Saudi government reportedly punished dissidents after McKinsey identified them

seems like a suspiciously specific denial to me.

Two real possibilities.

First, a lot of companies in the US loved to deal with Saudi money, and are now shocked to discover that the Saudi’s are up to some shady shit.

Second, there are rumors that the Saudi government has either planted or groomed moles at tech companies for the express purpose of identifying dissidents. There was some talk about there being one on Twitter with access to user IP addresses, but I’m not sure if that’s been substantiated.

They kept it with the bone saws.. /s

Technically, it is of course possible that they where infiltrated/hacked whatever. But it might as well be that they do do business with the saudi's and gave them access to this 'internal report'. I mean, why else would you have a report on the top three critics of a regime?

A classic of the genre "we certainly did not produce this document in the anticipation that we would get caught. We absolutely abhor the negative consequences for ourselves and would not have accepted this engagement if we knew it would come back to bite us"

https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/105398920020122009...

Tweets are cheap - let's see them sack the Saudi government as a client before anyone takes their apology seriously.

And that still begs the question of why an report on dissidents was compiled for their own internal use in the first place...

Plenty of people at McKinsey have a conscience. They are humans like everyone else.