He says as much.Of course, we all know the only reason WashPo publishes articles critical of the administration is Bezos right? It mean, it&#x27;s not like every other mainstream paper all over the world does it. And for no connection, no connection at all, the Whitehouse is suddenly talking about raising the rate Amazon is charged for postage. That couldn&#x27;t possibly be vindictive retaliation by state power to get a newspaper to change, could it? Nah.

He really hasn’t given them any, has he? I mean, besides buying it. The Post has even been quite critical of Amazon, regarding HQ 2, for example.

He probably doesn’t want to give people more reasons to suspect that he might use WaPo as his personal propaganda platform.

He tweeted it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;JeffBezos&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093643321732464646" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;JeffBezos&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093643321732464646</a>

Is there a good way to verify it’s actually written by him? Doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to set up a fake Medium profile and post this claiming to be him. There’s nothing else posted under this profile, almost no followers, unless he has linked to it from some other verified source I don’t think we can assume it is genuine.Edit: apparently he verified it by tweeting it. Still a worthwhile thing to remember to check in the future though, I imagine this kind of thing eventually being gamed, especially in such a drama-filled escapade as this.

And also contrary to his own arguments in this very story.

Could just publish it as a letter to the editor, no?  Papers public random screeds all the time.

Serious question: What if he bought a full page ad at the market rate?  Would that be unethical because he was paying himself (sort of) for that ad?

&gt; (Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)Using his stake in the WaPo to boost a personal rebuttal would be a tremendous ethical lapse.

apparently his lawyers didn&#x27;t even know he was postingit does come across as quickly written and rather genuine

This was my first thoughts as well.Very strange writing style &quot;complexifier&quot;, &quot;back to the story&quot; multiple times.

Also interesting that the writing is a bit clunky. Doesn&#x27;t seem to have gone through 100 coms people.

maybe he considered his audience, and it&#x27;s not the genpop, but tech people who read such things?

Actually, it&#x27;d be far less improper to do that than to put it in the Post.

Personal stuff is for blogs. The Washington Post is a business, a respected newspaper, an internationally renowned journalistic publication. It’s not a soapbox for Bezos...In fact, why not bring up that he owns one of the most heavily trafficked websites on the planet. Why didn’t he publish this letter to Amazon.com front page? Equally valid question, no?

Because it&#x27;s there.Jeff Bezos didn&#x27;t spend his Thursday afternoon throwing up a static site in an S3 bucket.He hit &quot;publish&quot; on Medium.

Yeah but why Medium? Surely he could throw up a static site in an S3 bucket...

AMI is willing to accept a loss of future profits gained from running the story, in exchange for Bezos’s capitulation. If you have access to AMI’s advertising rate card and a rough subscriber count you can estimate the USD value this information represents.As others have mentioned, “thing of value” does not have to be monetary. For example, there are a number of cases where a person was found guilty of extorting another for sexual favors[0] or to exact a particular benefit (political or otherwise) from a victim.——-[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sextortion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sextortion</a>

Apparently it&#x27;s not a clear cut case of extortion, because no money is exchanged. A &quot;thing of value&quot; may do, but it&#x27;s not clear that AMI&#x27;s demands rise to that level.

&gt; (Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)Failure to immediately understand why this is bad idea boggles my mind. Maybe this is how we ended up with Trump in the first place.

Fairly certain you can&#x27;t edit the news&#x2F;paper&#x2F; after it&#x27;s been printed and distributed.

One thing for sure is that he cannot retro-actively edit an article on Medium, without medium knowing about it.I am not sure the same thing can be true with his own newspaper.

He doesn&#x27;t need to use the Post. He&#x27;s the richest man in the world, if he writes an article claiming someone is trying to extort him it&#x27;ll get plenty of press regardless. And with Medium he can just publish it himself and it removes any biases folk have about the paper.

He owns a newspaper company, but the newspaper isn&#x27;t his personal blog. It would be quite improper to use it as such, and a decent editor probably wouldn&#x27;t allow it. He could maybe write an opinion piece, though even that seems dubious.

Important note: This is written by Jeff Bezos himself.Normally, the Bezos affair story would be gossipy, but this alleges extortion, extraordinarily.(Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)

This is especially true because it isn&#x27;t a matter of hypocrisy: Bezos isn&#x27;t a political figure or religious authority claiming high moral standards.

As I read Bezos&#x27;s post, I noticed that at the section where he describes the photographs, I found myself simply scrolling past them to get to the next part of the story.

Probably more to do with the fact that there&#x27;s so much high quality porn on the internet that we&#x27;re honestly desensitized to amateur quality celeb nudes. Briefly intriguing, but overall rather &quot;meh?&quot;Granted, I could just be projecting, but I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m alone here.

Yeah, AMI really seems to be operating with an outdated world view here, whereas Bezos correctly assessed that the public at large will be more impressed by the act of standing up to a blackmail attempt than they&#x27;re concerned about his marital fidelity. AMI&#x27;s going to get dunked hard : being simultaneously amoral and stupid makes them the easiest target in the world.

I think another interesting thing about these times, compared to when such things may have happened 20+ years ago, is that the photos they&#x27;ve described would cause rather little outrage or attract much beyond a few giggles from the public. Especially if released after their existence is already known about. I think the iCloud leaks of 2014 severely tempered society&#x27;s salacious demand for more pictures of this nature.

&gt; This shows the whole Trump&#x2F;AMI&#x2F;Campaign org to essentially be a criminal mafia enterprise.There are quite a few connections with organized crime, it turns out. This isn&#x27;t just a random slur, but something that merits investigation.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;are-trumps-mob-connections-a-coincidence-fuhgeddaboudit&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;10&#x2F;24b62e2c-9cad-11e8-843b-36e177f3081c_story.html?utm_term=.f34ec45db8d0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;are-trumps-mob-conne...</a>and of course there&#x27;s this, too:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;d...</a>

Are the people downvoting this (presumably Trump supporters), that AMI admitted guilt in attempting to influence the 2016 by using their well known tactics to snub a story damaging to the candidate, and that their plea agreement stipulates that they would no longer commit anymore crimes, and that by blackmailing Bezos, they&#x27;re essentially broken their plea agreement?This is the very definition of a criminal enterprise. Breaking federal election laws, blackmailing those investigating your crimes. If the connection to the Trump campaign bothers you, that too is factual, given that AMI&#x27;s agreement involved assistance they gave to the Trump campaign that was illegal, and the owner, David Pecker, is a close personal friend of the President.There&#x27;s pretty good circumstantial evidence from this, and the Cohen tapes, that using power and privilege to &quot;deal with&quot; personal or political enemies does not give pause to these people.Thus, mafia-like behavior.

David Letterman also did it very publicly on his TV show.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=44QgPty17Mc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=44QgPty17Mc</a>This shows the whole Trump&#x2F;AMI&#x2F;Campaign org to essentially be a criminal mafia enterprise.

I guess he had no real choice, there is no way the extortionist would not come back for more.

Yeah, and he makes a great point - if he can&#x27;t fight back against this sort of thing, then who the heck ever could?

Not specifically a big fan of Uncle Jeff but gotta admit it takes some guts to publish such a thing.Sneaky edit : I&#x27;m sure one could not ignore his massive balls on any of the selfies AMI allegedly got their hands on ;)

&gt; Did he not divorce his wife by parting with half his fortune?Half of their fortune. It was communal property.

&gt; literally has tons of moneyIf his keeps his money in $100 bills, then you&#x27;re right. $136 billion would weigh about 1,230 metric tons.More likely, his cash consists of electronic entries in bank systems which weigh substantially less.

Looking at descriptions of those photos, I honestly don&#x27;t understand why it&#x27;s even such a big deal. And I suspect that it&#x27;s not nearly as big of a deal to Bezos as the blackmailers thought it would be. Perhaps a little projection at play.

Agreed, if he gave into the request this time, it would have only escalated. Fast forward in time. Oh, we also want you to remove this article, or stop talking about that subject. If you now disagree, not only will we release the photos, but it&#x27;ll also become public that you&#x27;ve been our puppet for years, and both you and the Washington Post have no credibility and everything you&#x27;ve written in the past cannot be trusted.I imagine this was the goal. They have some nude photos which are embarrassing and a chance for them to get in the door. If they could get Bezos and Washington Post to bow down on that, they&#x27;d have much more power and leverage going forward that could potentially destroy them both. Bezos called them out, and now all they have are these fairly meaningless Bezos nudes, which are not in the highest of demand.I heard some people suggesting that it was a really poor move to blackmail Bezos in writing. However, if you believe the above, then it makes perfect sense. They wanted a very clean paper trail of their requests, Bezos and the Washington Post accepting the offer, and the future outcome of those actions. This would provide them with blackmail material much more valuable than the photos.

The whole affair reminds me of nothing so much as that scene in &quot;The Dark Knight&quot; that ends with Lucius Fox saying &quot;. . . and your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck.&quot;

Also, naked selfies have somewhat become normal in the smartphone age. It&#x27;s nothing you can shock anybody with anymore...

&gt; if he secretly capitulates to this, then the real blackmail material would be the capitulation, not the photos.I wonder if this was the plan all along.

AMI picked the wrong person. Jeff, literally, has tons of money, extremely respected in the business world.Forget about the embarrassment, if he secretly capitulates to this, then the real blackmail material would be the capitulation, not the photos. Cause if the owner of Washington Post bowed down to blackmail, every article published in the article will be called into question.And who gives a shit if a billionaire cheated on his wife or sent dick pics. I don&#x27;t care. Did he murder someone? Did he not divorce his wife by parting with half his fortune?

Maybe a combination of defiance and comic relief:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f7f9D4KclJw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=f7f9D4KclJw</a>(David Letterman talks about an extortion attempt on him)

David Letterman laid out the details of a blackmail attempt on air a several years ago. If memory serves, he had been having sex with a young staffer on his show. These sorts of blackmail blowbacks happen from time to time, and it&#x27;s always people who are very secure - either with money or social status or both - who are able to pull them off.

David Letterman was being extorted over an affair in 2009.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-NaIwHWEE7k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-NaIwHWEE7k</a>

That&#x27;s some Reynolds Pamphlet biz right there.

I remember David Letterman doing just that. Apparently that&#x27;s the conventional wisdom on this sort of thing: announce it yourself rather than let the other person take the first public move.

&gt; Well, that got my attention. But not in the way they likely hoped. Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?Can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a prominent person post the details of a personal extortion attempt out of defiance for all to see.

You come at the king, you best not miss.Also, never take notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy ;P

Indeed! Even I was quite fascinated by that phrase. I really wonder if AMI folks did any what-if analysis before shooting off those e-mails. At least the best-case and worst-case scenarios if not exploring all possible branches.I mean come on, you are literally taking on the richest person on earth and didn&#x27;t even evaluate implications!? Just to belabor the point, he&#x27;s not only the richest person right now, he&#x27;s among the top 15[1] wealthiest persons of human civilization. And you are threatening him with, what, a bunch of nudish images and adult text messages!?&gt; and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.This had me laughing for a long time!![1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_wealthiest_historical_figures" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_wealthiest_historical_...</a>Edit: Added wikipedia reference.

That gave me chills, and the phrase, If you’re going to shoot the king, you’d better be goddamned sure you’re going to kill him flashed through my mind. Well, they missed spectacularly, and now the man who has a rocket company for fun is clearly pissed.

This is worse than Gawker outing Thiel as gay. In this case they&#x27;re attempting blackmail ahead of time, which may be a crime.

I&#x27;m getting strong vibes of Thiel and Gawker here. Attempting to intimidate a billionaire is generally a poor decision.

&quot;proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter&quot;That&#x27;s the richest guy in the world saying &quot;I don&#x27;t give a XXXX what it costs, find out who did it.&quot;It&#x27;s also the moment in your life when, if you get the result that guys wants, he&#x27;ll be glad to write you a cheque for $20,000,000 and will be happy to do so and he won&#x27;t be interested in why the number is that high.

I&#x27;m gonna guess that the National Enquirer knows what the response will be when they say &quot;we&#x27;ll release your pics&quot;. They probably weren&#x27;t expecting this move by bezos

This sounds too bad to be true , but if true i think it&#x27;s how any sensible person should handle it. I mean, a dik pik who will care a month later. Did they really think that such misguided extortion would work? It really doesn&#x27;t make much sense unless someone else was pushing forward this extortion

I&#x27;m not sure if you are joking, but that&#x27;s exactly what they should not be doing. They also can&#x27;t just go poke around their customer&#x27;s data. That would be very unwise...

That would be a terrible idea.We&#x27;re at a point in time where the public, politicians and the tech community itself are becoming wary of tech monopolies. Currently Amazon has avoided the brunt of it (mostly due to being consumer friendly unlike Facebook) and the scrutiny it has had, has been focused on it&#x27;s retail business.Bezos booting someone off AWS would bring a ton of public scrutiny to an even more powerful monopoly, one that the public and politicians are by and large ignorant of. Plus it would (rightly) shake the tech community out of its complacency around cloud lock in and encourage us to explore solutions. (I realise there&#x27;s already a lot of good work happening around this, but it&#x27;s not an issue I&#x27;ve seen the wider industry talking about much)

Aannnd in a spectacular twist to this beautiful soap opera, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalenquirer.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalenquirer.com</a> is down.Even if AWS has nothing to do with this it (unfairly) reflects extremely bad on them.

Amazon could pull a CloudFlare and knock them off the internet as nationalenquirer.com seems to be hosted on AWS. My guess is Amazon&#x2F;Bezos already has multiple backups of the Enquirer&#x27;s digital assets for forensic purposes.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ryanhuber&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093665718464327680" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ryanhuber&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093665718464327680</a>

Yep, otherwise he&#x27;d be their hostage...do this other thing or we&#x27;ll release the pics.

They won&#x27;t publish them. But I&#x27;ll guarantee you they will anonymously leak out on the internet. There is no way to prove they are the only people with these photos. (and they of course aren&#x27;t the only ones)

I don&#x27;t see how much public availability of such photos could hurt him. He&#x27;s already divorcing. He probably had to accept many humbling things about himself over last few years.The only thing those photos would change is undeniably confirm that richest man on the planet has actual human male body and some love life, which pretty much everyone already suspected.Some people will get a kick of it but it will eventually blend into the background same as fappening or a photo of a hole in the sock of president of world bank.

You are giving too much credit to dirtbags. These photos will be routed to persons that are 45th degree from him and released aka leaked for free. Don&#x27;t underestimate the power of revenge :|

It&#x27;s worth noting that Jeff Bezos has a lot to gain from publishing these threats. While publishing the descriptions of the photographs may sting, publishing the photos themselves would hurt a lot more. Now that he&#x27;s made the accusations public, AMI could not plausibly publish the actual photos.

Someone without that net worth won&#x27;t be blackmailed by the US and Saudi governments.

But if humanity as a whole enforced social norms that rewarded blackmail-refusals, then the value of blackmailing would drop so low as to be not worth it and extremely uncommon.Essentially we could develop a herd immunity to blackmail.

&gt; this is the correct way to handle such things.Yes, with conditions.Bezos himself writes, in the article we&#x27;re discussing:I asked him to prioritise protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter. - emphasis mine.And that:On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.Thus making it plain, simple, and obvious, that he recognises that having a net worth up around the US$137 billion[1] mark has it&#x27;s perks.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jeff_Bezos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jeff_Bezos</a>Edit: inconsequential grammar improvement

So in a nutshell, &quot;Imagine if instead of normal pics they were of weird shit that might be illegal?&quot; There isn&#x27;t enough time in the world for me to think about that line of inquiry.&quot;Imagine if instead of simply walking down the street you punched everybody you passed.&quot;

Imagine if the material contained morally grey stuff, like something politically incorrect. Not even illegal - just monetary support for some alt right figure or someone.Then imagine if the material was about this other woman before he got his divorce.Then imagine if the material contained actual borderline illegal stuff or something like photos of his nieces on a beach holiday.He got lucky - many many others would capitulate.

Whatever you think about Jeff, this is the correct way to handle such things. We should all have the same character in such a situation (despite how the situation arose; in this case via an affair). Jeff has MANY other issues of moral disfortitude (we all do to some degree, though not at these scales). However, this particular event is to be applauded and emulated.

The ghastly behaviour is a description of the extorters, surely?!

I think GP&#x27;s &quot;ghastly behaviour&quot; (seems like you inserted the &quot;personal&quot; unless it was an edit?) is referring to AMI rather than Bezos.

The status of his marriage is the key thing here. And there&#x27;s plenty indicating he is very much a classical cheater.Whatever the right adjective is, I&#x27;d definitely pick a negative one.The way he cheated only makes an already dirty act so much nastier.

I&#x27;m going to push back against this characterization as &quot;ghastly personal behavior&quot;. For one, it&#x27;s not clear if he and his wife were already separated, at least at a personal level, before this affair. But this general idea that it&#x27;s somehow &quot;ghastly&quot; to send a paramour love notes and sexually suggestive pictures is a sad remnant of our puritanical history, and  the sooner we rid ourselves of this notion, the better.

Good billionairism or otherwise Jeff.  Please don&#x27;t enter a Saudi embassy, unless to hand out hearing protectors with a smile on them.

Having read the whole thing, man Jeff Bezos has a great deal of courage.It helps to be backed by untold wealth but here is a guy who stands tall in the face of ghastly behaviour and in the face of deep personal embarrassment.+1 Bezos.

Anyone with a job has means, more agencies just need to start thinking of it as a pipeline business. You can even go as low as to threaten to dox various meme authors for instance, unless they start paying $10&#x2F;mo into a fund. Get enough of them over enough time and the methods used to de-anonymize or uncover whatever other information you want to charge people for the privilege of not releasing will pay for themselves.&#x2F;s

not exactly tabloid blackmail, but &#x27;revenge porn&#x27; was and is still prevalent on the internet, and I don&#x27;t doubt that a lot of small scale blackmail happens as well, and if I would guess I think many of the affected people have very little recourse.

But what person without means is going to be the target of tabloid blackmailing?

Although, it did, I assume, trigger the divorce which will cost him a couple billion dollars

All the money in the world can&#x27;t buy your pride &#x2F; dignity back, especially if some &quot;embarrassing&quot; evidence get out there.It&#x27;s something in the way people would look at you, talk about you, etc ...If you combine that with the Streisand effect, there&#x27;s no way a public figure can take this kind of hit and walk away unphased. It&#x27;s very much human nature, and that&#x27;s why Jeff&#x27;s move is bold.

I agree.One thought did occur to me is that he is basically daring AMI to release the pictures. What if he knows the providence of these pictures, knows how they got into AMI hands, and knows that if AMI publish them he can sue them, Gawker (not Buzzfeed) style, into the ground?

Jeff Bezos has mentioned before that he tries to make big decisions from a “regret minimization framework”.

Well, he&#x27;s still Jeff Bezos, the man who runs Amazon, with all the unethical implications that come with that.He has demonstrated a certain level of integrity, but that doesn&#x27;t make him a Good Man.

The problem I have with most super rich people is that they consider genuine risk far less important than potential embarrassment. E.g. they won&#x27;t dare taking a stand politically because of the chance that someone will go public with some scandalous nonsense. Bezos on the other hand seems willing to calculate differently. I have to say, this has changed my opinion of him a lot in his favour. On the very remote chance you&#x27;re reading this Jeff, good on you!

There were some photos of him recently looking like a bit of a unit - e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;jeff-bezos-before-and-after&#x2F;?r=AU&amp;IR=T" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;jeff-bezos-before-and-after&#x2F;...</a>

Unless he&#x27;s proud of his body, and either doesn&#x27;t care or feels positively about strangers looking at it.

At minimum, this type of post would intensify a very expensive legal battle, which Bezos admits in this article he&#x27;s looking forward to.For anyone else, going bankrupt in an attempt to fight blackmail would be a pyrrhic victory in the best-case scenario.

&gt;racialist photosCan you clarify what makes one of these different from a racist photo?

Really? I&#x27;m at the other extreme: blackmailing me would be pointless as there would be no gain (not to mention in my boring case any unclad selfies would have to be synthesized).And in the current world[+] there&#x27;s so much exposure that such pictures will be drowned out by the sheer volume of stuff. Yes, we&#x27;re still at a point where politicians can lose their jobs because of racialist photos or certain indiscretions, but at least the &quot;indiscretions&quot; have less and less power over non-politicians (actual bad deeds still do, but that&#x27;s not an issue here).And these pictures are all about consensual behavior that isn&#x27;t extraordinary. There&#x27;s not even a scandal.[+] or in what I can imagine is a linear projection of today&#x27;s world forward only a few years from now

Maybe. It’s usually better to get ahead of bad news.

&gt; If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)Sounds like precisely why he felt the buck had to stop somewhere.

Only if you don&#x27;t want the world to see your penis.

Granted, this strategy is very high risk unless you&#x27;re one of the richest people in the world.

Blogger and Tumblr aren&#x27;t like Medium; maybe a good comparison for them would be Wordpress. Twitter&#x27;s official blog isn&#x27;t on Medium. So doesn&#x27;t &quot;have&quot; it - 
blog.twitter.com

I mean, Amazon doesn&#x27;t really have an associated &quot;official&quot; blogging platform, not in the way that Google has Blogger, Yahoo has Tumblr, and Twitter has Medium. Also worth noting that Amazon&#x27;s spokesperson used Medium when writing a rebuttal to a high-profile investigation of Amazon&#x27;s business practices in 2015: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@jaycarney&#x2F;what-the-new-york-times-didn-t-tell-you-a1128aa78931" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@jaycarney&#x2F;what-the-new-york-times-didn-t...</a>

I mean, he&#x27;s talking about journalistic standards. Having an open web is crucial for having good journalism on the web.

Only HN could turn Jeff Bezos publicly outing a company attempting to extort him with naked photos into a threat to the &quot;future of the open web&quot;.

It has a paywall, forces users to have an account to read the stories published on the platform. It&#x27;s not a champion of the open web, either.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scripting.com&#x2F;liveblog&#x2F;users&#x2F;davewiner&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;20&#x2F;0900.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scripting.com&#x2F;liveblog&#x2F;users&#x2F;davewiner&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;20&#x2F;090...</a>

for all its faults medium is not a closed garden

Slightly off topic, but the fact that the world&#x27;s richest man who owns a tech giant chose to publish this on a closed platform like Medium should be worrisome for the future of the open web. On the other hand, this might just be the biggest brand endorsement for Medium till date.

Ya, there&#x27;s some real danger here with regard to precedent, but I agree, in both of these cases, the world is much better off without Gawker and AMI.

Yeah, that was more open and shut (court orders them to do something, they refused. Play stupid games win stupid prizes)

No, they went right ahead and published revenge porn.

From the article:&gt;I didn’t know much about most of that a few weeks ago when intimate texts messages from me were published in the National Enquirer. I engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer. As it turns out, there are now several independent investigations looking into this matter.AMI showed up on Bezos&#x27;s rader after they published his intimate text messages. Gawker showed up on Thiel&#x27;s radar after they outed him. They both then went investigating to see if there was some illegal activity that these media companies were engaged in.

Gawker didn&#x27;t try to extort Hulk Hogan or Peter Thiel.  The situations aren&#x27;t comparable.

I am glad that Jeff Bezos is aggressively going after AMI for their scummy behavior. I was also glad that Peter Thiel aggressively went after Gawker Media for their scummy behavior. Sometimes these badly behaving media outlets need to have a billionaire personally invested in stopping their bad behavior.

I look forward to seeing these scumbags becoming a smoking crater.

I mean, that is if Medium doesn&#x27;t run out of money in the next ~18 months. It&#x27;s been a savage series of pivots to get to here, and even then, I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s actually sustainable.

This browser extension has really saved my Medium reading experience.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thebaer&#x2F;MMRA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thebaer&#x2F;MMRA</a>

big kudos but he should remove the popups , with the extra gdpr prompts it&#x27;s unbearable

He chose Medium.@ev is 3 out of 3 (and a podcast pivot).

The title does this post a misservice.  This is way, way more interesting than you might think, and I highly recommend following the link and reading the whole thing.

perhas because they are also the only ones who would care to do so?

The elite are really the only members of society who can successfully dismantle tabloid media like AMI, see: Peter Theil v. Gawker.

The &quot;I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter&quot; part gives off pretty strong &quot;money is no object&quot; vibes haha.

He specifically calls attention to the fact that his wealth is one reason he was able to speak out about this:&gt; If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can? (On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake.)(emphasis added)

Well in this case there&#x27;s no money involved really.
It&#x27;s just a fuck you.

Interesting attempt to blackmail someone (who in this case happens to be, you know, the richest man in the world), with information that is generally public already. All that would have been added were a few additional pictures. How much extra public embarrassment is going to come from that?

Sterile robots don&#x27;t have naked selfies floating around.

Counterpoint: this is likely how a sterile robot would respond to an extortion attempt.

I’m glad not all tech billionaires are sterile robots

&quot;blackmail is legal&quot; is a pretty depressing take, but it does seem plausible.

Only analysis that matters in the end is the judge&#x27;s. That&#x27;s why when you&#x27;re operating with something like that hanging over your head, you should keep your nose clean.You wouldn&#x27;t believe the number of people who sidestep trouble with a deal like that, and then go right out and burn it up like idiots. I just don&#x27;t get it?

Did their agreement specify that they wouldn&#x27;t commit any more federal crimes?Or did it say they wouldn&#x27;t commit any more crimes?

Depends on the analysis I suppose. This one makes it sound unlikely that the agreement will be voided:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;renato_mariotti&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093658366583422978" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;renato_mariotti&#x2F;status&#x2F;10936583665834229...</a>

Apparently AMI and David Pecker&#x27;s non-prosecution agreement for the Michael Cohen stuff is contingent on them not continuing to do crime. So i guess that&#x27;s out the window now.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;nycsouthpaw&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093654471157170177" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;nycsouthpaw&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093654471157170177</a>

That&#x27;s what all the back-and-forth about &#x27;fair use&#x27; and Bezo&#x27;s competency as a CEO is about.

The paparazzi own their photographs though. In copyright, the person who takes the photo owns it.These photos were stolen.

the paparazzi exist in a 1st amendment gray area.  they cover public figures but the newsworthy nature of their salacious stories and gathering tactics are always getting challenged in court.

Fair use for news reporting, basically. Their justification is in the email chain at the bottom.

How can they publish photos which they don&#x27;t own the copyrights?

Part of the HN charm is that when there&#x27;s a story pegged to the front page with a title like this, you can just trust that it&#x27;s worth a click.

I agree, it could at least use &quot;Jeff Bezos: &quot; as a prefix.

This title should probably be changed to something useful. There is no indication of what it might be in the original title.

I respect him even more now.We are all human. Nobody wins this &#x27;moral crusade&#x27; that takes up so much airtime.We should be much more focused on the existential threats that the entire biosphere is dealing with, not the &#x27;dick pics&#x27; of the world&#x27;s richest man. He&#x27;s just another dude at his core it seems, happens to be founder of Amazon though.

How does that explain Pecker&#x27;s rage at the WaPo digging into AMI&#x27;s Saudi connection, though?Nearly everyone who wants funding at this scale hits up the Saudis. Describing that AMI looked for funding with the Saudi royals doesn&#x27;t strike me as a particularly significant reveal; Musk did it relatively recently, and he wasn&#x27;t excoriated for it. How is news that AMI is doing it worthy of a push-all-the-chips-into-the-pot move like AMI pulled?Now if Bezos&#x27; private investigation team is getting close to some kind of Kryptonite like Pecker personally authorized his staff to assist with encouraging Khashoggi to visit the Saudi&#x27;s Turkish embassy as a favor to the royals to try to ingratiate himself and angle for a funding pitch, then I could understand Pecker&#x27;s reaction. Even if Pecker and AMI didn&#x27;t know the Saudi&#x27;s intent, it would indeed be very awkward for AMI and the Saudis. The other direction this could be going is the Saudis are directing AMI via cut-outs to dissuade any deeper investigation into Khashoggi&#x27;s death, and miscalculated Bezos&#x27; mettle.I wonder if AMI overplayed the &quot;Bezos cheated in his marriage!1!1&quot; angle, too. If there is more or less a collective shoulder shrug that billionaire POTUS DJT cheated on Melania, I&#x27;m not clear what AMI thought the impact would be on Amazon&#x27;s public opinion that its billionaire founder&#x2F;leader is doing the same.This will be interesting to follow.

The Post, along with the Times, has been pursuing and reporting a story that David Pecker, AMI&#x27;s CEO, has been working with a Saudi go-between, in part as an effort to expand their business. More importantly, Jamal Khashoggi, who we now know almost beyond a reasonable doubt† was targeted by Mohammad Bin Salman before Saudi assassins murdered him in Turkey (most probably at MBS&#x27;s behest), was a Post employee.† Reports emerged today that there&#x27;s apparently audio of MBS himself ruminating over having him murdered.

A little less than a year ago, AMI&#x2F;National-Enquirer published a 100 page ad-free magazine dedicated to the praise of MBS and the Saudi Kindgom [1]The Saudis claimed they had no involvement in it, although an Associate Press investigation revealed that it had circulated among Saudis weeks before publication [2]This issue was distributed at supermarkets across the United States.Whether there was an untoward arrangement behind it might be under investigation.1.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedailybeast.com&#x2F;trumps-publisher-pal-puts-saudi-propaganda-magazine-in-us-supermarkets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedailybeast.com&#x2F;trumps-publisher-pal-puts-saud...</a>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;24&#x2F;the-strange-saga-of-a-pro-saudi-tabloid-in-americas-heartland&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;24&#x2F;the-strange-saga-of-a-pro-saud...</a>

Here we go:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ndrew_lawrence&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093715333079318530?s=21" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ndrew_lawrence&#x2F;status&#x2F;109371533307931853...</a>

I don&#x27;t usually put myself in debates on HN but I have always thought of you as a very rational guy so I&#x27;m surprised you make this comment-Situation A: where none of this happened. Ami reserves the right to publish photos. Perfectly legal.Situation B: Present
Offer- I wont publish them. But if you cheat- we go back to situation A.Plain and simple. I am no lawyer bit everyone I&#x27;ve read today says that basically bezos has no case and his legal allowed him to publicize evidence and comment on &#x27;an ongoing case&#x27;- commentary which can alter the &#x27;case&#x27; pretty much means there is no case. The only thing that remains to be seen (or ignored) is when Ami will publish his photos because if they really want to play this game- that&#x27;s what their next step would be.

Yes, they do explicitly say exactly that. Term 3 in Jon Fine&#x27;s email is &quot;AMI agrees not to publish&quot; and that directly follows term 2, which is Bezos backing off his assertion that AMI is politically motivated in their coverage. And term 6 means they get to keep the blackmail materials.

Saying that they may publish something is not saying that they will.

From the quoted e-mail:&gt;In the case of a breach of the agreement by one or more of the Bezos Parties, AM is released from its obligations under the agreement, and may publish the Unpublished Materials.That&#x27;s very directly saying that they will publish the photos if Bezos doesn&#x27;t do what they say.

&gt; &quot;6. In the case of a breach of the agreement by one or more of the Bezos Parties, AM is released from its obligations under the agreement, and may publish the Unpublished Materials.&quot;They don&#x27;t really need to say more than that, do they?

&gt; If we do not agree to affirmatively publicize that specific lie, they say they’ll publish the photos, and quickly. And there’s an associated threat: They’ll keep the photos on hand and publish them in the future if we ever deviate from that lie.They never explicitly say that, do they? I&#x27;m not enough of a lawyer to know if what they did still counts as extortion&#x2F;blackmail, but as far as I can see they simply describe the photos, and propose an agreement that would prevent them from publishing the photos. But they never say &quot;Do this or we&#x27;ll publish the photos&quot; - perhaps they never intended to publish them in the first place.

&gt; I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.It&#x27;s going to be fascinating to see what he uncovers. David Pecker has been playing this extortion game for decades (frequently on behalf of his buddy Don Trump). Now Bezos has given a blank check to drain the swamp.&gt; To lead my investigation, I retained Gavin de Becker. I’ve known Mr. de Becker for twenty years, his expertise in this arena is excellent, and he’s one of the smartest and most capable leaders I know. I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter.

I never thought I’d be rooting for Bezos, but I am.

Are there any repercussions for accredited lawyers involved in this? Or are they safe if they act purely at the discretion of a client?

And if you are going to do it. For fucks sake, do not put it in writing...

If you ever find yourself with scandalous or incriminating material on someone remember this: Blackmail will always fail in the long run.It&#x27;s commonnly known in espionage tradecraft that it&#x27;s an absolute last resort or totally off limits tool. The risk you take with coercive trade craft are insanely high.As proven here.

Those penalties can occur simply from users flagging posts, which is likely what happened here, given the vitriol elsewhere in-thread about Amazon.

HN penalizes post randomly sometimes. The last time I had one of my blogpost pretty high on the front page, it lasted an hour and then went directly to 5th-page. It gave me an impression that everything on the FP is heavily handpicked.

HN penalizes high discussion posts for being gossipy.

Yep. I don&#x27;t read medium posts as a general principle, and the title meant nothing to me so I skipped right over it. Only saw it in another thread.

The title isn&#x27;t something that I would have had any idea what it was about or why I should read it if I hadn&#x27;t been linked here from a comment thread with a more informative title.

Slightly off topic, but does anyone know why this is so low on HN? It has more votes and is more recent than anything except the &quot;How I didn&#x27;t make a billion dollar company&quot; post, but is at rank 11.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;bifDABu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;bifDABu</a>

I agree.Once you&#x27;ve torn them limb from limb, once Pecker is rotting in a jail sell and the only thing the National Enquirer is useful for is recycling them into cup holders; then you walk into Playgirl and do a photo shoot of these exact photos just to make sure they all know it was never about the pictures.

Jeff Bezos, if you&#x27;re reading this:Do a Playgirl spread, for charity. Spreadeagle.Defang them.--------Edit:defang them (pun intended... get it? &quot;fang&quot;) by doing Playgirl now, and publishing those sext images alongside.
And do it for some great charity.Everybody will have a huge laugh over it, Jeff will be a hero, and National Enquirer will have nothing to publish.

Can a DA get some political mileage from prosecuting this?My guess is yes.

Given that Jeff Bezos appears to be willing to spend almost unlimited money on this, it’ll be interesting to see if a felony investigation happens.

Yeah I know. It&#x27;s almost just slipped in there as an afterthought, but it tells a story of Bezos saying to AMI: &quot;I&#x27;ll spend more money on this than your entire media &#x27;empire&#x27; is worth, if that&#x27;s what it takes... And I&#x27;ll barely notice the loss.&quot;

&quot;I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter.&quot;Wow!

I find this extremely irresponsible. This is a serious issue.I am beginning to think that this is a conspiracy by AMI to damage Washington Post. If Jeff would have done something as requested by AMI, they would again use that against him and start shouting that WaPo has lost credibility, since Jeff is so easy to blackmail.

Now if they do publish those photos, you&#x27;d only have to add &#x27;his&#x27; to that headline.

&gt; Bezos Exposes PeckerHuffPo headline

And now we have to live in a world where Mr Bezos&#x27; unpublished &quot;materials&quot; are patiently waiting to be found among other junk in somebody&#x27;s hard disk. How can humanity sleep  at night...

Yes. When they say it&#x27;s newsworthy, the only reason they care about that is the legal protection it could offer them if they did publish the photos.They clearly don&#x27;t care about using journalism to benefit the public good. They&#x27;ve already admitted to that much when they openly acknowledged they helped bury the Karen McDougal &#x2F; Trump story. ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;dec&#x2F;12&#x2F;national-enquirer-trump-payments-david-pecker-catch-and-kill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2018&#x2F;dec&#x2F;12&#x2F;national-enq...</a> ) If it&#x27;s important for shareholders to know about a sex scandal involving Bezos, then it&#x27;s important for voters to know about sex scandal involving Trump.

Thought experiment: Try taking them at their word for a sec.&quot;...an exploration of Mr. Bezos’ judgment... is indeed newsworthy and in the public interest.&quot;Wonderful! Looking out for my interests! My heroes, fightin&#x27; for me against all the bad judgment! So grateful!But then, if he&#x27;ll agree to comply with their demands, suddenly it&#x27;s not newsworthy anymore.&quot;AM agrees not to publish, distribute, share, or describe unpublished texts and photos (the “Unpublished Materials”).&quot;What?! Sellouts! Traitors! What about the public interest?! All the bad judgment!??!?So yeah, not only do they blackmail public figures; by their willingness to bury the story they also show that they can&#x27;t be counted on to hold public figures accountable when the time comes. He&#x27;s right, real journalists don&#x27;t act like this. (Not that I ever believed that shit; like I said, it was just a thought experiment.)All you need is a bit of dirt on them, and you&#x27;re safe from being exposed. Actually that might be the one thing that made this case different and turned it into a blackmail attempt instead of just another in the thousands of sleaze stories over the years.

If they have no value in causing embarrassment, what value would they have as blackmail material?There&#x27;s nothing embarrassing about being naked but I&#x27;m sure most people wouldn&#x27;t want naked photos of themselves made public.

Is there anything particularly embarrassing about them? All sounds pretty vanilla to me?

You need to describe or post the pics to defang the blackmail leverage

Jeff &#x27;s got some balls -- that we &#x27;re unlikely to see now

I&#x27;m impressed he didn&#x27;t censor out the text that says what the photos contain. The post would have had a similar impact either way I think. Nobody should have to be embarrassed about harm-free personal activities though.

I wonder how this appears in their financial filings? I hardly think they have a line item for extortion.

What struck me was how brazen AMI was about the blackmail. Then I realized: they were comoftable doing it that way, putting it in writing, because in nearly every other time they&#x27;ve done this, it worked.

probably personal cell # vs business cell #

He seems to be driving his point home in how, when including the email from Dylan Howard, the mobile (cell) number in the text is redacted, but the signature image (containing said number) is left unmodified.

I didn&#x27;t downvote- can you please elaborate more?

Bezos essentially got paid by the CIA to buy the WashPost ($600 million contract from the CIA, next thing you know, Bezos buys the paper).Let&#x27;s not kid ourselves about his altruism - the purpose of owning a large paper like the Post is political power... this has been true since at least the time of Lord Beaverbrook.

he says it s plausible but doesnt offer evidence , or even imply it is true. It&#x27;s not exactly secret that they are not fond of each other.

Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.Is Bezos implicating Trump himself in this scheme?

How can they act above national security interest?  Don&#x27;t they realize the security institutions would destroy them?

Not just a cover story, they created a whole glossy ad free magazine about him and printed 200,000 copies. It&#x27;s bizarre.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedailybeast.com&#x2F;trumps-publisher-pal-puts-saudi-propaganda-magazine-in-us-supermarkets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedailybeast.com&#x2F;trumps-publisher-pal-puts-saud...</a>&gt; Greeting Americans on newsstands is a high-quality glossy advertisement for MBS, The New Kingdom. It retails for $13.99, has no ads and its 200,000 copies can be found in venues ranging from U.S. airports to WalMart, Safeway and Kroger’s—raising questions about the magazine’s financing and its origins. The Saudis say they don’t know how it came to be. AMI, which publishes The National Enquirer, insists it had no outside editorial or financial assistance, from the Trump administration or otherwise.

It is possibly due to pressure from Saudi Arabia. MBS was pissed that WP is going after him after killing of Khashoggi. Enquirer (and Pecker) are quite close to MBS, they ran a cover story on him (how awesome he is).It could be a bigger story than it seems at the moment.

So let me get this straight.. the owner(s) of the National Enquirer are doing this.. because they&#x27;re worried about what, their journalistic credibility? Seriously? After having published the Enquirer for decades already?Alternately, maybe some people just like to be bullies.

There is enough crime to marvel at right now.

Maybe, maybe not.The investigations against Trump and his people are already way past the scope of Nixon or Iran-Contra.Particularly, at the very least, Trump is on the hook for state charges in New York about his Trump foundation. He can&#x27;t get pardoned by a sympathetic successor.

I&#x27;m afraid that at said point, we will marvel more with the fact that the people at the center of it all got away with it. Remember Nixon, or Iran-Contra?

At some point in the future we will look back at this administration and marvel at the magnitude of criminal activities surrounding this president.

Think what you will of Amazon or Jeff Bezos, but his conduct here is heroic. I don&#x27;t say that lightly.

Quoting somebody who posted in the deleted duplicate thread:&quot;To modify a quote from The Dark Knight:&quot;Let me get this straight, you think one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, who owns the Washington Post and pays out of his own pocket to send rockets to space, won&#x27;t stand up for himself so your plan is to blackmail this person?Good Luck &quot;

Worth pointing out that the only mobile device that Bezos has apparently tweeted from (publically) seems to be an iPhone. Doesn’t mean he didn’t have a burner phone for conducting his affairs of course.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dancow&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093732934299856899" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dancow&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093732934299856899</a>

Citizen Lab (who uncovered a lot of NSO Group&#x27;s work with governments) also recently had what seemed to be an attempt at character assassination targeting them.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apnews.com&#x2F;9f31fa2aa72946c694555a5074fc9f42" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apnews.com&#x2F;9f31fa2aa72946c694555a5074fc9f42</a>

&gt;AMII heard &quot;amazon Machine Image&quot; and thought WTF - are the AMIs compromised....

Which makes stories like this a lot more interesting:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;mby7kq&#x2F;malware-to-spy-hack-iphones" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;mby7kq&#x2F;malware-to...</a>&gt; Saudi Arabia paid $55 million to purchase iPhone malware made by NSO Group, according to a recent report by Israeli newspaper HaaretzThe Saudis really disliked the Washington Post digging into their murder of Khashoggi, it doesn&#x27;t seem too crazy that they set their sights on the boss and ended up stumbling upon some juicy texts and pics. The really interesting part is how they got to AMI. I have to imagine there is a Trump connection somewhere along the way.

Don&#x27;t underestimate how desperate people in power will get when they feel threatened.

Check out the book The Billionaire&#x27;s Vinegar. Plenty of rich people are willing to stay silent to avoid embarrassment.

House of Saud, maybe, they are dumb enough to think this would work. Given their inept handling of the Khashoggi I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised. I doubt anyone in the US intelligence profession would think Bezos would call off the WaPo because of some scandalous photos.&quot;Just blackmail the richest man on the planet, that will totally work!&quot;

It seems like a lot of people are not reading between the lines of this post. Bezos apparently believes that he was hacked by either the US or Saudi government and that now one or both of those governments are using the National Enquirer as an attack dog against him. That accusation is much bigger than any other piece of this story.EDIT: Here [1] is a reporter from the Washington Post backing that up. The Bezos&#x27; camp believes this is a politically motivated attack and the data was acquired by a &quot;government entity&quot; (logically the US or Saudis).[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ndrew_lawrence&#x2F;status&#x2F;1093715333079318530" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ndrew_lawrence&#x2F;status&#x2F;109371533307931853...</a>

No Thank You, Mr. Pecker