Why is the Apple Watch link to Jamal Khashoggi's murder unlikely?

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Getty / AFP

Reportedly, Jamal Khashoggi, the missing journalist, reportedly recorded exactly what had happened inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on his Apple Watch. This seems extremely unlikely.

The story was first reported in the Turkish newspaper Sabah and has been repeated in several media.

Sabah says that Khashoggi turned on the recording facilities of his Apple Watch before entering the consulate of Saudi Arabia. Then, it is stated that the circumstances of his "interrogation, torture and murder" were recorded and sent to his iPhone, which was with his fiancée outside the consulate, and on Apple's iCloud.

The report states that the Khashoggi attackers spotted the watch and tried to access it by guessing its code before using its fingerprint to unlock it. They then deleted some of his files, but not all.

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AFP / Getty Images

Let's say this last point. The Apple Watch does not use the company's Touch ID system, access to fingerprints would have been impossible – unless the attackers have unlocked it via the iPhone with which he was associated, on the outside.

This makes me doubt the rest of the report, but let's look at the "recording function" of the watch. This is not built into the device, but a number of third-party applications allow you to record audio. It is conceivable that the reporter installed one of these applications and began to register before entering the consulate.

But for this recording to be downloaded to his iPhone, he probably should have hit Stop without his attackers noticing. And most importantly, his Apple Watch would have needed a Bluetooth connection to the phone in the hands of his fiancée outside.

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Now, Bluetooth has a fairly limited reach. I just tested this by setting up my iPhone for podcast playback in my living room and spreading it through Bluetooth headphones. By the time I got to the other end of my modest sized home, the audio was gone. It seems very unlikely that the signal went through several walls of the Istanbul building if Khashoggi's fiancée was not standing in front of the room where the interrogation had taken place.

Ah, some advocates of this thesis have said, but the Saudi journalist had an Apple Watch 3 with his own cellular connection allowing him to communicate directly with the iCloud. It is true that a photo of Khashoggi appearing in a television show shows that he had an Apple Watch 3 with his red button witness. He could have chosen to pay a mobile phone contract for the device in the United States where he was based.

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Reuters

But here's the problem: you can not move with a cellular Apple Watch, so once it would have landed in Turkey, the watch would have depended on the iPhone for its data connection. He could have swapped his phone's SIM card for a local card, but a year ago, Apple's support answered a question about the use of the watch in Turkey as a stand-alone device by saying this:

"There are three different regional versions of Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular), each supporting different LTE and UMTS bands, as shown here – no supported carrier is listed for Turkey. "

This situation does not seem to have changed: in other words, you can not use an Apple Watch to connect to the Internet in Istanbul unless you are paired with a nearby iPhone.

Now, we do not know if the Turkish security services managed to hack the Apple Watch to turn it into a remote recording device that they then provided to Jamal Khashoggi before he entered the Consulate of Saudi Arabia.

But it seems much more likely that they have other ways to detect what foreign diplomats are preparing and the history of Apple Watch is only a useful cover .

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