Beware the tracking number
Business Insider reports that Saudi Arabia uses a tracking number on the packaging of phones to track down women who leave the country.
Women who flee Saudi Arabia expect to be chased.
They expect their friends to be interviewed, their social media to be scoured, their passports to be frozen.
They mostly do not expect Saudi government agents to hunt down the old box for their iPhone.
But why do they expect to be chased, though? I realize Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow women to travel without a male “guardian” but I don’t see why it feels the need to continue that beyond its own borders.
The fact that such techniques are being employed shows how seriously Saudi Arabia takes the mass escape of as many as 1,000 women each year, people it has said are as much of a national security threat as terrorists.
Because…?
They’re just women after all. Nobody is going to listen to them or look askance at Saudi Arabia for treating them like objects. I’m not seeing the security threat.
A third Saudi woman, who was captured by Saudi agents after fleeing, was also told her IMEI number played a part. INSIDER was told her story by Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, an activist based in Germany, who passed her messages on.
“Captured” after “fleeing” – what is this shit? Nations don’t get to “capture” people who leave it, and people who leave their home countries aren’t “fleeing” – nations aren’t supposed to be prisons, and people who emigrate aren’t considered fugitives. What business does Saudi Arabia have “capturing” women who travel to other countries? That’s not capture, it’s kidnapping.
The woman, apprehended in the ex-Soviet nation of Georgia in 2018, was informed by her Georgian state-funded attorney that Saudi intelligence found her IMEI number. Working with the Georgian police, the attorney said, Saudi officials used it to find her.
“Apprehended” – no, kidnapped.
“The Georgian police tracked you upon request from the Saudi government, using an IMEI that they obtained from the packaging box of your cellphone,” she said, paraphrasing what the lawyer told her.
The woman was taken back to Saudi Arabia, where she has remained since.
Where she has remained a prisoner, kidnapped by the Saudis with help from the Georgian police.
At any rate: if you’re a Saudi woman making plans to leave, be sure to destroy the packaging your phone came in.
And helped by the police of a foreign nation who had taken her in, I presume. Why do we put up with this? Oh, yeah, I remember – oil.
Between global warming and Saudi Arabia, do we need any more reasons to wean from oil?
Yes, the same thing is done in supposedly more moderate countries such as Jordan, where my sister’s family used to live and now, thankfully, does not.
Moderate, my arse. Having been born in the UK and having married a Jordanian man in the UK, she was nevertheless not allowed to leave Jordan without her husband’s permission and especially especially especially not allowed to take her own children out of the country without her husband’s permission. Explicit, written permission.
Don’t get me wrong, he would never have withheld such permission but he could have if he wanted to and he was arrested more than once for ‘letting’ his wife and children travel to their relatives in the UK. In this supposedly most moderate of countries.
Criminals are apprehended. Fugitives are apprehended. Any woman who manages to leave Saudi Arabia is necessarily a criminal? Saudi owns them?
Oh this one is easy. First, keep in mind that the prevailing attitude towards women is that of ownership of property rather than any kind of regard for a fellow person… and the rest follows.
latsot @ 2 – daaaaaaaamn.
Holms – the rest doesn’t entirely follow. I mean I guess it does, since they do this, and that is pretty much the reason. But still I would expect the more usual view to be “If the whore wants to get out that badly then she’s dead to us.” Less mishegoss.
Yes, Ophelia, but this is Saudi we’re talking about, so it’s more “If the whore wants to get out that badly then she’s dead to us, but just to be sure we will be the ones that kill her.”
Pour encourager les autres.
Sans doute.
I think the idea is “if the whore gets out the other whores will get ideas. Better make an example of her.”