the public furor.
Before he was a 'somewhat well known person' but now he's really, really going to be famous, and probably not for the right reasons. And by the way, most people probably don't know how he is yet. That's hard to grasp because we certainly do - but if you walk out your door right now, take a stroll and ask people if they know how 'Jeff Bezos' is, surprisingly fewer people will know who is is than you'd imagine.
You know Maroon 5? They were a 'famous' band with hit albums and singles. But since the lead singers role on 'the Voice' - their popularity has skyrocketed into mainstream. Listen to Zuck's sister Randy talk about the history of 'The Social Network' film - apparently the film caused a huge upsurge in FB accounts so it was a blessing. But who among us hadn't heard of Maroon 5 before 'The Voice'? Or Facebook before 'The Social Network'. 'We' are not normal folks. Normal folks have a variety of interests that may not include hearing about Maroon 5, or Facebook in it's early years, or Jeff Bezos.
Bezos is entering a new realm of pop culture, the news cycle in a very ugly landscape, and he's opening himself up for trouble.
'The truth' is the first thing lost in the fog of war, and certainly in pop culture war as well.
It might have been a better move to simply shut up about it, or at least be low key. Newsrooms work on the fuel of tidbits of facts, actions, and create narratives - without fuel, these issues just fade in the background because other , more clickworthy stuff is always happening.
Personally, I would have made a public statement through a rep. which possibly included the extortion notes, just for public record, but I wouldn't for a second make it personal or do things in my name, give interviews etc. etc..
Finally, and something that people have not denoted - but this 'scandal' has it's essence partly in sneaky photos - but mostly in the notion that 'Bezos, supposedly family man, was caught cheating on his wife'. I don't know the details of what happened, but this perception can actually be damaging. Even among those who are more liberal on such issues ... the idea of a rich billionaire guy, philandering around with some woman while his wife and kids are at home ... this is a bad image irrespective of what reality is.
The only winners in media storms are those for whom it's a way of life, i.e. 'their only value' - like newsrooms and media creations like Donald Trump.
I feel Bezos might be getting sucked into a storm he may not be able to get out of.
There are very few things that could risk his tenure as CEO of Amazon, but a wrong turn in the public eye is surprisingly easy, and it could cause trouble. People lose their CEO jobs often not because the board things some real wrongdoing has happened, but because public opinion is just up in a fuss about something.
Edit: If he is making ostensible claims that the US or Saudi's are actively spying on him, this could hurt him. True or not, it just sounds wildly conspicuous and conspiratorial, and it could easily turn into fodder for those who might not want to treat him well. It could also hurt his position among regular business people who might see it as a wild claim, irrespective of what the truth is.
I said in my post I would probably make a carefully worded statement through a spokesperson for the public record, possibly including the email, and avoid in any way creating something the press or anyone else could buy into as clickbait narrative. Stay out of the public eye entirely, no photos, personal quotes, attacks etc..
Bezos will not win if this blows up. He'll win in the eyes of a few people, and lose in others, and it will only create a stain on his record.
Think of the legacy of Bill and Melinda Gates. It's relatively unscathed.
>He'll win in the eyes of a few people, and lose in others, and it will only create a stain on his record.
This will happen even if he does what you said.
> Think of the legacy of Bill and Melinda Gates. It's relatively unscathed.
Yeah, that's because they did not do anything wrong. Here, Jeff cheated on his wife and he is facing the consequences. BTW, Bill gates was very much reviled during the early Microsoft days. People tend to see beyond his past actions due to his tremendously useful social work he has undertaken since he left MS.
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why this is so low on HN? It has more votes and is more recent than anything except the "How I didn't make a billion dollar company" post, but is at rank 11.
The title isn't something that I would have had any idea what it was about or why I should read it if I hadn't been linked here from a comment thread with a more informative title.
HN penalizes post randomly sometimes. The last time I had one of my blogpost pretty high on the front page, it lasted an hour and then went directly to 5th-page. It gave me an impression that everything on the FP is heavily handpicked.
I find this extremely irresponsible. This is a serious issue.
I am beginning to think that this is a conspiracy by AMI to damage Washington Post. If Jeff would have done something as requested by AMI, they would again use that against him and start shouting that WaPo has lost credibility, since Jeff is so easy to blackmail.
"I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter."
Yeah I know. It's almost just slipped in there as an afterthought, but it tells a story of Bezos saying to AMI: "I'll spend more money on this than your entire media 'empire' is worth, if that's what it takes... And I'll barely notice the loss."
I'm afraid that at said point, we will marvel more with the fact that the people at the center of it all got away with it. Remember Nixon, or Iran-Contra?
The investigations against Trump and his people are already way past the scope of Nixon or Iran-Contra.
Particularly, at the very least, Trump is on the hook for state charges in New York about his Trump foundation. He can't get pardoned by a sympathetic successor.
I'm not a fan of the guy. He (and all the GAFAs) is killing our public services all over Europe by not paying any taxes (legally, I know, we did this to ourselves).
I think he did good by reacting as he did, though.
However, something is bugging me: how can you be so stupid to make dick pics with a connected device nowadays?
I mean, the fappening happened, so much happened that you cannot ignore the fact that nothing you're doing with an online device is private.
Anyone, any entity with enough cash, can hack into all your devices in a glimpse.
When you're Jeff f*ing Bezos, you must know better, come on!
On Gavin de Becker: If you've done some shady stuff, it's hard to imagine a worse person to have investigating and digging into your activities than Gavin de Becker. Here's a excerpt from Gavin's wikipedia entry on just a little of his work over the years. This Bezos issue isn't even his first foray up against a tabloid:
Along with the United States Marshals Service, he co-designed the MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems, which is used to screen threats to Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, members of United States Congress, and senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency... De Becker testified in the successful 1994 civil case arising when The Globe tabloid accused an uninvolved man of being the actual assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy. Globe tried to get de Becker's testimony thrown out by a higher court; however, it was ultimately upheld[0]
He seems to be driving his point home in how, when including the email from Dylan Howard, the mobile (cell) number in the text is redacted, but the signature image (containing said number) is left unmodified.
Hiding in all the obvious noise surrounding this case, where Bezos is certainly the nice guy, I can still get Gail Wynand vibes from him.
The power he holds is unprecedented.
A little less than a year ago, AMI/National-Enquirer published a 100 page ad-free magazine dedicated to the praise of MBS and the Saudi Kindgom [1]
The Saudis claimed they had no involvement in it, although an Associate Press investigation revealed that it had circulated among Saudis weeks before publication [2]
This issue was distributed at supermarkets across the United States.
Whether there was an untoward arrangement behind it might be under investigation.
The Post, along with the Times, has been pursuing and reporting a story that David Pecker, AMI's CEO, has been working with a Saudi go-between, in part as an effort to expand their business. More importantly, Jamal Khashoggi, who we now know almost beyond a reasonable doubt† was targeted by Mohammad Bin Salman before Saudi assassins murdered him in Turkey (most probably at MBS's behest), was a Post employee.
† Reports emerged today that there's apparently audio of MBS himself ruminating over having him murdered.
How does that explain Pecker's rage at the WaPo digging into AMI's Saudi connection, though?
Nearly everyone who wants funding at this scale hits up the Saudis. Describing that AMI looked for funding with the Saudi royals doesn't strike me as a particularly significant reveal; Musk did it relatively recently, and he wasn't excoriated for it. How is news that AMI is doing it worthy of a push-all-the-chips-into-the-pot move like AMI pulled?
Now if Bezos' private investigation team is getting close to some kind of Kryptonite like Pecker personally authorized his staff to assist with encouraging Khashoggi to visit the Saudi's Turkish embassy as a favor to the royals to try to ingratiate himself and angle for a funding pitch, then I could understand Pecker's reaction. Even if Pecker and AMI didn't know the Saudi's intent, it would indeed be very awkward for AMI and the Saudis. The other direction this could be going is the Saudis are directing AMI via cut-outs to dissuade any deeper investigation into Khashoggi's death, and miscalculated Bezos' mettle.
I wonder if AMI overplayed the "Bezos cheated in his marriage!1!1" angle, too. If there is more or less a collective shoulder shrug that billionaire POTUS DJT cheated on Melania, I'm not clear what AMI thought the impact would be on Amazon's public opinion that its billionaire founder/leader is doing the same.
This type of response is quite common when investigating criminal masterminds: Maximum outrage; Blatant denial; Threatening retaliation if the investigation is not halted immediately.
Whether or not Pecker is a criminal mastermind is for the courts to say, but his response does him no favors in the public eye and in the press.
You're seem to ignoring what AMI was demanding from Bezos/WaPo. Wanting funding from Saudis is no big deal, unless you compromise your core business to do this sell-out. Maybe the deal would have fallen through with it becoming public? Why do we need any much bigger conspiracy?
So let me get this straight.. the owner(s) of the National Enquirer are doing this.. because they're worried about what, their journalistic credibility? Seriously? After having published the Enquirer for decades already?
Alternately, maybe some people just like to be bullies.
It is possibly due to pressure from Saudi Arabia. MBS was pissed that WP is going after him after killing of Khashoggi. Enquirer (and Pecker) are quite close to MBS, they ran a cover story on him (how awesome he is).
It could be a bigger story than it seems at the moment.
> Greeting Americans on newsstands is a high-quality glossy advertisement for MBS, The New Kingdom. It retails for $13.99, has no ads and its 200,000 copies can be found in venues ranging from U.S. airports to WalMart, Safeway and Kroger’s—raising questions about the magazine’s financing and its origins. The Saudis say they don’t know how it came to be. AMI, which publishes The National Enquirer, insists it had no outside editorial or financial assistance, from the Trump administration or otherwise.
This made me just realize that MBS might fund Enquirer's legal fights with Bezos which may reduce the possibility of Enquirer's extinction (as everyone is hypothesizing).
Blackmail is the motivator behind practically all surveillance. It's the essence of spycraft and much of what we call law enforcement. Most of it, as here, doesn't directly involve money, but coercion. Getting something on a judge's son, prosecutor's father, or administrator's husband is as useful as on the target.
Was that decision or contract awarded by merit, or coerced? We can rarely know. This is not academic. Why did Obama ratchet up the war on whistleblowers in the CIA/NSA/DIA, charging them with espionage? We can only speculate.
I mean, that is if Medium doesn't run out of money in the next ~18 months. It's been a savage series of pivots to get to here, and even then, I'm not sure if it's actually sustainable.
Imho, the best possible response to this kind of situation is to generate thousands of (deep) fakes, with different parameters, and spread them. Then, nobody will know what the real photos were. Also, with this many fakes going around, nobody will really care anymore. And mr. Bezos certainly has the resources to get a team of CGI artists to work on something like this.
I get the sense that his response is more about principle and not getting pushed around by some sleazeball hack posing as a journalist than it is about avoiding personal embarrassment. Bezos is secure in his professional life. Whether or not more pictures come out have little bearing on the outcome of his divorce. The biggest concern here is the reaction of his family and friends. The ones closest to him would probably know about the extortion attempt anyway. This is a guy who is worth $140B. That’s not normal and has likely made relationships difficult for many years. The people he truly cares about, the ones who are close, have already gotten past the thing that makes him completely different from everyone else in the world. Why would they care about something like sexting and nude pics that make him the same as most people in the world? They don’t care. As for everyone else not close to him, I’m sure he learned long ago how to tune out the noise.
The "I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter" part gives off pretty strong "money is no object" vibes haha.
He specifically calls attention to the fact that his wealth is one reason he was able to speak out about this:
> If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)
Quoting somebody who posted in the deleted duplicate thread:
"To modify a quote from The Dark Knight:
"Let me get this straight, you think one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, who owns the Washington Post and pays out of his own pocket to send rockets to space, won't stand up for himself so your plan is to blackmail this person?
The right to publish here would be protected under the first amendment. But:
1. An argument for the news worthiness of these pictures could be made like in the Hulk Hogan v Gawker[1]. This is a delicate balance if a judge decides to let this go to trial. Things could get interesting. Especially given the written email.
2. Could a criminal case not be made for blackmail under Title 18 [2]? Or is it that now Jeff has published the letter it is no longer considered blackmail as long as they don't publish the picture?
Interesting attempt to blackmail someone (who in this case happens to be, you know, the richest man in the world), with information that is generally public already. All that would have been added were a few additional pictures. How much extra public embarrassment is going to come from that?
For all the times Hacker News criticizes personal "anecdata", nitpicks the tiniest flaw in methodology, and demands statistical significance for every trivial matter, when it comes to politics they sure are willing to run the gossip mill without an ounce of critical thought.
This is public person directly involved laying down criminal blackmail attempt accusation whose goal was to stop him from investigating the source of the information. If Besoz is lying, Pecker and AMI can sue him for false accusations and win handsome sum of money.
Things that make this interesting case:
Pecker was not worried about himself, because National Enquirer has right to publish pictures they get. He wanted to hide source of the information. That's weird.
Pecker surely is not worried about the wellbeing of some paparazzi or low level information source. Attempted a blackmail and exposing himself to criminal liability means that there is something there.
Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.
President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.
Is Bezos implicating Trump himself in this scheme?
Bezos essentially got paid by the CIA to buy the WashPost ($600 million contract from the CIA, next thing you know, Bezos buys the paper).
Let's not kid ourselves about his altruism - the purpose of owning a large paper like the Post is political power... this has been true since at least the time of Lord Beaverbrook.
With iPhones on both ends, I'm having a hard time believing the "hack" accusation. Apple has learned their lessons from The Fappening debacle, and you you can't as much as sneeze without triggering 2FA if you're accessing stuff from the device not already tied to the user.
More likely this was leaked either by Sanchez herself or by someone who had access to her Apple Photos photostream (such as on e.g. a Mac or a shared iPad) where all of this stuff would pop up unless they were using something like WhatsApp with "save images" setting set to off.
Less sophisticated users probably don't even know this setting exists, and it's on by default.
> I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
It's going to be fascinating to see what he uncovers. David Pecker has been playing this extortion game for decades (frequently on behalf of his buddy Don Trump). Now Bezos has given a blank check to drain the swamp.
> To lead my investigation, I retained Gavin de Becker. I’ve known Mr. de Becker for twenty years, his expertise in this arena is excellent, and he’s one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know. I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter.
I'm impressed he didn't censor out the text that says what the photos contain. The post would have had a similar impact either way I think. Nobody should have to be embarrassed about harm-free personal activities though.
Sure, I don’t want pictures of my dick poking out my trousers on general release. But as evidenced by the fact that these apparently _were not_ good blackmail material, I can think of considerably more embarrassing situation someone could find themselves in.
The only salacious angle here — and the letter he got really tries to drive this home — was that he was conducting an affair.
Many more men than women have had their career as C-level executives ended by sexual indiscretions. That's of course because there are many more men than women in C-level executive positions, but your "if he was a woman" is a non sequitur.
I feel like there’s value in drawing a line between “sexual indiscretion” and harassment/assault. Using the expense account to take your mistress out, paying your strip bar bill with the company card, or banging your consenting coworker on your boss’s desk during the Xmas party is sexual indiscretion.
Abusing a position of power to get sexual favours from a coworker is something quite different, and I don’t think anyone benefits from conflation of the two.
I have done things in my past that people could and may publicly shame me for. I was worrying TODAY about what I could do to try to avoid a possible future where my research gets derailed from some kind of extortion. It's my understanding that reciprocal altruism can spread easily through a competitive community, but extortion can overcome altruism when information is kept private.
This is Jeff Bezos helping us figure out useful language for standing up to extortion, which is important if we want reciprocal altruism to be a new cultural norm. Transparency is the anti-extortion pattern.
What’s kind of weird about this move by National Enquirer is that it seems so poorly thought out. Bezos’ “affair” was known to his wife and they parted amicably; sending genital photos is probably the least embarrassing thing you could catch a billionaire doing, and in fact it kind of humanizes him.
In the age of privacy conversations, I can’t see how this is supposed to end up positive for the paper. They oversold it here and seem to have opened themselves up to some tough questions in the process.
Not surprised the whole mainstream media attacks him recently. This guy doesn't agree with them, so he gets consequences. The left has a vast corrupt media support it. I wonder which one is the next victim of this party. Apple and Walmart have been consistently threatened, and the past year has been Facebook (the left likes FB a lot and even not disclosing some bad things of this company until 2017 ).
> My lawyers argued that AMI has no right to publish photos since any person holds the copyright to their own photos, and since the photos in themselves don’t add anything newsworthy.
Wait, is this really true? If it is, then why do wedding photogs claim they have copyright ownership?
Whatever people say about the social media, their evilness is at least transparent. This kind of "journalism" is another level of evil and reminds me why all traditional media should be distrusted.
It looks like criminal blackmail attempt. In a normal case Bezos would just forward all evidence to authorities for more investigation and prosecution. He would issue short press release later when the case goes to court.
Because Bezos thinks there is a political angle, and he wants to really find out who is behind this and expose them, this seems to be the best course of action.
The sole reason for this blackmail attempt was to make Bezos to back down and stop trying to find the source of this information. This means someone was worried and it's not just normal paparazzi stuff. Peckers attempt has backfired spectacularly.
With all the publicity, any individual in the government or in some telecom company who might have illegally gained access to those records must be panicking.
If there is foreign involvement, this will become a counterintelligence investigation. If Trump is involved, Mueller will take a look. Pecker has already cooperation agreement with Mueller, so Pecker is in real trouble.
I believe people on this thread are viewing this thing in a specific way, and that there are other ways to consider this.
1) I suggest this is not blackmail in the legal sense. AMI, whatever they are - are not idiots. AMI probably knows better than any company in the world what is going to constitute 'newsworthy' items, at least in the legal sense. To suggest they would do something blatantly illegal and criminal in an email of all things ... I think does not make sense.
They do this sort of thing for a living.
2) This is a back room deal, a pretty normal one. They are asking Bezos to state:
"have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces."
This may actually technically be true. Does Bezos actually have hard evidence of political interference? And how would acquire this? And if he doesn't, what is the cost of merely stating a fact?
If we move out of a moral headspace for a moment and just consider the realpolitik of the situation - it's tantamount to a kind of 'legal blackmail' - superficially, it's not a bad deal at all.
This is hardball and it's not exactly uncommon in business, it's just of a very personal nature.
3) If those pics are published, the 'courage' of Bezos' ostensible principled stance are not going to be rewarded.
The #1 thing Bezos will be known for, for at least a decade are his 'dick picks' and that he was 'cheating on his wife and kids'.
None of the context will really matter that much, i.e. maybe he was already separated, maybe the 'dick picks' were totally private, nothing to do with work, the woman did not work for him etc..
It does not matter.
A dick pick is all anyone will know.
Bezos is famous among us, but he's not really famous among regular people, but this could make could really make him a 'household name' for the wrong reasons.
Remember: the realm of pop culture nobody cares about 'principles'. Images flashing across the screen of a blurred out penis will be 99% of the news type thing.
This is a 'pop culture' war, not a legal war, or a war among public intellectuals or businessmen. This is a 'Buzzfeed war' and Bezos doesn't have any ammunition.
His penis may be seen by billions, almost nobody will read his Medium post.
4) I respect his choice - but - he has a company to worry about. If this blows up, and it starts to affect his 'perceived credibility' - what is he going to tell his board? He had a 'truce agreement' on the table which seemed ostensibly reasonable (assuming Bezos doesn't have some crazy evidence that he really needs to provide the feds?).
The pragmatic choice would have been to make a truce with his warring entities.
Thankfully, Bezos has billions and ownership etc. and doesn't have a normal CEO-board relationship, as I believe most 'regular boards' would have seen only the realpolitik of the situation and would be aghast that he didn't make an agreement.
So good on him for ostensibly 'doing the right thing' but I feel there is much more to come.
> This may actually technically be true. Does Bezos actually have hard evidence of political interference?
"On December 12, 2018, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced its agreement with A.M.I. "AMI admitted that it made the $150,000 payment in concert with a candidate’s presidential campaign," the press release said, so that Karen McDougal wouldn't "publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election."
> 1) I suggest this is not blackmail in the legal sense. AMI, whatever they are - are not idiots. AMI probably knows better than any company in the world what is going to constitute 'newsworthy' items, at least in the legal sense. To suggest they would do something blatantly illegal and criminal in an email of all things ... I think does not make sense.
> They do this sort of thing for a living.
I really think you give them too much credit. This is a publication known to operate somewhere on the spectrum between shady and illegal. This latest development fits the picture perfectly.
> 2) This is a back room deal, a pretty normal one. They are asking Bezos to state: "have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces."
“Asking“. If it is just a normal deal, not amounting to extortion, and I disagree with that, it‘s off the table now. After Bezos‘ letter a statement anywhere close to or resembling what AMI is asking is now meaningless.
> 3) If those pics are published, the 'courage' of Bezos' ostensible principled stance are not going to be rewarded. The #1 thing Bezos will be known for, for at least a decade are his 'dick picks' and that he was 'cheating on his wife and kids'.
Maybe 20 years ago. In today’s climate this story hardly fills a full news cycle. Furthermore sexting probably doesn’t lead to the same public shock and outrage it might have decades or just years ago, as it’s pretty much become a relatable thing large parts of the population have taking part in at some points in their life. It’s rather tame by today’s standards, where presidents fuck porn stars while their third(?) wife cares for the newborn and Jefrey Epstein gets a slap on the wrist for molesting and raping hundreds of children: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html
> 4) I respect his choice - but - he has a company to worry about. If this blows up, and it starts to affect his 'perceived credibility' - what is he going to tell his board? He had a 'truce agreement' on the table which seemed ostensibly reasonable (assuming Bezos doesn't have some crazy evidence that he really needs to provide the feds?). The pragmatic choice would have been to make a truce with his warring entities.
Playing along with AMI‘s demands is what actually would have affected Bezos‘ and The Post‘s credibility. His choice, even if bold, is the natural and obvious option.
Frankly, I don‘t know what AMI was thinking.
Once you've torn them limb from limb, once Pecker is rotting in a jail sell and the only thing the National Enquirer is useful for is recycling them into cup holders; then you walk into Playgirl and do a photo shoot of these exact photos just to make sure they all know it was never about the pictures.
The quoted portion was authored by Jon P. Fine (who actually worked for well over a decade at Amazon before ending up as General Counsel for AMI); Marty Singer represents Bezos in this case and the quoted portion is addressed at him.
The title does this post a misservice. This is way, way more interesting than you might think, and I highly recommend following the link and reading the whole thing.
Can anyone actually knowledgeable and not just rooting for one side tell me whether it would be illegal for NE to now go ahead and publish the said pics?
As of now, all I read from knowledgeable people is that there is no case- as is shown by the fact that mr bezos chose to make the 'evidence' public. My question is- does there still stay no case if they publish the pictures? Or does that change things?
I'm assuming it won't because Mr bezos wouldn't risk publicizing the evidence considering that eventualit
Slightly off topic, but the fact that the world's richest man who owns a tech giant chose to publish this on a closed platform like Medium should be worrisome for the future of the open web. On the other hand, this might just be the biggest brand endorsement for Medium till date.
I mean, Amazon doesn't really have an associated "official" blogging platform, not in the way that Google has Blogger, Yahoo has Tumblr, and Twitter has Medium. Also worth noting that Amazon's spokesperson used Medium when writing a rebuttal to a high-profile investigation of Amazon's business practices in 2015: https://medium.com/@jaycarney/what-the-new-york-times-didn-t...
Blogger and Tumblr aren't like Medium; maybe a good comparison for them would be Wordpress. Twitter's official blog isn't on Medium. So doesn't "have" it -
blog.twitter.com
"The nasty newspaper was mean about poor little Donald by reporting on his wrongdoing" does _not_ justify blackmail. In any way. What on earth are you talking about?
the paparazzi exist in a 1st amendment gray area. they cover public figures but the newsworthy nature of their salacious stories and gathering tactics are always getting challenged in court.
I am glad that Jeff Bezos is aggressively going after AMI for their scummy behavior. I was also glad that Peter Thiel aggressively went after Gawker Media for their scummy behavior. Sometimes these badly behaving media outlets need to have a billionaire personally invested in stopping their bad behavior.
>I didn’t know much about most of that a few weeks ago when intimate texts messages from me were published in the National Enquirer. I engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer. As it turns out, there are now several independent investigations looking into this matter.
AMI showed up on Bezos's rader after they published his intimate text messages. Gawker showed up on Thiel's radar after they outed him. They both then went investigating to see if there was some illegal activity that these media companies were engaged in.
> If we do not agree to affirmatively publicize that specific lie, they say they’ll publish the photos, and quickly. And there’s an associated threat: They’ll keep the photos on hand and publish them in the future if we ever deviate from that lie.
They never explicitly say that, do they? I'm not enough of a lawyer to know if what they did still counts as extortion/blackmail, but as far as I can see they simply describe the photos, and propose an agreement that would prevent them from publishing the photos. But they never say "Do this or we'll publish the photos" - perhaps they never intended to publish them in the first place.
Yes, they do explicitly say exactly that. Term 3 in Jon Fine's email is "AMI agrees not to publish" and that directly follows term 2, which is Bezos backing off his assertion that AMI is politically motivated in their coverage. And term 6 means they get to keep the blackmail materials.
I don't usually put myself in debates on HN but I have always thought of you as a very rational guy so I'm surprised you make this comment-
Situation A: where none of this happened. Ami reserves the right to publish photos. Perfectly legal.
Situation B: Present
Offer- I wont publish them. But if you cheat- we go back to situation A.
Plain and simple. I am no lawyer bit everyone I've read today says that basically bezos has no case and his legal allowed him to publicize evidence and comment on 'an ongoing case'- commentary which can alter the 'case' pretty much means there is no case. The only thing that remains to be seen (or ignored) is when Ami will publish his photos because if they really want to play this game- that's what their next step would be.
> "6. In the case of a breach of the agreement by one or more of the Bezos Parties, AM is released from its obligations under the agreement, and may publish the Unpublished Materials."
They don't really need to say more than that, do they?
>In the case of a breach of the agreement by one or more of the Bezos Parties, AM is released from its obligations under the agreement, and may publish the Unpublished Materials.
That's very directly saying that they will publish the photos if Bezos doesn't do what they say.
EDIT: Here [1] is a reporter from the Washington Post backing that up. The Bezos' camp believes this is a politically motivated attack and the data was acquired by a "government entity" (logically the US or Saudis).
[1] - https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/109371533307931853...