Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the United Nations Secretary-General, said yesterday that the employees of the international organization have not been using the WhatsApp application to communicate in their correspondence since 2018, and stated that the reason for the ban is that the application is not classified as a safe mechanism.
Independent experts said on Wednesday that they have information indicating the possibility of the involvement of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the process of piracy of the President of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, by a message on the WhatsApp application.
Haq said that instructions have been issued to senior UN officials not to use the application, because it is not safe, and added that UN officials were informed of the ban in June 2018.
The piracy story began with Bezos in April 2018, when he attended a dinner party with the Crown Prince and exchanged phone numbers, after which - specifically in May of the same year - Bezos received an encrypted video file sent from the Saudi Crown Prince's personal WhatsApp account, followed by the start of a leak Huge amounts of data from the Bezos phone.
Bezos then said that he received WhatsApp messages from Muhammad bin Salman containing private and confidential information about his personal life, according to what was reported by the media between November 2018 and February 2019, the period that followed the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
On Wednesday, the independent experts said: Agnes Kalamar, the Special Rapporteur on arbitrary and extrajudicial executions, and David Kay, Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression - in a statement - "The information we received indicates that the Saudi Crown Prince may be involved in observing Mr. Bezos, with the aim of influencing - If not silence - reports published by The Washington Post (owned by Bezos) on Saudi Arabia. "
Meanwhile, the American Wall Street Journal revealed on Thursday that officials close to the Saudi crown prince had knowledge of plans to hack into the Bezos phone, confirming that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was investigating the incident.
The experts, Kalamar and Kai, called on the United States and other relevant authorities to investigate these allegations, as well as to investigate bin Salman's involvement in targeting his opponents for years.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Kalamar said that the circumstances surrounding the Bezos phone piracy operation were at the heart of the investigations into the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, adding that the piracy took place at a time when Khashoggi was writing articles critical of the Saudi authorities.
For its part, the WhatsApp application management responded by saying that the application is safe and provides protection for more than 1.5 billion users. "Every private message is protected by comprehensive encryption, to help prevent hackers or others from watching chats," said Communications Director Carl Wooge.
He added that "the encryption technology that we have developed is greatly appreciated by security experts, and it is the best available around the world."
On Tuesday, the Saudi embassy in Washington denied hints that the crown prince hacked Bezos 'phone, and said on her Twitter account that recent media reports hinting that the kingdom was behind Jeff Bezos' phone piracy were "ridiculous."