What happens is something approximately like this:
Saudi military intelligence puts through a request via appropriate channels to the Five Eyes for a tap on some low-profile woman's phone, claiming it's necessary in pursuit of a counter-terrorism objective. This ends up with GCHQ rather than NSA (NSA spies on Brits, Brits spy on Americans, they work at adjacent desks and share info: this is the traditional work-around for laws banning domestic spying) who happily hand over the contents of a foreign POIs phone to an allied intel agency.
Nobody at any senior level has a clue what's going on under cover of surveillance: stuff like this happens thousands of times a day. Meanwhile, the Saudi officer in charge of the kompromat on Bezos now has the dodgy photos off his girlfriend's phone ...
If GCHQ doesn't work, route through some other allied SIGINT agency with cooperation via NSA, preferably in a country where the Khashoggi thing is just another "foreigners doing horrible things to each other" back page story and nobody has a clue about Jeff Bezos' divorce.
TLDR: the global war on terror has given us a global hairball of inter-tangled intelligence sharing arrangements, and these can be manipulated for pleasure and profit by any sufficiently corrupt party who is plugged in to it.
It’s hard to conclude that five eyes isn’t a domestic spying proxy program.
One is resource management and risk evaluation (aka, there are bigger problems), another is knowledge of FIS operations and many others...
You've incorrectly attributed the argument from a specific offshoot (that foreign spy tools persist because of limited counterintelligence resources) and applied it to the root supposition (that nation states utilize parallel construction, through a conspiracy with known adversaries as a matter of course and that spy infrastructure is built specifically for that purpose).
Of course it's more likely that someone (anyone, really) just pwned Ms. Sanchez's phone directly.
They are huge customers for British arms sales (look up the Al Yamamah deal — roughly US $100Bn in business). They're known to have bought surveillance and intelligence monitoring software from Israel. They're in everybody's back pockets, and in their wallets.
As a Brit, I find your belief that US citizens are immune from monitoring by the intelligence services of other nations (when that kind of money is passing hands) touching ...
As are a lot of countries. Does not mean we will allow surveillance without any questions.
>As a Brit, I find your belief that US citizens are immune from monitoring by the intelligence services of other nations (when that kind of money is passing hands) touching ...
I never said or implied that.
Read the comment again:
>No Five Eyes member is going to randomly tap some US citizens phone because the Saudis asked without some serious investigation.
(You're looking at the present-day for context, but these agencies run on protocols that have built up over many decades, dating back to the Cold War.)
I would welcome your conjectures on how the spooks controlled Obama. His enduring legacy may be heavy use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, and a radical expansion of "death from the sky", which seem incompatible with his personality, creating a mystery: What leverage did/do the spooks have on him?
My read on BHO is that as a non-white guy super-achieving in a quietly racist political climate (we've subsequently had a refresher course in American racial politics: it never went away) he was at pains to avoid alienating factions that might work against him.
He was also a lawyer: not just any lawyer, but a former editor of the Harvard Law Review (a plum niche reserved for star pupils at the #1 law school in the United States, often an early sign that the individual is on the road to the Supreme Court). Instead of heading for the bench Obama went into politics, but he is above all else a legalist (and a constitutional expert). As such, he worked only within the established legal frameworks, carefully trying to build a platform for incremental adjustments.
The Espionage Age was already a feature of the system before he arrived in the Oval Office: he continued to use it as it was designed. He didn't rock the boat or try to impose a radical agenda on the DoJ. He wouldn't do anything that might give his enemies a lever against him. He was, in fact, a conservative politician: not "conservative" in the sense of Movement Conservativism (which is actually a very radical political platform), but a Burkean conservative.
The spooks didn't need leverage on him: he was theirs from the outset.
For me it checks out - leaking informations sounds like something that Trump or his supporters would do. Why would not they, if they have the option to? Per the intelligence agencies - are you sure that they are a single entity, where people are of uniform opinion? And every single person follows law to the letter of it? There is the example that those services employed Snowden - if the services were so organised as to avoid such hacks, we would not have heard of Snowden.
Sure, Sanchez' phone might have had leaks in it... but it is just as plausible as a government officials (US or non-US) accessing his phone.
>>For me it checks out - leaking informations sounds like something that Trump or his supporters would do. Why would not they, if they have the option to? Per the intelligence agencies - are you sure that they are a single entity, where people are of uniform opinion? And every single person follows law to the letter of it? There is the example that those services employed Snowden - if the services were so organised as to avoid such hacks, we would not have heard of Snowden.
But from my experience in other government entities, I believe that doing something like hacking into someone's phone, would require approval and support from high enough officials in those organizations, and so far it seems that these organization do still seem to remain professional and not involved in political actions by the president.
I agree that there might be (and I'm assuming there are) private Trump supporters in those agencies, that for example, would do 'a Snowden' and release classified and private information that they shouldn't. But that information first needs to gathered, and I don't think Jeff Bezos has done something to warrant previous gathering of information about him. (If information about Trump for example is released this way, it would seem more likely to me, because we know they collected that information while thinking he might be a spy).
But once again, I hope I'm not just being hopefully optimistic in my trust of 'the system'.
The Saudis seem like a much more likely party to do it in my opinion, mostly because we know they are willing to do a lot worse against people they oppose (or who oppose them).
That being said, I also think that playing the "A government hacked my phone" is a much better play on behalf of Bezos then claiming it was done by someone accessing his or Sanchezs phone (for example her brother who is supposedly a Trump supporter, like the link in the end suggests).