An Israeli team of contractors who allegedly manipulated over 30 elections worldwide using sabotage, hacking, and automated disinformation on social media has been exposed in a new investigation. The unit is led by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative, who goes by the pseudonym “Jorge”, reported British media outlet The Guardian.
The team, which operates under the name “Team Jorge,” has been secretly working in elections worldwide for more than two decades. The team's services are also available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns, and private companies seeking to secretly manipulate public opinion.
Hanan's unit provides a private service, offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or AIMS, a sophisticated software package, is one of Team Jorge's key services. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram, and YouTube. Some of the avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets, and Airbnb accounts.
According to The Guardian and its reporting partners that tracked AIMS-linked bot activity across the internet, Team Jorge was behind fake social media campaigns in about 20 countries including India, the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, and the United Arab Emirates. Most of these involved commercial disputes.
The investigation, part of a wider probe into the disinformation industry, was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a French non-profit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened, or jailed reporters. The consortium of journalists investigating Team Jorge includes reporters from 30 outlets, including Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País. Hanan and his unit spoke about how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts, and how they could plant material in legitimate news outlets. Team Jorge claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician to sabotage his campaign.
The undercover footage of Team Jorge was filmed by three reporters who posed as prospective clients. The footage provides a rare glimpse into the mechanics of disinformation for hire. Hanan appears to have run at least some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Ministry of Defence to promote defence exports. The Israeli MoD has not yet responded to requests for comment.
The techniques used by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms, which have struggled to prevent nefarious actors from spreading falsehoods or breaching the security of their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies worldwide. The revelations could cause embarrassment for Israel, which has faced growing diplomatic pressure in recent years over its export of cyber-weaponry that undermines democracy and human rights.