WBD643 - Ahmed Gatnash: What Bitcoin Did

Ahmed Gatnash: I can't really find a better answer than that, but I was at university when the Middle East uprisings happened in 2011 and I was very inspired. It was one of those formative events that makes you shape your identity around it and I got sucked in.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'm going to have a lot of questions about the Arab Spring because it's something obviously I'm clearly aware of; I followed it both online and followed it on the news, but I don't really know the full details of what sparked it or what the outcomes were. But let me just focus firstly, to help me understand a little bit more about the region, in terms of human rights, you talk about your foundation works on human rights within the Middle East.

Peter McCormack: What are the primary issues that you guys focus on, the primary concerns with regard to human rights?

Ahmed Gatnash: We're taking a holistic perspective rather than a specific right or a specific cause, and we're looking at the issues that unlock everything, basically. We start with the vision that we want the region to be prosperous, to be stable, to be safe and to be on an equal footing with every other region in the world, rather than this cesspool of authoritarianism and corruption and repression.

Peter McCormack: And what are the considerations, therefore, with that that you have to have for religion, because some of the things that we may consider oppressive either come from a religious context or a religious context is used to justify them?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, that's a good question because dictators are big on using religion and it's a particularly pertinent question for us because a lot of the team, including myself, are observing Muslims, but that's also where the activism comes from because a lot of this is driven by our disgust at seeing our religion used in this way to justify the oppression of women and blatant corruption.

Peter McCormack: When I was in New York, I was with a taxi driver and talking about Islam, I was interviewing a lady called Laura Loomer and I think her observations of Islam are wrong, but coincidentally on the way to the interview, my driver was a Muslim so I asked him about this. And one of the things he explained to me about Islam is that it is a peaceful religion and, "Whilst my religion may not approve, for example, of people who are homosexual", he said he himself is not homophobic, "Because my religion teaches me to tolerant and accept you for who you are"; was that a fair explanation?

Ahmed Gatnash: Muslims have different ways of squaring this circle.

Ahmed Gatnash: Some people choose the "live and let live", some people have interpretations that allow them to be even more accepting, some people less so, but the wider point is that religions develop over time, as cultures do, and people reconcile themselves to new ideas and figure out how to adapt themselves to the world, and that's a natural process that happens in every religion. But that can be cut short when you have a context where you don't have the freedom to discuss these issues and negotiate new positions on them, and that's basically the position that Islam's had for the last at least 100 years, probably longer if we include colonialism, that the structures which uphold certain perspectives are entrenched by political forces, and we can't get rid of them, and they prevent us from having free discussions.

Peter McCormack: So, how do you interpret that in the context of what happened with, say, Charlie Hebdo? My understanding is that their representation of the Prophet Mohammed was offensive and offensive to Muslims, but at the same time their defence was that this is a free speech --

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, on a personal perspective, I've never really got people who get that wildly upset about representations. I mean, the magazine is pretty Islamophobic; they've published some disgusting stuff, in my opinion, over the years. They've agitated against refugees, they take any opportunity to demean Muslims; but at the same time, I don't feel particularly drawn to commit an act of violence against them, I just think they're douchebags.

Peter McCormack: I didn't realise that. Obviously, they're being purposely provocative with representation of the Prophet Mohammed, but I didn't realise that, over a period of time --

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it's a pretty consistent pattern.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, right, interesting; okay, so that's helped me understand. Let's talk a little bit about the Arab Spring; for people who don't know what sparked it, what was the trigger?

Ahmed Gatnash: I think it's a trap to look for a specific event and say, "This caused it". What we basically had was a pressure vessel which was shut for decades and pressure built up, and eventually one straw broke the camel's back. That could have been any particularly straw, it just happened to be when this fruit seller, called Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, had his fruit confiscated and he was so crushed and humiliated that he went and stood in front of a public administration building and poured gasoline on himself and set himself on fire; and nobody expected what came next, but it just spread like wildfire.

Peter McCormack: So, that triggered protests within Tunisia which spread out through the region?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, everyone watched Tunisia as the protests grew. I still remember so vividly the day that we turned on the TV to see this press conference stating that Ben Ali had fled the country, and people were screaming in the streets, "Ben Ali's run, Ben Ali's done a runner". People were inspired, people started coming out in Egypt, in Bahrain, in Yemen and Syria, basically empowered to say, "Yeah, we're fed up with this shit too".

Peter McCormack: Where you were at the time?

Ahmed Gatnash: I was here in the UK.

Peter McCormack: You were here in the UK?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, I was born here.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but you were following it?

Peter McCormack: You've obviously got friends and family in the region.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, pretty much all of my extended family are in Libya.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I've got questions about Libya as well. Okay, so this spread out throughout the Middle East, but there were some commonalities of what was happening from region to region of why people were pissed off.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it's basically the same institutional structure, lack of accountability, lack of representation, oppression, corruption, dysfunctional institutions leading to dysfunctional economies where people can't make enough to survive, and there's only so much you can take of that before you reach the end of your tether.

Peter McCormack: Are there any regions or any countries within the Middle East that are different?

Ahmed Gatnash: The oil monarchies are different because of their economies; they're so sustained by oil wealth that they didn't have those economic pressures. This was just after Occupy Wall Street and the Global Economic Crisis, if you remember.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, a lot of places in the world were dealing with that economic pressure and oil monarchies had the buffer to be able to deal with it slightly better, whereas you had spiralling food prices and massive unemployment in a lot of North Africa.

Peter McCormack: So, when you're talking about the oil monarchies, Qatar, Saudi…

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, the UAE, Bahrain.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay. So, when the Arab Spring protests were, you said spread like wildfire, was there coordination between people in different countries?

Ahmed Gatnash: There was to an extent but it wasn't like there was a single masterplan. It was basically people getting inspired, people speaking to contacts, "How did you organise this; what did you do?", people starting their own Facebook groups planning their own events; it was the early days of social media in the region as well, so people were inspired by what happened in Tunisia, and at the same time they were inspired by this new ability to coordinate and to reach their fellow citizens.

We had a very closed information sphere for decades before that, like the government controls the public squares; the government controls the published media, like the printed word, the printing presses; the government controls the TV channels, the radio channels. So, you can't really get an unfiltered perspective from anywhere and then suddenly social media appears and suddenly you're connected to people and you realise that everyone feels exactly the same as you do.

Peter McCormack: But there have been instances, I certainly know of it in Iran, where they've blocked or they've blacked out the social media channels; I think Twitter was blocked at one point in Iran. Did the state try and fight back by doing this?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it happened in a lot of places, it happened in Libya; as it was spiralling into a civil war, they basically cut internet for the entire country and we mostly lost contact with our families for a few months. They did it in Egypt; at the time, Twitter introduced the SMS-to-tweet service which kind of added a lifeline, but it was by and large too late.

Peter McCormack: Because…?

Ahmed Gatnash: People had already realised, yeah.

Peter McCormack: The Occupy Wall Street movement eventually failed because of a lack of coordination and leadership. Within these protests, these uprisings, was there any coordination; were people trying to rally around opposition parties; what were they trying to establish?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, there was a massive amount of grassroots coordination, but because of the legacy of decades of authoritarianism, there was kind of an allergy to hierarchy and structure, and that's one of the things that ultimately did the whole movement in.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that was the same problem with the Occupy Wall Street is that, sadly within these things, you often do need structure or leadership or somebody to get behind.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and it was even worse because in the West, you often have alternative institutions that you can rally behind, and in Libya, there were basically 40 years of having no institutions at all, not even properly functioning government institutions. So, as soon as the government unravelled, there was nothing and it was complete anarchy.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. What was that in the timeline to Gaddafi being, as I remember it, he was essentially hauled off the streets and killed on the streets, wasn't he?

Ahmed Gatnash: He was dragged out of a tunnel, like a sewage tunnel.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, like a rat they said, didn't they?

Ahmed Gatnash: Pretty much, yeah; that was very satisfying to Libyans because that was the term that he'd used for the protestors as he threatened to hunt them down, one by one, and kill them all.

Peter McCormack: Right, but his death has led to a power vacuum; is it still in civil war?

Ahmed Gatnash: It's in a lull right now, the different sides are entrenched. In the west of the country, you basically militias occupying districts and cities and regions and suburbs and occasionally fighting, occasionally allying and just relentlessly sucking the blood from the population. In the east, you have a would-be military dictator who's managed to clamp down on things a lot more over there.

Peter McCormack: So, is Libya in a better or worse place?

Ahmed Gatnash: In terms of everyday life for the average person, it's definitely worse.

Ahmed Gatnash: But it's the consequence of what came before.

Peter McCormack: Of course. So, if you reflect on this and think, is there a better way or is this the natural order that the country has to go through to get past a dictator, it has to go through this power vacuum, this next battle?

Ahmed Gatnash: I think the optimal path is definitely institutional reform over a long period, but that's obviously only possible if the institutions are willing to be reformed and don't immediately try to kill you, and that's the lesson that most of human history shows because that's how it happened in the UK; it was many centuries of slow institutional reform as the monarchy was stripped of powers, one by one, and they were given to parliament or different institutions.

Peter McCormack: We have seen limited reforms in places like Saudi, I believe, and I say very limited in that we've seen certain reforms that have led to a few more freedoms for females.

Ahmed Gatnash: Social freedoms.

Peter McCormack: Social freedoms, yeah. And we certainly saw reforms in Afghanistan led by the government that was put in place by the US, which have collapsed since the US has left. Have you seen any significant successes anywhere with reforms?

Ahmed Gatnash: Not really. So, Garry Kasparov put it very succinctly when he said, "The only real reform in a dictatorship is to be less of a dictatorship", and the problem with social reforms in Saudi Arabia, for example, is that just as they're given, they can be taken away at any moment because the actual power imbalance hasn't changed.

Peter McCormack: So on reflection, say with Libya, do you think the uprising was a good thing?

Ahmed Gatnash: I think it was inevitable and hopefully we're going to look back in a few decades and say, "Yeah, that was part of our path towards a more stable region", but it hasn't been pleasant to live through or to watch.

Peter McCormack: Is there anything that western governments could be doing to help or support this or do they just always make things worse?

Ahmed Gatnash: They mostly make things worse, and that's a product of a lot of different things; one of them is the chronic short-termism. So, Obama had this interview with Jeffrey Goldberg I think in his last couple of years in office, where he basically said, "Yeah, my biggest mistake was that I took my eye off the ball. I thought the Brits were handling it and the Brits thought I was handling it". And in the meantime, this country, which had had no institutions for over 40 years and no freedom of speech, was told, "You guys are free now, hold elections, you're good".

Ahmed Gatnash: Then, when there was a dispute about the election, there's no kind of process for sorting that out, there are no ultimate authorities to appeal to, there's nothing.

Peter McCormack: It seems like an unusual, naïve thing for Obama to be saying, "What do you mean? We thought you were handling it".

Ahmed Gatnash: Well, the thing is he doesn't really care, he doesn't matter to him whether Libya thrives or burns, and that's another kind of chronic problem with western policymaking in the region, is that they don't actually care about our wellbeing. Much as they will lord these lofty ideals of human rights and democracy, it's actually about the bottom line for them like, "What's in it for us; how much can we profit; is there oil?"

Peter McCormack: "Can we sell you guns?"

Ahmed Gatnash: Exactly, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Which the British Government have a long history of selling weapons to Saudi.

Ahmed Gatnash: Pretty much anyone who will buy them, but yeah, especially Saudi, and it's that cyclical short-sightedness, because it will eventually blow up in your face and you'll be dragged in to do an intervention or do some peacekeeping, or you'll get involved in a conflict one way or another, or there'll be a terrorist movement that grows up in a power vacuum that you've created. And after you deal with that, you'll make your commitments to human rights and democracy and reform and then just start behaving in exactly the same way again.

Peter McCormack: Are these potentially unsolvable problems?

Ahmed Gatnash: I think they're very simple problems.

Peter McCormack: But solvable though?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, they're definitely solvable if we approach them with a different kind of thinking to the one that created the problem, and that's what we are doing.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so what created the problem?

Ahmed Gatnash: How far do you want me to go back?

Peter McCormack: Educate me.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, me and my colleague, Iyad El-Baghdadi, wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Middle East Crisis Factory, and we basically go back to the end of colonialism. So, as a region, we'd been under colonialism for a few hundred years, depending on where, and we were left with no institutions, uneducated populations, desperate poverty. European powers withdrew after the Second World War because they were basically broken, couldn't maintain these colonies anymore, and in the vacuum authoritarians came up to fill the void; in response to years and decades of authoritarianism, you have people who are radicalised, who want to overthrow them by force.

In some of these countries, the West was against the local dictator; in other countries, they were staunch allies, like Saudi Arabia. And that determined who the terrorist movements decided to pick as targets; sometimes it was the government, sometimes it was its foreign backers. And what formed is this what we call the vicious triangle of terrorists, tyrants and foreign intervention, and to the naïve mind these are in opposition to each other, but actually each of the points of this triangle presents the logic for the continued existence of the others.

So, why is the dictator there? He's there to guard the independence of the nation and its sovereignty from foreign occupiers. Why are the foreign occupiers coming? Because of terrorists or to bring democracy and get rid of a dictator. And why are the terrorists there? Either to get rid of this dictator who's got his boot on our necks or to fight the foreigners, and it just goes around, around, around.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. It reminds of that Noam Chomsky book, The Fateful Triangle, regarding the US, Palestine and Israel.

Ahmed Gatnash: I haven't read it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a complex book trying to explain the relationship between those three countries. So, did anything good come out of the Arab Spring, and when I say with regard to reforms of the state, not with regard to the people understanding they do have the power to revolt?

Ahmed Gatnash: Maybe some minor reforms, like Tunisia was democratic until last year; it's now slipped back into authoritarianism, but there's arguably some knowledge of how to do it now, and there are some institutions which, although they've being dismantled, there's hope if this dictator gets removed again then can re-proceed down that path. But I'd say most of the positives were the hope that it created and the belief that there is an alternative and we're not destined to live in this authoritarian hellhole forever.

Peter McCormack: So, do you think there may be further waves of similar Arab Springs?

Ahmed Gatnash: I think it's inevitable.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and is there kind of a bubbling of tension at the moment? We're seeing it in other parts, we've obviously seen here in the West, we're seeing it in France and Holland.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, just before COVID, there was a revolution in Algeria, there was a revolution in Sudan, there were mass protests in Lebanon and a few other countries as well, and then basically COVID put a halt to that completely.

Peter McCormack: Lebanon's an absolute economic basket case.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it's a failed state.

Peter McCormack: It's a failed state, yeah. We're planning to visit it actually at some point to go and make a film. But also, I follow Iran with a lot of interest; I saw only this week there was an incident with a lady who wasn't covering her hair and somebody threw yogurt all over her.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, I saw that.

Peter McCormack: He was arrested and she was arrested. But there seems to be a concerted move by women within the country to push for reforms and more freedoms for women there, and there's a lot of tension but there's a lot of bravery.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and the government's losing control.

Ahmed Gatnash: And I think you're also starting to see other segments of the population, even men basically siding with the women in a lot of these street confrontations and attacking the people who are trying to enforce these morality codes and saying, "We're fed up of this".

Peter McCormack: Are we seeing any reforms there in Iran?

Ahmed Gatnash: I haven't seen any institutional reforms but I'm not an Iran expert.

Peter McCormack: It's strange how this region seems to have a very similar problem from country to country, from state to state.

Ahmed Gatnash: It was a very interconnected region.

Ahmed Gatnash: Before colonialism, we didn't really have nation state borders and we share a lot of cultural aspects, we share a majority religion, most of the region shares a language, apart from Iran, and there are obviously minorities in the region but there are so many commonalities that that's just continued to the present day.

Peter McCormack: Okay. I wanted to talk to you now about Jamal Khashoggi; what was your link to Jamal?

Ahmed Gatnash: So, one of the issues we noticed was extremely pressing, in the wake of the Arab Spring, was the public sphere. As soon as citizens were able to discuss issues of common concern in a way that was free, they were able to do things about it and stuff started changing, and Facebook and Twitter were massive drivers of that. Initially, the dictatorships were not ready for it at all and they were stopping people in the street to check their phones and things like that that obviously did nothing. Around 2014, they started to reorganise and they started to get this thing figured out.

So, I remember vividly a Saudi cartoonist called Twitter the Parliament of the Arabs, that's how central it became to the region's movements, there was no other place where we could get together and meet each other and understand what was going on and how we all felt about it, and they decided to shut that down.

So, around 2015, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a few other countries, started to flood Twitter specifically but the internet generally, with trolls and bots and fake content, and they'd basically mob you if you tried to have a discussion, a civil discussion in Arabic. They'd flood your mentions; they'd make it so you couldn't see the replies; they'd harass you; they'd abuse you; they'd threaten you. It became completely unusable, and by and large has stayed that way until today; most people don't tweet in Arabic anymore because it's just not a useable platform.

Peter McCormack: Who was driving this; is it government departments?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it's governments using technology from their providers of these tools; a lot of them are connected to Israel.

Peter McCormack: Ironically?

Ahmed Gatnash: We can get into the causes later.

Ahmed Gatnash: But Saudi Arabia was one of the biggest users of these technologies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and they really relentlessly pursued the closing down of online space at the same time as they were closing down physical spaces. This is around the time Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman came to power, MBS, and he started rounding up activists, rounding up intellectuals, public figures of any kind who were independent.

Peter McCormack: So prior to that, was Saudi a freer state?

Ahmed Gatnash: It was freer before MBS, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay, and so what do you think his driving intention was? Obviously to have a firmer grip and control of the country, but he would have already had a fairly firm grip and control.

Ahmed Gatnash: Well, he was new to the scene, his dad had just come to the throne and he was becoming Crown Prince and coming up the hierarchy, and he's basically de facto king at this point.

Peter McCormack: He's fairly young as well.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, he's like mid-30s, and I guess a lot of it was driven by his personality; he seems to be very controlling, probably an egomaniac or a psychopath. Even though Saudi Arabia's always been an absolute dictatorship, he behaved in a way that shocked even other Saudi royals; they thought he was extreme, that how bad it was.

So, he went about systematically purging the media as well as the online space, and we started communicating with Twitter about what was going on, we were telling them like, "Your platform's becoming unusable for us; it was so important and now look what it's become. Why aren't you doing anything?" And they weren't that responsive initially, so we started literally spoon-feeding them information.

Peter McCormack: Who's "we?"

Ahmed Gatnash: My organisation.

Peter McCormack: So, the organisation mentioned at the start?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, Kawaakibi Foundation.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, we would basically pull thousands of accounts that were clearly manipulating hashtags or abusing people, things like that, and we'd give them the data dumps, and they started to take action on them, but there's a lot more. We weren't really making much of an impact because of the sheer volume of it.

Peter McCormack: Was it a whack-a-mole?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, pretty much, and there was an arms race going on with the platform at the time because they're trying to train their algorithms on how to detect stuff, and meanwhile the bad guys are getting better at doing it and adjusting their techniques.

Peter McCormack: Did you have ideas of ways they could do it better?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, we gave them a lot of policy recommendations but they mostly weren't implemented at the time.

Peter McCormack: Can you talk through any of those that you think would have been particularly important?

Ahmed Gatnash: We told them that they needed to have more understanding of local contexts, so they needed to have more local moderators rather than just moderators for the Arabic language as a whole, because sometime a certain dialect will have words that are abusive in that dialect but aren't so in standard Arabic, like local slang.

We said there needed to be escalated reporting for certain types of threat in the MENA region. We told them they needed to protect activists' accounts, so people who have been flagged to them as like, "This person is important, this person has done a significant thing and they're targeting them. You should think about making their account more secure against login from new devices", or things like that, but most of things weren't implemented.

Peter McCormack: So, what does free speech for you on Twitter mean? Some people believe that any speech is free speech; some people believe that bots, you should be able to get rid of bots because it's fake speech; some people believe some abusive language should be allowed but threats of violence shouldn't. Where do you stand on that whole spectrum because you've been in the fire fight with this?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah. I think it requires a lot of nuance and the last decade was basically an exercise in the entire region dropping a lot of the naiveties and developing nuance, like we realised that just holding an election is not enough to be a democracy.

Peter McCormack: Russia has elections.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, exactly. We realised that just because you can say whatever you want, that doesn't make your speech completely free, or just because your speech is free, that doesn't make it a good thing for society necessarily; there's a lot more that you need to have.

Peter McCormack: So, that would be one area that people would particularly home in on, that just because you have free speech, it doesn't mean it's good for society?

Ahmed Gatnash: It's the danger of being absolutist about a specific thing.

Ahmed Gatnash: People need to be free to express themselves but that's one element among many elements that constitute a healthy public sphere, like I can't go and publish your home address publicly on the internet, even though that would be an act of free speech by myself.

Peter McCormack: No, of course, no. So I'm with you on that, any risks, any threats to personal safety, but abusive language is a tricky area.

Ahmed Gatnash: It is a tricky area, it depends. Again, you can't really legislate these things in a vacuum because you have to look at what impact is that having, like if people are just rude to each other then maybe that's your society.

Peter McCormack: But on Twitter, I don't know if they do it anymore, but you used to get warnings.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, when it brings up a little box that says, "Most people don't tweet like this".

Peter McCormack: No, actually warnings to your account, "You've been flagged as being abusive to somebody or harassing somebody", and I just feel like that's died away.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, they've definitely changed their approach on that but I'm not sure what their thinking is.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it's a complicated job they have to do.

Ahmed Gatnash: Oh yeah.

Peter McCormack: We should probably get into the fact that it's clearly managed differently under Elon Musk than it was under, I say Jack Dorsey, but really he'd stepped by then, but let's say pre- and post-Elon; it seems to be a very different world now.

Peter McCormack: Have you noticed that?

Ahmed Gatnash: Massively. So, that collaboration that we used to have with Twitter no longer exists because everyone we knew in the organisation is gone.

Peter McCormack: Okay. What?!

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, we don't even have an email address anymore.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so the relationship you had was with multiple people; was there a department?

Ahmed Gatnash: There were multiple people, there were multiple departments, some of them were responsible for the more algorithmic side, some of them were responsible for Arabic language moderation. There was the Trust and Safety Team globally who look at a lot of the policies and try to understand, kind of what you were getting at, that this might be causing a harm here but what's the overall principle that we should be applying globally, or does it not make sense to apply anything globally?

Peter McCormack: The tricky thing with these rules is that there will always be examples where it's been executed with probably a little bit too much strength and sometimes a little bit too weak, and there's always somebody somewhere pissed off with it.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and it's never going to be possible to please everyone.

Peter McCormack: No.

Ahmed Gatnash: And there's also a danger of cultural relativism, like you don't want to be told, "Oh, in my culture, it's okay to call to a certain group of people by this slur".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and there's also political bias. I think, pre-Elon, there was certainly a left-wing bias because I would expect, without knowing the factual data, that if you saw the voting records of the people who work for Twitter, I think they would lean very much more to the Democratic Party over the Republicans.

Ahmed Gatnash: That's probably like a tech kind of thing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is.

Ahmed Gatnash: Like San Francisco.

Peter McCormack: It is a regional tech thing, but at the same time, I think there were more examples of, say, Republicans being removed from the platform, even outside of Mr Donald Trump, I think there were a lot more examples of that. So, you do get all these different biases, and the tricky thing is it's either algorithmic or there's a human decision or everyone's free to do what they do.

Peter McCormack: There's no perfect answer here.

Ahmed Gatnash: And with human decisions, you obviously immediately run into the problem of scaling, like how many humans can you have moderating this stuff? And with the algorithmic stuff, we had a lot of cases where the dictatorships realised that, "If we do a certain thing, we can trick the algorithm into blocking this person's account. Like hey, we can just mass report them for abuse and the algorithm will automatically block their account, and hey, we've silenced an activist for at least a few days or weeks until they manage to get hold of Twitter somehow and get their account reinstated".

Peter McCormack: So, what do you think of what Elon Musk has done? Obviously, Twitter was haemorrhaging money so he had to make some decisions, but do you think he's introduced -- I want to be very careful with my language and say he's made Twitter a more dangerous place because it is still just a place of words and images, but do you think he fully understands the consequences of what he's done?

Ahmed Gatnash: No, I don't think he does at all. It's quite clear, when he tweets about stuff, that he, at least initially, he saw it at as very one-dimensional, it was just a matter of more free speech, and then he realised that there was the whole bot issue and everything became either free speech or bots, and there are so many shades of grey beyond that.

Peter McCormack: So, are you no longer doing anything with Twitter; have you just abandoned?

Ahmed Gatnash: We still monitor stuff on there really regularly because dictatorships produce so much disinformation and it's helpful to us to understand what they're producing and who they're targeting and why, but they've cut the API access as well recently, they've made the API something like $42,000 a month.

Peter McCormack: What?!

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it used to be free.

Peter McCormack: Did you know about this?

Danny Knowles: No, I did not know that.

Ahmed Gatnash: So now, basically researchers and academics and activists can no longer afford to use it at all.

Peter McCormack: So, there's no pass?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, so you have to do stuff manually.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, I'm just writing this down, I'm going to tweet and see if I can get him to reply later. Okay, that's very interesting. And do you work with other platforms, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or is the Twitter --

Ahmed Gatnash: We do look at them, not so much as Twitter; Twitter was just on a different level in terms of usefulness in the region. We spent a lot of time looking at Clubhouse during COVID because there was so much social audio going on. We've looked at things like Telegram; we just follow the activity.

Peter McCormack: So, is it referred to as like Arab Twitter, Arabic Twitter, Middle East Twitter, what it is referred to? I don't know want to get it wrong.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, there's not really one community.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but has it essentially highly damaged the Arab-speaking part of Twitter; is it now becoming almost unusable?

Ahmed Gatnash: Pretty much unusable; I haven't checked into it for many months, if not years. There were so many fascinating conversations going on in the early years post-Arab Spring, people talking about philosophy, people talking about politics, people talking about the economy, sharing their ideas, and slowly all of that died and it never really came back. A lot of the more dynamic parts of that, interestingly, were in Saudi Arabia. There were some really fascinating intellectuals looking at the economy of the region, looking at the social side, looking the role of religion in society, making proposals, and they're all gone, they're all completely silent now.

Peter McCormack: It does make me think, with regard to say, and I'm not picking a side for the sake of this conversation, but let's say the Ukraine/Russia conflict, the propaganda battle that must be waging on Twitter with regard to that, because there is a side of that war, a Russian side, that will want to disseminate misinformation about Ukraine and Zelenskyy, to perhaps turn people more pro-Russia during this conflict, and vice versa.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, Russia was one of the pioneers of this whole online social media propaganda wave; we call it Propaganda 2.0, because in the old days the purpose of propaganda was to make you believe a certain thing. This happened at least 12 years ago, but their new purpose isn't to make you believe a certain thing, it's to make you doubt everything.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Ahmed Gatnash: So you no longer trust anyone; if you can't trust anyone, you can't coordinate, you can't organise, you're just a conspiracy theorist who fears everyone and everything.

Peter McCormack: Well, I find myself sometimes almost with some kind of opinion paralysis in that, so for example, we had an interview yesterday where a guy was, how would you put it, Danny, he was partially siding with Russia with regard to the conflict, and my point was, "Look, I don't know everything, but what I am aware of is historically, there aren't free elections in Russia, Putin is a dictator and a tyrant who has assassinated people aboard and murdered journalists, oppressed homosexuals and stolen elections and probably stolen a huge amount of wealth and distributed some of that to some of his lackies. Yeah, I get the feeling that this was an illegal invasion of a sovereign country. That's my position".

He's not the only person I've discussed this with, and the YouTube comments of this will be we'll have people coming in and saying, "You're just a moron, you're not looking at the facts, Zelenskyy, he was put there by the CIA". And this guy yesterday was saying, "Well, the Ukrainians have been bombing Russians in the Donbas region for years", and like all this other information comes to you and it goes, "Oh, well maybe they were".

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, some of these people have just made up their mind already and then fit the facts to the story that they want, so they are against western governments for example, and they've decided, because of that, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Peter McCormack: They still live here though.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it's very convenient.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but the truth is of it all is that I want to know the truth. I'm pretty convinced of my ideas with regard to Putin and Russia but then have I been made to believe something by western governments? I don't think I have, but are there facts? I know there were conflicts, there were civil war-type conflicts on the border regions with Russia; I'm fully aware of it, I've seen a documentary regarding it, I think it was a BBC documentary that talked about the Russian-speaking Russians who live in Ukraine and the Ukrainians and how destabilised the region was, like were they bombing it? I don't know.

Ahmed Gatnash: But things don't have to be black and white.

Peter McCormack: No, but the point I think I'm getting to is I don't even know how to find the truth anymore, and I don't feel like I even have journalists' resources that I know I can 100% trust. I find the whole thing very difficult, which leads me back to what you were just saying, the idea isn't to believe something, it's to doubt everything, and I feel like that's where I am, I have like this paralysis.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, I think as a society, we're still trying to adapt ourselves to this new technology that came around a few decades ago. When historians look back at us, they're going to see it probably as revolutionary as a printing press, and that caused centuries of civil war throughout Europe.

Peter McCormack: Okay. So, let's get back to Khashoggi. So, where does he come into this story for you; how did you know him; was it working on this?

Ahmed Gatnash: So, we'd known of him for a long time, he was obviously one of the most influential and important journalists in the region and I'd never liked him.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, he was staunchly pro-government, he was a true believer in the Royal Family's stewardship of Saudi Arabia. Even though he was a pretty insightful social commentator and he did great investigative work, to me he was the guy who almost got it and then, right at the end, he'd walk everything back and be like, "This is why the people around the government are bad, and if they change their policy, they can be fantastic".

Danny Knowles: He was called Peter Schiff!

Peter McCormack: I was going to say that's how people refer to me in Bitcoin; they think of me as a guy who nearly got it and then walks it back!

Ahmed Gatnash: He was consistent on that because he was fundamentally a pro-government guy.

Peter McCormack: Do you think there are incentives at play at that point?

Ahmed Gatnash: He'd been in and out of royal circles his entire life, he'd always had access, he'd always had their ear, he got the stories from them, he knew what was going on on in the inside.

Peter McCormack: So, do you think potentially that was the trade-off, he had to be partly pro-government to have access to be able to get those stories?

Ahmed Gatnash: I'm not sure if there was a trade-off, like maybe he just did believe that things would have been worse without a strong government in place.

Peter McCormack: Well, no, you can make an argument, not everyone will agree with it, but you can make an argument, well we did, we discussed it earlier with Libya, we've made the argument it was certainly better, net better under Gaddafi, even though the right path of the country is the removal of Gaddafi. Some people would make the same argument about Iraq, that Saddam Hussein was a horrendous tyrant who gassed the Kurds but the country had some stability to it.

Ahmed Gatnash: I don't think anyone wants to advocate for stateless anarchy to emerge in their country.

Peter McCormack: No, of course.

Ahmed Gatnash: But some people are more enthusiastically in favour of reform than others, and I guess you could call Jamal a reform-minded establishment guy.

Ahmed Gatnash: He was part of the establishment. But even for him, it got to a point where he couldn't stand it anymore. They shut down the media enterprise he was launching, they banned him from writing, and that happened to him multiple times through his career and it had always been like a few months and then he'd be back.

Danny Knowles: What was the reason for that?

Ahmed Gatnash: I can't remember; he wrote something that probably was construed as being slightly less pro-government than it should have been, and yes, was a lot less thick-skinned than anyone who came before him. So, Jamal packed his bags and left the country and never went back.

He moved to the US, he became a Washington Post columnist and he started to do so much more aggressive criticism of the way the country was heading. He was watching these purges of intellectuals and activists and he wasn't that happy about it. I guess, to him the final straw was that complete loss of any semblance of freedom of speech. And that's when our paths crossed because we were doing that work on the public sphere, and he was one of the biggest accounts, one of the biggest Arabic language accounts on Twitter, and he was consequently one of the people who suffered most from that trolling and the bots, and he'd comment on it a lot.

Peter McCormack: Was he popular?

Ahmed Gatnash: He was pretty popular, yeah, among a certain demographic. He was very well followed. He was like an influential journalist; he always had the scoop and he knew what was going on.

Peter McCormack: Right. Was he seen perhaps as a provocateur within those circles?

Ahmed Gatnash: He was more reformist than most of the circle, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But what was he calling for?

Ahmed Gatnash: Slightly more accountability, slightly more taking into account the perspectives of the population, like smoothing the edges of the system a little bit and giving people more space to breathe, that kind of thing.

Ahmed Gatnash: Nothing drastic but good kind of stuff.

Peter McCormack: Achievable goals.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah. So, I can't remember how our paths crossed exactly, but we told Alex's team at the Human Rights Foundation that, "You guys have to bring this guy to the Oslo Freedom Forum", and we met that year in Oslo and we introduced Jamal to one of the VPs at Twitter at the time, and we basically started shaping this initiative into something more formal.

We decided with him that we're going to set up a centre that's going to be focused on studying and advocating for the improvement of the public sphere in the Middle East. His position was always, "All you need to do is give people the freedom to speak and they'll do the rest, they'll take care of all the reforms. You just need to give them the freedom to speak".

Peter McCormack: And how much progress was made?

Ahmed Gatnash: It was very early days, so that was like May 2018, and he was killed five months later.

Peter McCormack: Well, I don't want to say we know how he was killed, although we know how he was killed.

Ahmed Gatnash: We know how he was killed.

Peter McCormack: Well, we know who killed him. That's quite a brazen move by MBS to --

Ahmed Gatnash: Chop someone up in an embassy?

Danny Knowles: Well, I don't think everyone will know, so I think it's worth going through that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. So, do you want to explain what happened with regard to the embassy, etc?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, he was trying to get married and he had to get a piece of paperwork, so they sent him to the Istanbul Embassy. Unbeknown to him, they sent a hit squad.

Peter McCormack: Was that a Saudi embassy?

Ahmed Gatnash: A Saudi embassy in Istanbul, so they sent a hit squad and entered the embassy on the day. When he arrived, they brought him in, injected him with something and chopped him up.

Peter McCormack: Strangled him and chopped him up?

Peter McCormack: And do we know what happened with his body?

Ahmed Gatnash: I think they burned it; I think that's what one of the intelligence reports said, and then got rid of the ashes, and allegedly they took the head back with them.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and this, allegedly, is under the instruction of MBS?

Peter McCormack: Was any actual direct evidence found that he instructed this?

Ahmed Gatnash: No, we don't have like a recording of a call. We have a lot of circumstantial evidence, and we also have the fact that nobody freelances in a country like Saudi Arabia, you don't do something drastic unless you absolutely know that your boss approves, because otherwise they see you getting chopped up.

Peter McCormack: But weren't people convicted and executed for it?

Ahmed Gatnash: They were "convicted", like it was a sham trial. I don't know that they were executed.

Peter McCormack: Can you look that up?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I could be wrong, I'm sure I read that and thought, "Huh".

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, I remember that people were executed.

Peter McCormack: So, you go there under instruction…

Ahmed Gatnash: Well, it's part of the process of washing your hands afterwards to…

Ahmed Gatnash: So, the guy who took the fall was Saud al-Qahtani, who was MBS's right-hand man, and he was the guy who was in charge of the Twitter trolls, he headed that department basically.

Peter McCormack: It was quite brazen for MBS to openly execute somebody, a public figure with someone he had a known dislike to, to openly do that, and on foreign territory; I know an embassy is considered sovereign territory within a foreign territory but it's still in --

Ahmed Gatnash: It's still pretty out there.

Peter McCormack: Essentially, yeah. What was the reaction from the Arab world?

Ahmed Gatnash: Kind of difficult to tell because they accompanied that with massive online campaigns blaming Qatar, blaming Turkey, saying that the Turks had done it and tried to pin it on them in order to destroy Saudi Arabia's reputation. The Saudi story kept changing day by day in the weeks afterwards, initially like , "Oh no, he left, nothing happened. He came, he got his document and he left", and then, "There was a scuffle and he died by accident", and I can't remember what it became after that, like, "These rogue killers", or something like that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Did you find it?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, five people were sentenced to death for it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, insane.

Danny Knowles: But they were later commuted to prison terms.

Peter McCormack: There you go. They might be in a cushty prison.

Ahmed Gatnash: Probably.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Can you talk to me about Pegasus? Firstly, explain what it is because Pegasus was one of the technologies that was used to track Khashoggi.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, Pegasus is a piece of software developed by an Israeli company called NSO Group. This company is staffed by ex-Mossad, ex-intelligence people, and it exports this software with licence from the Israeli Government, so they have to approve every country that they export it to individually.

Peter McCormack: But that is also insane, that the Saudi Government is buying technology from the Israeli Government who are considered mortal enemies.

Ahmed Gatnash: Well, it shows that in reality, they're a lot closer than it is convenient for either side to admit.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's a bit like Japan this week agreeing to buy oil from Russia because some specific rule that isn't broken within the rules that said they can't, I can't remember what I read, but there are these double standards.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and they've played this double game for a long time, of having this very anti-Israel stance for the Arab public like, "Yeah, we support Palestinian rights, etc", and in reality, Israel feels very threatened by the existence of a Middle Eastern democracy. And Saudis are also very threatened by the existence of any Middle Eastern democracy, that's why they're so interventionist in the region, like they don't want to model for an alternative so they cooperate closely on these things.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so explain how Pegasus works and how they infiltrated his phone.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, there are multiple versions of it and I think the latest one at the time was zero-click. They would basically get this software on your phone without you having to -- no, let me backtrack; the latest one at the time, they'd send you a link somehow.

Peter McCormack: Like a text message?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, they'd send you a text message saying, "Your Amazon delivery is scheduled, click this link to find out the details", and you'd click the link; as soon as you've clicked it, it's on your phone and your phone is compromised and they can hear anything the phone can hear, see anything the phone can see, access the files, etc.

Ahmed Gatnash: After that, there was another version which was zero-click. I think they had exploited a bug in WhatsApp where they'd give you a missed call, and just by doing that, without any action on your end, you'd have it on your phone.

Peter McCormack: And is this all phones, Apple, Android…?

Ahmed Gatnash: I believe it was on all phones, or all major phones.

Peter McCormack: It amazes me that that can happen and there hasn't been a patch from Apple. It amazes me that software can be downloaded to your phone without you agreeing.

Ahmed Gatnash: It's another whack-a-mole kind of thing. To their credit, the phone manufacturers are generally very fast at getting these patches out because this is a critical security vulnerability, but that's what a zero-day is, like you find a bug and you hide it until you have the opportunity to use it, because as soon as people find out about it, it's going to be patched.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I would have thought the installation of software, there would have been something they can do to stop the software being installed on your phone, but…

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, I guess that's a very difficult problem.

Peter McCormack: It's out of my level of understanding, and my understanding is like almost every government is probably using this, or a lot.

Ahmed Gatnash: Dozens of governments have been revealed to be using it. There are European governments, like Hungary, who have been spying on journalists; Mexico; a lot of Middle Eastern dictatorships; a lot of countries that you wouldn't really expect from the visible perception to have been greenlighted basically a digital weapon by Israel, countries that you'd think have like an adversarial relationship. There have also been uses of it in western democracies targeting journalists, and this is just one tool among many, of course; there are other ones, some of which we know about, probably a lot more that we don't.

Peter McCormack: So, you must then find it particularly frustrating to see Saudi Arabia sportswashing their entire history, because it isn't just the murder of Khashoggi, there are serious human rights abuses within Saudi Arabia, there is this ongoing war with Yemen which a lot of people refer to as some of the worst human rights violations, it's an absolute humanitarian catastrophe.

Peter McCormack: It hasn't barely had any coverage compared to what we see of Russia/Ukraine. I've seen it, I've seen the blockade which led to the starvation, deaths of children, I've seen it all.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and again, it goes back to that complete hypocrisy of western governments claiming that their support for Ukraine is about human rights when they'd happily turn a blind eye to what's happening in Yemen.

Peter McCormack: Well, they have, and provided weapons that have likely been used.

Peter McCormack: We don't need to get into the details of either war, but it is an absolute catastrophe of what's happened there. So, you must find that particularly frustrating when you see Newcastle United bought by a -- so, explain the corporate structure for that because is it that the investment fund from Saudi has to own 50% of everything, therefore by virtue of Newcastle being bought, they own 50%? I can't remember the actual --

Ahmed Gatnash: I don't know the details.

Peter McCormack: Okay. Is it PIF?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, the Public Investment Fund, and the Head of the Public Investment Fund, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who is now a director of Newcastle, is a Saudi Minister.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I don't know if it's just Premier League teams, I think it is, they have a thing called a fit-and-proper-person test.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, the Directors' Test.

Ahmed Gatnash: Which doesn't seem to do anything. Apparently, they're tightening up this week, but I don't think they actually want to, like they're tightening it up without tightening it up.

Peter McCormack: So, I've got something I want to show you; this isn't because of the interview, I bought this about five months ago, but it was only this morning when we started running through some of the notes I remembered I had this. So, I've got the Newcastle, now Saudi, green shirt.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, I love it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I bought it, so anyone listening, about five months ago, I bought the Newcastle --

Danny Knowles: Hold it up for the camera.

Peter McCormack: -- third shirt where they agreed to change their logo and everything to green, the Saudi colour, and I thought, "You fuckers", and I got Khashoggi on the back and 18 because the year he was murdered. But I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet; part of me wants to go to a game and wear it, part of me wants to just run on the fucking pitch with it, just lay in the middle of the centre circle.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, this whole kind of sportswashing thing is part of the social reforms in Saudi Arabia.

Peter McCormack: Can we just backup on that? So, when you say "social reforms", you said it earlier and it didn't trigger as a pejorative to me.

Ahmed Gatnash: It's not meant to be pejorative but these are kind of soft reforms which don't disturb the power structure.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, pejorative's the wrong term, I didn't notice, I didn't realise the cynicism you had towards it.

Peter McCormack: So, please carry on.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, they're reforms without being real reforms, like you let people have their bread and circuses but you don't actually give them what they really want, which is more accountability, a more functioning economic system, a more functioning political system, the right to determine what happens to them and to choose their own destiny; that's what people actually want, not the ability to go to concerts in Jeddah.

Ahmed Gatnash: It's particularly galling, to go back right to the beginning of the conversation, as a Muslim, it's particularly galling to see a dictator like MBS use, as a central plank of his legitimacy, that he's creating social liberalisation in a conservative region where the entire reason why he needs to create that social liberalisation is because his family spent decades spending billions of dollars to normalise an ultra-conservative form of my religion across the world.

Peter McCormack: Using your religion.

Peter McCormack: Interpreting it incorrectly to maintain authoritarian control.

Ahmed Gatnash: Exactly.

Ahmed Gatnash: And now we're stuck with it. The institutions which maintain those interpretations and maintain that control are entrenched because they're wedded to the political structures which are wedded to the economic structures. We can't even talk about it freely, we can't even discuss it, we can't even have debates, and meanwhile, he could travel to western capitals and talk about how he's doing all these reforms and basically paint the picture that the region needs a benevolent dictator because we're so backward that we can't be trusted to rule ourselves.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and not only does it lead to this authoritarian control over these countries but actually it leads to a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of who Muslim people are across the world. We have a significant amount of Islamophobia here in this country, it happens in the US as well. As I said, I interviewed Laura Loomer who, a lot of her attention has been focused on Islam and the things that she sees, the clichés that she falls into with the criticisms of Islam, but my understanding from many people like you and the taxi driver and people I've met, it is a peaceful religion.

Ahmed Gatnash: We're a community, and like every community, we have our problems, we have areas we've gone wrong, we have conflicts with others, we have conflicts among ourselves, it's not really a homogenous entity in any way, but that isn't really visible to most people because the power's entirely on one side.

Peter McCormack: Well, what they see is dictators and war and terrorists.

Ahmed Gatnash: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: They're misled. What did you make of LIV Golf and the, I'm going to put words in your mouth almost now but I've just got to say it, the fucking embarrassing statements we've got from the various golfers who've either openly admitted, "Yeah, I'm in it for the money", or have given some convoluted reason because they didn't want to say, "I'm in it for the money", but every one of them is in it for the money?

Ahmed Gatnash: I'm not following LIV Golf too much, but I find that very refreshing. I'd be happier if politicians just said, "We're in it for the money", as well. It would give us a break from the relentless kind of upholding of these slogans about freedom and democracy and human rights that clearly mean nothing.

Peter McCormack: What about Qatar? I know you've said that the oil monarchies are in a better position, and I thought the World Cup was a particularly brilliant World Cup, great football, I thought they put on a brilliant competition, everybody I spoke to who went said it was so well-organised; it seemed like a very good World Cup. Was that also sportswashing?

Ahmed Gatnash: It was the use of sport to bolster a country's reputation.

Peter McCormack: But even many countries around have -- the UK has a terrible history of colonialism and --

Ahmed Gatnash: Where do you draw the line on sportswashing is?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, where do you draw the line? When I first heard about it, I just felt like it wasn't a country that deserved it, not for any human rights reason, it's just not a footballing country.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, well another fabulously corrupt organisation, FIFA.

Peter McCormack: Of course; thanks, Sepp! But in hindsight, I think they did a brilliant job at the time, and then I was particularly concerned with the treatment of workers and the deaths of workers. I interviewed a Guardian journalist, Pete, I can't remember his name, regarding that, and then when it came around I was like, "I'm not going to watch this World Cup", and then I obviously got sucked in because I love football. I felt hypocritical, but at the same time I was like, "Well, do you know what, has Qatar, embracing the World Cup, embracing a lot of foreign travel into the country and becoming part of a global community there, could that help push towards reforms within their country?"

Ahmed Gatnash: Maybe, I'm not really sure. To your credit, whilst enjoying the World Cup, you have spoken about human rights abuses, about the abusive labour rights, and that's the most I could ask of anyone. I wouldn't ask someone to not watch the World Cup; I watched the World Cup. To their credit, at least Qatar are not chopping up journalists in embassies even though they have their fair share of human rights abuses to deal with, so they're an authoritarian Middle Eastern dictatorship but they're not quite in the same bucket as the UAE and Saudi Arabia to me.

Peter McCormack: Okay. This is a long lead up to talk about Jeff Bezos.

Peter McCormack: I didn't know about this. I'd heard something about Jeff Bezos's phone being hacked; not until we went into this preparation for this I had the details, and I was like, "What?!" How is this not more public?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it's a pretty crazy story. I'm going to have jump around a little to give the full context because there are lots of moving parts; it connects to where we were earlier basically with Jamal. So, we met him in May 2018 at the Oslo Freedom Forum, we introduced him to Twitter, we were planning this initiative to monitor disinformation and to take action on it. And in the middle of those plans, he basically told us, "Send me the proposal and I'll chop it around to my contacts and see if I can get you funding", and in the middle of that, he gets killed.

We used those techniques that we'd been developing to track the aftermath of the murder. So, we watched how Saudi Arabia was basically using online narratives to confuse people about what had actually happened, about who Jamal Khashoggi was, who was responsible, and in the midst of that we were seeing a bunch of stuff that didn't make sense to us at the time. So, park that thread and we'll start another thread for a second. There's a tabloid in the US called the National Enquirer.

Ahmed Gatnash: You know them?

Peter McCormack: Well, I know them for two reasons; firstly, I know it is a bit of a shit rag, but also I know of it from, there was a podcast series I listened to called Catch and Kill which is about originally Harvey Weinstein that led to Trump, and I believe the National Enquirer was used to catch and kill stories or some -- I can't remember the exact detail.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and they were in legal trouble for this. So, I don't know the full details either, but something involving corruption and they'd had a plea deal essentially. They admitted to a lot of illegal stuff; in exchange, they got immunity but with very strict condition that, "If you do one more illegal thing, you lose the immunity and you get prosecuted for all of it". So in 2018, early 2018, there are a lot of parallel threads here, but I don't know if you remember MBS took this trip to the US.

Peter McCormack: I do.

Ahmed Gatnash: And he met the who's who of US politics, culture, media, business, like he met with Zuckerberg, he met with Bezos I think, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, etc. And there was a magazine that came out around the same time; it was like a glossy 100-page magazine titled The New Kingdom, and it's like a 100-page advert for MBS's vision for Saudi Arabia, with no ads, published by the National Enquirer, 200,000 copies distributed nationwide, of their own accord, of course, be very clear about that point.

Peter McCormack: It is an ad.

Ahmed Gatnash: Even though there are emails showing that they had sent a copy of the magazine to the Saudi Embassy three weeks before publishing it. So, the Saudi Embassy had seen the contents and approved it, I would say.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, copy-checked it.

Ahmed Gatnash: MBS gets back from that trip having had a fantastic time and the whole world is behind him, excited about these reforms happening in Saudi Arabia. We'd spent the whole time shouting from the rooftops that this guy's bad news but nobody listened. So, he comes back and he arrests all of the women's rights activists in the country, because that's what he does every time he feels empowered by the West, he escalates the repression; he feels like it's a licence to take a step forward.

Peter McCormack: Is it him fearing uprising or does he just want control; does he just want to exercise control?

Ahmed Gatnash: He's extremely controlling and extremely paranoid.

Peter McCormack: He is paranoid.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah. Allegedly at the time, he was sleeping on a yacht off the coast; I think that's because he was consolidating his power and he even feared his own family, a coup within the family.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Ahmed Gatnash: So, anyway, he gets back and does that purge of all the women's rights activists, and this is around the time we're talking to Jamal. He is killed and then the Washington Post, where he was a columnist, kind of takes up the cause and decides, "We're not going to let this be forgotten. Someone has to be held accountable for this", and they keep it as a story in the media for weeks. I don't know if you remember that, it was a big thing.

Ahmed Gatnash: And we're seeing these aggressive campaigns online, Arabic language, on Twitter demonising Jeff Bezos, "Jeff Bezos, the Jew who controls the Washington Post and Amazon".

Peter McCormack: Oh yeah, I forgot he bought Washington Post.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and he's not even Jewish by the way but antisemitism is how they roll. So, they're demonising him, they're abusing him, calling him slurs and advocating for a boycott in Saudi Arabia of Amazon because Jeff Bezos is a racist who's against Saudi Arabia and wants to see the country fail, and this proud country will, etc, and every time something major happens -- do, Jamal was murdered on 2 October, I think on 15 October, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Erdoğan, President of Turkey, pointing the finger at Saudi, and that led to an explosion of the stuff online. But there were a few surges of activity that we didn't really understand at the time.

Then, early January, the National Enquirer publishes a special issue with Jeff Bezos's texts showing infidelity and he gets divorced the next day, so this is divorce, and obviously there's a lot of gloating and a lot of triumphalism on Saudi social media with these inauthentic accounts. Then, in early February, he suddenly releases this article on Medium where he says he's been the victim of an extortion attempt, or a blackmail attempt, and he says, "I received this letter yesterday from the owner of the National Enquirer asking for a couple of very specific things". Obviously, he'd had his security team investigating the source of the leaks of his texts, and the security team had basically said to the media, towards the end of January that, "We think there's a political motive".

They immediately get a letter from the National Enquirer saying, "There is absolutely no political motive to this. Drop that line of enquiry". And then he gets this letter from them saying, "We have photos as well", basically like naked selfies, and, "We're going to offer you a deal. We won't publish those selfies if you make a public statement that we have not been involved in hacking or electronic eavesdropping of any kind and that there is no foreign involvement or direction in this whole thing whatsoever".

Peter McCormack: That's just blatant blackmail.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it's blackmail.

Ahmed Gatnash: And it's very specific blackmail, which is quite strange.

Peter McCormack: And very strange that the National Enquirer would openly blackmail. Danny, can you just look up, "National Enquirer blackmail Jeff Bezos?"

Ahmed Gatnash: So, there's an article in the Daily Beast by Gavin de Becker, who is his Head of Security, basically stating the facts of the case, and this is also in the article that Bezos published in Medium.

Peter McCormack: But it feels like there's something criminal in this with the National Enquirer; I wouldn't know what law has been broken.

Ahmed Gatnash: It certainly feels like that, and Bezos kind of states in his article that they basically lost their shit as soon as they mentioned that they were investigating a Saudi angle, because if you remember, they had this plea deal which said, "If you engage in one more criminal act, you lose the immunity"; and if they've been taking direction from the Saudis for anything, without registering as a foreign agent under the FARA law, then they've broken the law.

Peter McCormack: I'm still also partly amazed that Jeff Bezos is sending cock photos now! You just would have thought someone like Jeff Bezos's security team would have said, "Look, Jeff, you need to be really careful here. You're the richest guy in the world".

Danny Knowles: "No dick pics".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "No dick pics".

Danny Knowles: Well, it says here that Dylan Howard, the Chief Content Officer at the National Enquirer, said, "Call off the Washington Post investigation or we'll publish your dick pic".

Peter McCormack: Wow, I mean that's insane!

Ahmed Gatnash: So, when we read these articles, we published saying, "This is really interesting; here's our angle", and we kind of lined up the timelines. It was really fascinating for us because on the day where he published that article saying, "Yesterday, I received a blackmail attempt", the day before, we had observed a surge in that kind of anti-Bezos trolling on social media, and it was really triumphalistic and gloating. We were confused by it at the time, we were like, "The other ones lined up with stuff and this one seems to be random", and suddenly it made sense because it happened at the time that he was receiving that letter, but that letter was not public; no one knew about it apart from the people responsible for it and Bezos himself.

We published that and we said, "This also happened on the day before the National Enquirer published the original texts", and it happened on a bunch of other dates, and some of them were unexplained, but we put them out anyway. His security team got in touch with us and said, "We need the rest of your information"; we shared it with them. They went and checked those dates and then they came back and said, "On one of those dates, his phone suddenly started uploading gigabytes of information to an unknown server by itself". They checked around; what had happened before that, he'd received a WhatsApp video from Mohammed bin Salman.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, from the personal phone number of Mohammed bin Salman, not through intermediaries, no attempt to disguise it.

Peter McCormack: What was on that video?

Ahmed Gatnash: If I recall, it was like a New Years greeting, like fireworks or --

Danny Knowles: A request for a dick pic!

Peter McCormack: Jesus! Okay, so how did that all wrap up, the whole Jeff Bezos thing?

Ahmed Gatnash: I'm not sure how it ended, but Gavin de Becker submitted a dossier to US authorities after he'd finished that investigation.

Peter McCormack: It is this weird scenario though, if Pegasus is on his phone, I feel like everyone is captured.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, if the most powerful man, or one of the most powerful men in the world can be blackmailed so blatantly, who can't be? And the Bezos story is only interesting because he said, "No", and he basically torpedoed himself. How many people got the same kind of threat and they just said, "Yeah, sure, I'll do whatever you want".

Peter McCormack: Exactly. It's almost like, when you mentioned earlier, those zero-day attacks, you don't tell anyone, you save it until you need it.

Peter McCormack: It's like, I don't know, zero-day dick pics, you've got that thing where you've got whatever shit, someone's having an affair, someone's done something corrupt; I think we all have stuff on our phone we wouldn't want to become public.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, the thing that keeps me up at night is how many people are there in the media or in senior political positions in western democracies who have been captured and who we don't know about because they haven't had the courage to come out and say so, they've just gone along with it.

Peter McCormack: They're either actively captured or don't know they've been captured yet.

Peter McCormack: God, it's trying to make me think of people who've done stupid shit, like why did they do that?

Ahmed Gatnash: Everyone's done something stupid.

Peter McCormack: No, like publicly.

Ahmed Gatnash: Oh right.

Peter McCormack: Like I wonder what's happened, who's been captured and when you would save them for, but it sounds like everybody is captured, like anyone could have this on their phone, anyone could be -- It's almost like there are lots of, like what the NSA did, these databases of people.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and they kind of normalised this pervasive data capture and invasion of privacy and now it's gone round and it's being used against citizens and residents of western democracies.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm also surprised, if this does exist, there aren't more people who've also come forward and said, "I've been blackmailed", more people like Jeff Bezos.

Peter McCormack: But I guess it has to be at such a serious level where you've got that marriage of richest guy in the world owning an important national newspaper in the US which employed the person that Saudi Arabia, or MBS, allegedly instructed the murder of. There are those connections enough to go, "Okay, this is worth using now", but they've been so sophisticated in getting this information that their approach to get the National Enquirer to blackmail him seems a very naïve execution of it.

Ahmed Gatnash: It's a very strange case. So, the National Enquirer were pretty close to Trump, they had a lot of connections to Trump.

Peter McCormack: The Catch and Kill, the stories?

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and the guy in charge, David Pecker, had basically been around a lot when MBS made that tour, so there's like a whole constellation of characters who were pretty tight together.

Peter McCormack: It's really weird because security won't be publicly against this because they're most probably using it, so it's like a new information war, it's like a hidden information war, it's a compromising information war.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, and there hasn't been much particularly strong action taken yet, even though this has reached the highest levels. It was revealed a few years ago that several ministers in the French cabinet had been hacked with Pegasus; I'm not sure if they ever revealed who'd done it, but I think the main culprit was Morocco, the Government of Morocco. I'm trying to remember who else high profile; there are obviously loads of activists, loads of journalists, bad things happen to a lot of them.

Peter McCormack: I'm starting to think I don't want a phone anymore!

Danny Knowles: You need that dumbphone that you bought.

Peter McCormack: What was it called? Light Phone. Maybe that can be compromised. Okay, so this is insane; I'm going to have to take some time to get my head around this all. But what is the outcome of it; where are you going with this now; what are you working on; what are you actively trying to do?

Ahmed Gatnash: So, right now, aside from that, we're kind of trying to build our institution, Kawaakibi Foundation, in order that we can continue to pull on these threads of issues critical to the future of human rights and freedom in the Middle East and in the world at large, because everything's interconnected, things that are critical on the long term, like 20 years and up, and which are not getting the amount of attention and work which they deserve.

So, this work with disinformation, we've called it the Jamal Khashoggi Disinformation Monitor in memory of our friend, and it's like a permanent-standing programme within the organisation; maybe we'll spin it off some day when it's independent enough. We have a bunch of other projects and we're basically focused on our sustainability.

Peter McCormack: And if people want to find out more or support you, how can they?

Ahmed Gatnash: Our website is kawaakibi.org; you can find it in my Twitter bio, I guess.

Peter McCormack: We'll share it out anyway.

Ahmed Gatnash: Thanks.

Danny Knowles: This might be a bit of sidetrack, but you talked a bit about kind of the fallout in Libya after the Arab Spring and you're working with people there now using psychedelics.

Ahmed Gatnash: Not people who are there now.

Danny Knowles: Okay.

Ahmed Gatnash: But we have a programme. So, one of those areas which we've identified is mental health; it's a massive crisis globally but particularly in this region. There was a study in the Lancet a few years ago that estimated 70% of Libya's population suffers from PTSD.

PTSD is notoriously hard to diagnose, it's a complex condition, but there are probably massive rates of it across the region, and that's a systematic issue that causes people to behave in particular ways, to be difficult, to struggle to relate to other people, and we are looking at ways of addressing that. The conventional mental health system is failing even here, never mind in Libya where I think, on the last count, there was less than five psychotherapists in the country.

Peter McCormack: A population of how many?

Ahmed Gatnash: 6 million or 7 million who have been experiencing a decade of war following 40 years of dictatorship, during which people were hung in the streets and in universities, so there's a lot of trauma.

Ahmed Gatnash: I don't know if you've been following, but over the last few years there's been a lot of research coming out about the potential of psychedelics.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, psychedelics as just a therapy, especially MDMA, incredibly promising for PTSD.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they've used it on soldiers.

Ahmed Gatnash: They have; a lot of the studies are on soldiers. I think one of the big studies was on Vietnam War veterans with an average of something like 20 years' chronic treatment-resistant severe PTSD and a lot of them basically no longer met the diagnosis threshold after three sessions of MDMA-assisted therapy.

Peter McCormack: I'm not surprised.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, it's like the penicillin of the mind.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. It's a wonderful drug if used rightly; it stimulates serotonin levels to rise, and serotonin levels rising warms the body and warms the heart and soul, so I'm not surprised.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it switches off the amygdala for a while so you can process some of the worst things that have happened to you in your life without feeling that fear response. And we basically have a programme where we're researching, and we're going to be educating about how these can be used in the region in a kind of culture and religion-sensitive manner to address some of the issues that we have.

Peter McCormack: Isn't it strange though that there are all these medicinal benefits to so many of these drugs, whether it's marijuana treatments, which we wanted to treat my mother with when she had cancer, to psychedelics, to MDMA, yet there's this real aversion from a lot of governments to even consider allowing this; it takes a lot of time and effort to get them to consider allowing this with so many datapoints that prove how beneficial they are to society.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, it's sad that they're so dogmatic about it.

Ahmed Gatnash: Do you know how the war on drugs came to be?

Peter McCormack: I do but I cannot remember but you'll probably give --

Ahmed Gatnash: The Nixon story.

Peter McCormack: There you go, yeah.

Ahmed Gatnash: So, allegedly, this is what I've read, in the 1980s, was it the 1980s around the Vietnam War time; no, the 1960s.

Peter McCormack: 1960s, Vietnam, wasn't it? Yeah.

Ahmed Gatnash: Yeah, around the Vietnam War, there was this whole counterculture --

Peter McCormack: Was it 1960s or was it 1970s, because they came off the gold standard to finance the Vietnam War, and that was 1971?

Ahmed Gatnash: It's strange how all these dates are connected.