Twitter has some very serious security explaining to do.

[Addendum 2/20/2020: Following a legal complaint, the Guardian removed its article of 14 June 2019 and apologised to Mrs Peel. We are happy to clarify that Yana Peel is not, and was not, personally involved in the operation or decisions of the regulated Novalpina Capital investment fund, which is managed by her husband Stephen Peel, and others. — Read the rest

"Davos in the Desert" is Saudi Arabia's charm offensive aimed at global financial elites, but its launch last year was marred by its close proximity to the gruesome murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, carried out at the personal behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who styles himself a progressive reformer.

Laura Poitras (previously) is the Academy Award-winning director of Citizenfour; she teamed up with the activist group Forensic Archicture (previously), whose incredible combination of data-visualization and documentary filmmaking have made them a potent force for holding war criminals and authoritarians to account: together, they created Triple Chaser, a short documentary that uses novel machine-learning techniques to document the ways in which tear gas and bullets made by companies belonging to "philanthropist" Warren Kanders have been used against civilians to suppress anti-authoritarian movements, and even to murder innocents, including children.

The shame just keeps on coming, America.

[Addendum 2/20/2020: Following a legal complaint, the Guardian removed its article of 14 June 2019 and apologised to Mrs Peel. We are happy to clarify that Yana Peel is not, and was not, personally involved in the operation or decisions of the regulated Novalpina Capital investment fund, which is managed by her husband Stephen Peel, and others. — Read the rest

Axios reporter Jonathan Swan has a reputation as a fawning interviewer, but he made Trump son-in-law and nepotism hire Jared Kushner very uncomfortable this weekend.

A particularly excruciating moment:

Q) Has Trump ever said anything racist?

KUSHNER: "Absolutely not. You can't not be a racist for 69 years then run for president and be a racist."

NSO Group is a notorious Israeli cyber-arms dealer whose long trail of sleaze has been thoroughly documented by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab (which may or may not be related to an attempt to infiltrate Citizen Lab undertaken by a retired Israeli spy); NSO has been implicated in the murder and dismemberment of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi (just one of the brutal dictatorships who've availed themselves of NSO tools), and there seems to be no cause too petty for their clients, which is why their malware has been used to target anti-soda activists in Mexico.

The NSO Group is an Israeli firm that has long marketed itself as a "cyber warfare" company, selling mobile surveillance technology to governments that include notoriously corrupt human rights abusers. One of these is Mexico, where NSO spyware played a key role in targeting teachers and journalists, and missing students. — Read the rest

Citizen Lab (previously) is a world-renowned research group that specializes in deep, careful investigations into the nexus of state and private surveillance, outing everything from the Chinese spies who took over computers in Tibetan embassies around the world to the bizarre deployments of state-level cyberweapons against Mexicans who campaigned for limits on sugary sodas.

Nominee for Attorney General William Barr told the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning that he "can conceive of situations where, as a last resort," journalists could be prosecuted for "putting out stuff that is hurting the country."

This was in response to Sen. — Read the rest

In Saudi Arabia, women can only get a divorce after proving abuse in court, but men can simply file — in secret — for a divorce from their wives, and sometimes, they don't even tell their wives, continuing to live with them so they don't have to pay alimony, fraudulently using power of attorney to access their funds, etc.

Netflix removed an episode of the program "Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj" in Saudi Arabia because the royal family didn't like its coverage of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The streaming media service said it was warned that the program violated Saudi Arabia's "anti-cybercrime law," which forbids content "impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, and privacy." — Read the rest

2018 has been a dangerous year for those who bring us the news: according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 129 journalists were killed this year. For the first time in history, the United States has been listed as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists to ply their trade. — Read the rest

In a deeply researched longread, New York Times investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe document in fine detail the role played by the ubiquitous McKinsey and Company in legitimizing, coordinating, and supercharging the world's most notorious human-rights-abusing regimes, from Saudi Arabia to China to Russia.

Watch. So chilling.

Find someone who is as happy to see you as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman, who high-five each other and dive in for a bro hug, laughing like only two murderers can, at the G20 in Argentina.

Yes, Trump is a pathological liar, but he's also the first US president to call Ted Cruz a liar, the first to admit that the Saudis were likely behind 9/11, the first to admit that the Saudi royals can kill a lot of journalists but that the US will still do business with them because they buy a lot of American bombs, that Nancy Pelosi blew a chance to impeach Bush, that pharma and defense contractors rip off the American public, that politicians are for sale to their political donors, that Vladimir Putin doesn't have a monopoly on political assassination (and that the US is hardly innocent on this score), and that going into Iraq was a "big, fat mistake."

Diane Greene was the CEO of Google's cloud business, and it was she who tried to convince Googlers to back her bid to sell AI services to the Pentagon's drone program, as a warmup for bidding on JEDI, the $10B Pentagon infrastructure project.

Canada's Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — a man who is willing to say the most progressive, laudable things imaginable, provided he doesn't have to do anything — has steadfastly refused to cancel Canada's planned $15 billion sale of antipersonnel weapons to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, despite the incipient genocide in Yemen and the Kingdom's practice of dismembering critical journalists.

The assassination and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi (previously) finally accomplished what decades of detailed reports of human rights abuses and years of increasingly grave details of a brutal proxy war in Yemen could not do: it made the Saudi royal family into international pariahs, even among the plutocrat class who had fattened themselves off of Saudi money.