The Washington Post reported Monday that it has appointed Juliet Kayem, a columnist and senior adviser to NSO, an Israeli spyware company suspected of helping the Saudi government spy on Khashoggi, according to a report by Motherboard.
Just over a year ago, the reporter at the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi, entered the Saudi consulate in Turkey, never went out, was assassinated and cut off, the report said. US intelligence agencies believe the Saudi royal family ordered the assassination.
The company sells malicious Israeli spyware known as Pegasus, which is used to track journalists and human rights activists for authoritarian regimes around the world, the report said.
According to an e-mail from The Washington Post, Kayem recently helped NSO establish a recently issued Human Rights Policy, an attempt to whitewash its image as a company that helps authoritarian governments spy on civil rights leaders and journalists.
Kayem's human rights policy was criticized by David Kay, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, in a letter to the company only four days ago.
"Human rights policy raises many questions about how NSO plans to prevent or mitigate human rights abuses committed by the technology it provides to governments around the world," Kay wrote.
Spyware from the NSO group was used by Saudi Arabia to monitor Saudi dissidents and friend Khashoggi Omar Abdul Aziz, according to a detailed study by Canada's Citizen Lab, which has become the world's most important watchdog.
Why Kayem? And why now?
The report says the Post's decision to hire Kayem - which "will help understand how the United States is dealing with the most challenging national security issues" - is very strange, given that the Washington Post editors previously said that Saudi surveillance had killed people.
"People are losing their lives because of (censorship)," Khashoggi, director of Khashoggi in the Washington Post, told CPJ.
Kaym's specific role in NSO was not mentioned on her website, and Kayem did not respond to a request for comment for Motherboard.
Kayem is also a faculty member at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama.
The report concludes that the appointment of Juliet Kayem, who advises a company that helped authoritarian governments track journalists as a columnist in the Washington Post a year after a journalist was killed, is surprising.