Karen Weise

In an opinion article in The Daily Beast on Saturday, Gavin de Becker, Bezos’s security chief, alleged the Saudis wanted to hurt Bezos because he owns The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively reported on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, one of its columnists, who was killed in October in Turkey. U.S. officials have concluded Khashoggi, who was critical of Saudi leaders, was killed on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

De Becker said he had turned over his findings about the Saudis and their role against Bezos to law enforcement.

“Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information,” de Becker wrote.

De Becker’s claims about the Saudis are difficult to verify and raise many questions. Throughout his article, the security consultant was vague on details. He did not reveal direct evidence of his accusations and wrote that he would not speak again publicly on the issue.

Amazon did not immediately have a comment about Bezos. An official with the Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment Saturday.

De Becker’s allegations are the latest twist in a bizarre situation that has embroiled the largest U.S. tabloid publisher and Bezos, who runs Amazon and owns The Post. The unusual set of circumstances began in January, when Bezos announced that he and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, were divorcing. The next day, The National Enquirer published an exposé revealing that Bezos was romantically involved with Lauren Sanchez, a former Los Angeles TV anchor.

Then in February, Bezos published a post on Medium accusing the parent of The Enquirer, American Media Inc., of “extortion and blackmail.” Bezos said AMI had threatened to publish graphic photographs of him, including a “below-the-belt selfie,” if he did not publicly affirm that The Enquirer’s reporting on his affair was not motivated by political concerns. He said AMI, which has had ties to the Saudis, was “apoplectic” about The Post’s reporting on the Saudis.

Bezos added that he had asked de Becker, his longtime security consultant, to investigate who had leaked information and photos about him.

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that two people with direct knowledge of The Enquirer’s reporting said that everything the tabloid received on Bezos’ affair, including the “below-the-belt selfie,” came from a single source. The Wall Street Journal later reported that AMI had paid Sanchez’s brother, Michael Sanchez, $200,000 for the texts.

But de Becker on Saturday said the effort against Bezos went beyond Michael Sanchez and also involved the Saudis. De Becker pointed to an article published Saturday by The New York Post in which Michael Sanchez said The Enquirer “had seen text exchanges between the secret couple” before he was in touch with the tabloid on the matter.

“Reality is complicated, and can’t always be boiled down to a simple narrative like, ‘the brother did it,'” de Becker wrote.

He did not say whether the Saudis provided any of Bezos’ personal information from the phone to AMI.

“As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details,” de Becker wrote.

De Becker said his investigation included interviews with cybersecurity experts and “people who personally know the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.” But he stopped short of saying what methods he believed the Saudis may have used to access Bezos’ personal information.

He added that AMI had wanted him to make a public statement “saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon ‘any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process,'” and that the tabloid’s story was not “instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.”

De Becker said he told AMI in a recorded call that those claims were “not my truth.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/technology/jeff-bezos-saudis-hack.html" id="4c6030ca-6f01-3b42-a960-5aa1810d8305">The New York Times</a>.

SEATTLE — Jeff Bezos’ security consultant accused the Saudi government of gaining unauthorized access to the Amazon CEO’s phone, as part of an effort to harm the world’s richest man.

Bezos' Security Consultant Accuses Saudis of Hacking the Amazon CEO's Phone

New York provided all of these data points, and thousands more, to Amazon as part of its successful bid to woo the tech giant to town.

On Monday, New York City posted online the 253-page proposal it submitted, along with New York state, to Amazon in March. The city quickly took the file down, saying it should have checked with its partners before posting it, because the document included proprietary information. But The New York Times downloaded the document before it was taken off the public website.

The proposal shows the types of data, some rarely available publicly, that the company amassed from cities across the country as part of its search for a second headquarters.

In the end, Amazon chose Long Island City in Queens and Arlington, Virginia, for two new headquarters. But more than 200 cities put in initial bids for the project, and 20 of them provided Amazon with more information when they made Amazon’s shortlist. Each submitted valuable research that the company can mine in the future for picking satellite offices, warehouse locations or research hubs.

When Joseph Parilla, a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, first scrolled through New York’s submission, which The Times asked him to review, one word kept flying out his mouth: “Wow.”

Parilla, who researches economic development, was amazed at the level of detail and hard-to-find data the city had provided. “We are doing a project right now that, if we had access to Amazon’s database, it would make our life so much easier,” Parilla said.

An Amazon spokesman, Adam Sedo, said most of the information the company received was publicly available, and economic development offices regularly provided such data to companies looking to locate in an area.

Here is a look at what Amazon obtained, and how the company did it.

What did Amazon ask for?

In September 2017, Amazon put out an eight-page request for proposals from cities and states. The first round of responses from 238 locations included glossy marketing pitches, with slick graphics and broad proposals for why Amazon should come to their regions. New York’s first proposal included a rendering of a building with Amazon’s logo shining in the skyline.

After Amazon announced its shortlist in January, it gave cities a 29-page request for information that required far more precision and was more about practicalities than flash. It asked cities to respond by early March with a huge text document punctuated only with a few maps.

What information did New York initially provide?

In its first proposal, New York offered to use eminent domain to help Amazon get necessary land, and highlighted four city neighborhoods for a new Amazon headquarters, including in the World Trade Center complex and the redeveloped Farley Post Office in Midtown West. Amazon ended up selecting Long Island City and there are no plans to use eminent domain.

The main criteria Amazon laid out in the initial request, like airport connectivity and education levels, were relatively easy to come by, Parilla said. He could pull it together in a matter of a few hours on his own.

The unique information in the first round of submissions was the details on available real estate sites and incentive programs, said Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto.

What new information was in the second proposal?

New York’s second response included dozens of pages of detailed information on outcomes from the city’s educational institutions that, the document says, is not all publicly available. “Some of this info only exists within organizations,” Parilla said. “It would be hard to coordinate all of that gathering.”

Amazon asked for detailed information on the availability of machine-learning specialists, user-experience designers and hardware engineers — three jobs critical to its growth. The proposal says New York University awarded 64 undergraduate and 63 graduate degrees in integrated digital media, which includes design, in the past three years. Amazon also learned that Columbia University has outreach programs for STEM programs for K-12 schools in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan that reached 3,682 students last year, and that Columbia planned to expand the offering.

The data, while not flashy, is core to the ability to understand where the best pool of potential employees live and could be developed, which drove the search for the new headquarters.

“During the process it became clear to us that the overriding criteria was going to be the ability to find and attract talent,” Jay Carney, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in an interview immediately after the company announced its plans for New York and Virginia.

Was any of this information public?

Most of it — but the company got the city and state to pull it all together.

New York’s response includes at least 140 footnotes documenting data sources that show how much information was publicly available. Some of it was very basic. New York had to detail, for example, that the state government has a bicameral legislature — the Senate and Assembly — whose officials are elected to two-year terms, and that 70,000 4-year-olds attend the city’s free, full-day pre-K programs. And it laid out the zoning designations for dozens of individual parcels.

While that information is public, it is spread across dozens of sources, and can be time-consuming to compile. The New York response has tables from federal census reports, published studies, city databases and news articles.

Amazon also asked cities to provide the costs of a “gallon of 2% milk, loaf of whole wheat bread, and an avocado” at a local Whole Foods, the organic grocer that Amazon owns.

As Parilla said, “It’s like why do the work when somebody else can do it?”

How is that information valuable?

Having that information, compiled in one place, can let Amazon move quickly in the future, Florida said. The company can go back to cities and say, “We didn’t put HQ2 in your neighborhood but we have this really good idea for an R&amp;D; hub,” Florida said. “You have this great site here, and you told us what incentives you would have,” and push them to act.

Sedo, the Amazon spokesman, said the company had already used information gleaned from the first round as it looks to future growth. For example, Amazon learned about a program in New Orleans that lets companies inform classes taught at community colleges, which made Amazon think it could be a good place to build a fulfillment center with robotics that require specialized skills to maintain and operate. He said real estate information, while valuable, can change quickly as cities develop.

“You now have this database that you can go back to,” Parilla said. “You have so much more information.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/technology/amazon-new-york-hq2-data.html" id="f930fcaf-430a-329f-a4ab-6c31ef7936fe">The New York Times</a>.

High-Tech Degrees and the Price of an Avocado: The Data New York Gave to Amazon

NEW YORK — An avocado at Whole Foods costs $1.25. Columbia University handed out 724 graduate degrees in computer science over the past three years. And 10 potential land parcels in Long Island City are zoned M1-4, for light manufacturing.

The cranes themselves turned menacing Saturday, when pieces of one came crashing down from atop a building being built for Google, killing two ironworkers who were involved with taking the crane apart and two passers-by on the busy street below.

Residents said Sunday that they were withholding judgment until more is known about the cause of the accident, which happened on a day with erratic weather. But they are resigned to the reality that Seattle will be one giant construction site for the foreseeable future.

“It’s the city of cranes,” said Daniel Kahane, a violin teacher who lives on a boat on Lake Union, near the accident site. “They are a necessity if we want to grow this city. I walk under them, but I do have my eyes to the sky.”

The latest building craze was touched off largely by Amazon, which decided in 2007 to locate its headquarters in the South Lake Union district just north of downtown. Other big tech companies followed, and so many streets now have blocked lanes or closed sidewalks to accommodate construction that navigating parts of the core business district can feel like a game of Frogger.

Tiara Jewell and her family used to live in South Lake Union, where she could count 16 cranes from her apartment window. But they moved after two buildings on either side of theirs were torn down to make way for large new ones. “I was concerned about having to walk under the construction site, and with all the debris,” Jewell said.

She used to take precautions like crossing the street to stay away from building sites, she said, but “it has become so ubiquitous, you can’t avoid it.” But now, she said, “I shouldn’t take anything for granted.”

Jewell said she was a block away from the accident site a few hours before the crane fell down Saturday, taking her son for vaccinations and then a doughnut afterward as a reward. When she heard about the accident, she was shaken.

“If everything is moving so fast, are we actually taking the time to make sure things are safe?” she said.

By Sunday morning, crews had cleared the crushed cars and crane debris from Mercer Street, a major thoroughfare that passes the accident site and connects to Interstate 5. The equipment used for the cleanup was largely gone by late afternoon, raising the possibility that Mercer Street could be reopened for the Monday morning commute.

And overhead, construction crews were once again taking apart the stricken crane, lowering sections that flatbed trucks hauled away to a storage lot.

King County officials have not released the names of the four people killed, but on Sunday, Seattle Pacific University, a Christian college a few miles north of downtown, said that one of them was Sarah Wong, a freshman who intended to major in nursing. She was in a car driving down Mercer Street that was struck by part of the falling crane.

“While we grieve the sudden and tragic loss of our precious student, we draw comfort from each other, our strong community of faith, and God’s presence with us in times of sorrow,” the school said in a statement.

The Washington Department of Labor and Industries is responsible for investigating the accident. Tim Church, a spokesman for the department, said that when he reached the scene late Saturday, “it looked like something had exploded.” Machinery was strewn across the street, he said, and the roofs of cars had been ripped open by rescue workers to free people inside.

Church said four companies would be involved in the investigation: GLY Construction, the general contractor on the building; Morrow Equipment, which owned the crane; Northwest Tower Crane Service, which was disassembling it; and Omega Rigging and Machinery Moving, whose mobile crane was being used to lower detached sections. “You can see there are a lot of people involved, and it was very complex,” he said.

GLY said in a statement that it was “heartbroken” by the accident, and that it and its relevant subcontractors are “cooperating fully with investigators and assisting the local authorities.”

The state tightened the regulation of cranes after one collapsed in Bellevue in 2006, killing a Microsoft lawyer in his apartment. The state got more resources for overseeing cranes after that, but “with 120 tower cranes and seven investigators, you can tell they are very busy all the time,” Church said.

It may be a while before the cause of Saturday’s accident is determined. The 2006 investigation, which took roughly six months, ultimately cited faulty design of the crane’s base.

For years, much of South Lake Union was a hodgepodge of warehouses, car repair shops and light industry. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, bought a lot of the land in the district and hoped to turn it into Seattle’s version of Central Park, but the public voted down the plans. Allen’s real estate company, Vulcan, then had ideas about developing it as a medical research center, before Amazon agreed to use much of the land for its headquarters campus.

Drawn by the engineering and technical talent that Amazon and Microsoft built up in the region, more than a dozen other major tech companies have built major outposts in Seattle, including Facebook and Uber.

Google’s Seattle headquarters was being developed by Vulcan on a prominent spot, the last available development site just south of Lake Union. People who regularly pass through the area had seen indications recently that the building was nearly finished and that Google would soon be moving in.

Alex Watson, who operates a streetcar that passes by the building, said he saw last week that workers had hung a large, brightly colored logo for Google’s cloud division on the facade.

Watson said he had once trained to be a crane operator, so he was interested in cranes and had hoped Saturday morning to catch glimpses of the big one on the Google building being dismantled. The horizontal boom was already down, he said, but by the time he had to move on, the vertical tower was still standing.

Shaking his head Sunday at the scale of the accident, he said, “Imagine a semitruck fell down off a 10-story building onto the street.”

But the city has to keep building just the same, he said: “It’s life, it’s what we need.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="e6c62382-5c65-3840-adeb-89ed17b6ea1e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/us/seattle-crane-collapse-accident.html">The New York Times</a>.

After a Deadly Accident, Seattle Eyes Its Crane-Filled Skyline

SEATTLE — For Seattle, a tech boomtown anxious about how fast it is growing, one distinction has been bittersweet: More giant construction cranes crowding its skyline than in any other city in the country, for three years running. The cranes symbolize a building frenzy driven by an influx of high-paying tech jobs that most cities would envy — but one that has also brought worsening traffic jams, soaring housing costs and tear-down threats to popular landmarks.

After a deadly accident, seattle eyes its crane-filled skyline

In an opinion article in The Daily Beast on Saturday, Gavin de Becker, Bezos’s security chief, alleged the Saudis wanted to hurt Bezos because he owns The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively reported on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, one of its columnists, who was killed in October in Turkey. U.S. officials have concluded Khashoggi, who was critical of Saudi leaders, was killed on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Amazon did not immediately have a comment about Bezos. A spokesman for the Saudi embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

He added that AMI had wanted him to make a public statement “saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon ‘any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their newsgathering process,'” and that the tabloid’s story was not “instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.”

Bezos' security consultant accuses Saudis of hacking the Amazon CEO's phone

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Karen Weise

Articles written by the author

Bezos' Security Consultant Accuses Saudis of Hacking the Amazon CEO's Phone

High-Tech Degrees and the Price of an Avocado: The Data New York Gave to Amazon

After a deadly accident, seattle eyes its crane-filled skyline

Bezos' security consultant accuses Saudis of hacking the Amazon CEO's phone