A Ringleader Unmasked: How has ‘Team Jorge’ rigged our own minds against us?
Are we, as citizens, entitled to the truth? An international effort undertaken by a consortium of journalists ranging from Le Monde, Guardian, and Der Spiegel amongst others have uncovered the identities behind a malignant team of hackers plaguing our social media and private messaging accounts. In an industrial park just over twenty miles outside of Tel Aviv, a small group of anonymous hackers have been engineering dozens of election results since at the latest 2015, influencing elections, creating false accounts to sway public opinion, and sowing discontent in favour of their clients. The group, or ‘Team Jorge’ as it is called, is run by their titular character ‘Jorge,’ a shadowy character finally exposed to be the pseudonym of Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative. The team claims to have accomplished at least 33 presidential campaigns, of which 27 have been classified as successful, having employed measures techniques to create avatars, spread disinformation, and undo the agency that citizens have in their own elections.
This group is not the mastermind but rather the hitman: with an alleged list of clients which has not been revealed, Team Jorge are simply the subcontractors doing the ‘dirty work’ for those who remain unknown. Nobody but Hanan is completely sure about who is hiring them: when the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office was inundated by critical messages online, the thousands of bots which were designed to accuse the office of being politically motivated led people to assume it was hired from someone critical of the government watchdog, but the true identity has stayed hidden. Another such example of their work is in the recent Kenyan election, Hanan exercised his power by demonstrating a hacked access to the phone of a presidential advisor to the current president William Ruto. Other campaigns that Team Jorge claim they have undergone have had implications in California, Catalonia, and Mexico.
This elicits memories of the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal that had people wary of uploading any personal information to their Facebook accounts, and to little surprise, Team Jorge has been linked to the controversy. When Brittany Kaiser, a former development director for Cambridge Analytica, blew the whistle on the misuse of private data, she mentioned that the SCL Group, the parent company to Cambridge Analytica, had contracted a team of Israeli contractors during their activities. However, their identities remained a hole in the timeline, and only now has the gap in information been closed with their identities revealed.
Conspiracy has become a painful truth that we may be scrolling past without even realising. The team’s operations were exposed when undercover journalists, posing as potential clients with the intent of delaying an election, got an inside look at the small office space that Hanan and his team used as headquarters. Hanan, using his ‘Jorge’ pseudonym, proved his capabilities to these ‘clients’ by showing private conversations from Kenyan and Mozambican cabinet members that had been hacked from their Telegram accounts. The technology that Team Jorge has used to create online armies is called AIMS, short for “Advanced Impact Media Solutions. The software is used to create profiles and disseminate disinformation at fast speeds, littering social media platforms with realistic false accounts. Their primary services include hacking messaging and email profiles, hacking real or fake materials, constructing online avatars, election disruption, and subverting election results. Their avatars are multilayered, with corresponding Instagram, Twitter, and Telegram accounts, some of them even having a Linkedin or Airbnb profile and a credit card. They have their own names, backstories, and pictures (when asked by undercover journalists where the profile pictures came from, Hanan said that if he revealed how, “[he would] have to kill [the journalists]”). These sophisticated, diverse, and cross-continental profiles and the comments they make are being seen by people all around the globe, completely unbeknownst to the fact that these avatars are completely fake. It is crucial to recognise that this example of “influence ops” is a form of psychological undermining of the general public. It is a frightening reality that this online warfare is a service that is “now offered privately.” This acts as a sombre reminder that dark money can buy citizens out of their own free choice, with the average consumer being potentially influenced by thousands of these fake profiles on the websites they are casually browsing.
Team Jorge’s online crusades are not all based on influencing electoral campaigns but have been used to support private citizens as well: in Ecuador, two businessmen who have been wanted for years but currently reside in the United States were the subject of an army of Team Jorge’s avatars, declaring that the Ecuadorian government’s request for extradition was politically motivated. The group’s alleged influences have also been noted in the journalism industry as well. In France, prominent journalist Rachid M’Barki, was suspended after being at the centre of accusations that his story last year about Russian sanctions negatively impacting the Monegasque yachting industry was disinformation paid for by clients associated with Team Jorge, with the implication that he had been paid to read false information.
The lack of clarity about the hard facts in each of these alleged situations is helping no one but the clients, who still remain anonymous, and some of the team’s claims have even been found to be false. This alarming lack of truthfulness, especially when there is demonstrated evidence of their hacking capabilities, is a troubling pattern that really shows how trust can never be guaranteed by those in these cyber hacking networks. As of yet, Hanan has denied wrongdoing but the investigation has uncovered the fragility of the online world that we have become so immersed in.
Although a monumental step in the right direction towards truth, this revelation of identities has not turned the last page on this story: the consortium of journalists still have not uncovered the identities of the people who paid Team Jorge, nor the full extent of the group’s cyber competence. There has not been any proof of the Israeli government involvement and it is essential that, given the nationalities of the hackers, people do not view this story through the lens of antisemitic conspiracy theories concerning Jews controlling governments, but rather through the perspective that any powerful figures with money are able to harness technology to influence regular citizens’ perceptions of the truth. We are scrolling right past a new form of psychological warfare and citizens from Barcelona to Nairobi are not immune from the highly advanced mechanisms contracted by the world’s elite, with both corporate and government forces peddling the internet to their favour. Especially in the age of proliferating artificial intelligence, with Microsoft’s own AI tool starting to threaten users and the line between computer and human generated becoming more and more blurry, we must be wary of the heights that technology can reach when driven by mal-intended people. When there are forces designed to sway our perceptions, we must consider the fragility of our own minds to uncover the truth, especially when there are networks of people hired by those with power to influence reality.
Image courtesy of elconomeno@email.com via Wikimedia, ©2017, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
