Super Important Article in Bloomberg –
How Hackers Manipulate Campaigns and Elections
"On
the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being
tampered with, he is unequivocal. “I’m 100 percent sure it is,” he
says."
Sometimes
good things come in ugly packages. Bloomberg, a reliable cesspit of
neocon nonsense, has published an excellent, remarkable, long,
investigative piece on how paid "cyber hit men" are wreaking havoc on
electoral processes.
The
article focuses on how this is happening in Latin America, but it is
perfectly obvious that similar things are happening in all countries, in
the current US campaigns, in the EU, and in Russia.
The
invaluable Michael Krieger, who runs a libertarianish blog called
Liberty Blitzkrieg, has excerpted some of the better parts, below.
If
this is really going on wide scale, then it is a great argument for
suspending elections alltogether in any country, and going back to good
old dictatorships.
I agree with Krieger, this is one of the most eye-opening things to have come along in a long time.
Important, must-read stuff.
Yesterday, Bloomberg published one of the most fascinating articles I’ve read all year.
Below are some choice excerpts from the piece, which I encourage you to read in full.
It was just before midnight
when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president
of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of
mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star.
He
beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the
Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or
PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in
2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña
Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more
transparent era in Mexican politics.
Two
thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá’s upscale Chicó Navarra
neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens.
Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a
tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his
head. On his nape are the words “</head>” and “<body>”
stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live
feed of Peña Nieto’s victory party, waiting for an official declaration
of the results.
When
Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes
in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a
microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded
documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia
and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he
says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American
campaigns in recent memory.
For
eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging
major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job
was by far his most complex.
He
led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated
social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and
installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a
right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he
cracked bottle after bottle of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual
on election night, he was alone.
His
teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras,
El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela.
Campaigns
mentioned in this story were contacted through former and current
spokespeople; none but Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of Guatemala’s
National Advancement Party would comment.
Usually,
he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based
political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin
America. Rendón denies using Sepúlveda for anything illegal, and
categorically disputes the account Sepúlveda gave Bloomberg
Businessweek of their relationship, but admits knowing him and using him
to do website design.
“If
I talked to him maybe once or twice, it was in a group session about
that, about the Web,” he says. “I don’t do illegal stuff at all. There
is negative campaigning.
They don’t like it—OK. But if it’s legal, I’m gonna do it. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a criminal.”
While
Sepúlveda’s policy was to destroy all data at the completion of a job,
he left some documents with members of his hacking teams and other
trusted third parties as a secret “insurance policy.”
Sepúlveda
provided Bloomberg Businessweek with what he says are e-mails showing
conversations between him, Rendón, and Rendón’s consulting firm
concerning hacking and the progress of campaign-related cyber attacks.
Rendón
says the e-mails are fake. An analysis by an independent computer
security firm said a sample of the e-mails they examined appeared
authentic. Some of Sepúlveda’s descriptions of his actions match
published accounts of events during various election campaigns, but
other details couldn’t be independently verified.
One
person working on the campaign in Mexico, who asked not to be
identified out of fear for his safety, substantially confirmed
Sepúlveda’s accounts of his and Rendón’s roles in that election.
Sepúlveda says he was offered several political jobs in Spain, which he says he turned down because he was too busy.
On
the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being
tampered with, he is unequivocal. “I’m 100 percent sure it is,” he says.
Rendón,
says Sepúlveda, saw that hackers could be completely integrated into a
modern political operation, running attack ads, researching the
opposition, and finding ways to suppress a foe’s turnout.
As
for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what
they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media
more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. He knew
that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all
relatively cheaply.
He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts.
The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and biographies to fit any need.
Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it, “When
I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than
reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost
anything.”
For
most jobs, Sepúlveda assembled a crew and operated out of rental homes
and apartments in Bogotá. He had a rotating group of 7 to 15 hackers
brought in from across Latin America, drawing on the various regions’
specialties. Brazilians, in his view, develop the best malware.
Venezuelans
and Ecuadoreans are superb at scanning systems and software for
vulnerabilities. Argentines are mobile intercept artists. Mexicans are
masterly hackers in general but talk too much. Sepúlveda used them only
in emergencies.
Chávez won but died five months later
of cancer, triggering an emergency election, won by Nicolás Maduro. The
day before Maduro claimed victory, Sepúlveda hacked his Twitter account
and posted allegations of election fraud. Blaming “conspiracy hackings
from abroad,” the government of Venezuela disabled the Internet across
the entire country for 20 minutes.
Sepúlveda didn’t like the idea of working in Mexico, a dangerous country for involvement in public life.
But
Rendón persuaded him to travel there for short trips, starting in 2008,
often flying him in on his private jet. Working at one point in
Tabasco, on the sweltering Gulf of Mexico, Sepúlveda hacked a political
boss who turned out to have connections to a drug cartel.
After
Rendón’s security team learned of a plan to kill Sepúlveda, he spent a
night in an armored Chevy Suburban before returning to Mexico City.
Early polls showed Peña Nieto 20 points ahead,
but his supporters weren’t taking chances. Sepúlveda’s team installed
malware in routers in the headquarters of the PRD candidate, which let
him tap the phones and computers of anyone using the network, including
the candidate.
He
took similar steps against PAN’s Vázquez Mota. When the candidates’
teams prepared policy speeches, Sepúlveda had the details as soon as a
speechwriter’s fingers hit the keyboard.
Sepúlveda saw the opponents’ upcoming meetings and campaign schedules before their own teams did.
Money
was no problem. At one point, Sepúlveda spent $50,000 on high-end
Russian software that made quick work of tapping Apple, BlackBerry, and
Android phones. He also splurged on the very best fake Twitter profiles;
they’d been maintained for at least a year, giving them a patina of
believability.
Just
about anything the digital dark arts could offer to Peña Nieto’s
campaign or important local allies, Sepúlveda and his team provided.
On election night, he had computers call tens of thousands of voters with prerecorded phone messages at 3 a.m. in the critical swing state of Jalisco.
The calls appeared to come from the campaign of popular left-wing gubernatorial candidate Enrique Alfaro Ramírez.
That angered voters—that was the point—and Alfaro lost by a slim margin.
In
another governor’s race, in Tabasco, Sepúlveda set up fake Facebook
accounts of gay men claiming to back a conservative Catholic candidate
representing the PAN, a stunt designed to alienate his base. “I always
suspected something was off,” the candidate, Gerardo Priego, said
recently when told how Sepúlveda’s team manipulated social media in the
campaign.
In
2012, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s successor,
unexpectedly restarted peace talks with the FARC, hoping to end a
50-year war. Furious, Uribe, whose father was killed by FARC guerrillas,
created a party and backed an alternative candidate, Oscar Iván
Zuluaga, who opposed the talks.
Rendón, who was working for Santos, wanted Sepúlveda to join his team, but Sepúlveda turned him down.
He
considered Rendón’s willingness to work for a candidate supporting
peace with the FARC a betrayal and suspected the consultant was going
soft, choosing money over principles.
Sepúlveda
says he was motivated by ideology first and money second, and that if
he wanted to get rich he could have made a lot more hacking financial
systems than elections. For the first time, he decided to oppose his
mentor.
Sepúlveda
went to work for the opposition, reporting directly to Zuluaga’s
campaign manager, Luis Alfonso Hoyos. (Zuluaga denies any knowledge of
hacking; Hoyos couldn’t be reached for comment.)
Together,
Sepúlveda says, they came up with a plan to discredit the president by
showing that the guerrillas continued to traffic in drugs and violence
even as they talked about peace.
Within
months, Sepúlveda hacked the phones and e-mail accounts of more than
100 militants, including the FARC’s leader, Rodrigo Londoño, also known
as Timochenko. After assembling a thick file on the FARC, including
evidence of the group’s suppression of peasant votes in the countryside,
Sepúlveda agreed to accompany Hoyos to the offices of a Bogotá TV news
program and present the evidence.
It may not have been wise to work so doggedly and publicly against a party in power.
A
month later, Sepúlveda was smoking on the terrace of his Bogotá office
when he saw a caravan of police vehicles pull up. Forty black-clad
commandos raided the office to arrest him.
Sepúlveda blamed his carelessness at the TV station for the arrest. He believes someone there turned him in.
· In
court, he wore a bulletproof vest and sat surrounded by guards with
bomb shields. In the back of the courtroom, men held up pictures of his
family, making a slashing gesture across their throats or holding a hand
over their mouths—stay silent or else.
· Abandoned
by former allies, he eventually pleaded guilty to espionage, hacking,
and other crimes in exchange for a 10-year sentence.
· Three
days after arriving at Bogotá’s La Picota prison, he went to the
dentist and was ambushed by men with knives and razors, but was saved by
guards.
· A
week later, guards woke him and rushed him from his cell, saying they
had heard about a plot to shoot him with a silenced pistol as he slept.
· After
national police intercepted phone calls revealing yet another plot,
he’s now in solitary confinement at a maximum-security facility in a
rundown area of central Bogotá.
· He sleeps with a bulletproof blanket and vest at his bedside, behind bombproof doors.
· Guards check on him every hour.
· As
part of his plea deal, he says, he’s turned government witness, helping
investigators assess possible cases against the former candidate,
Zuluaga, and his strategist, Hoyos.
· Authorities issued an indictment for the arrest of Hoyts but according to Colombian press reports he’s fled to Miami.
In
July 2015, Sepúlveda sat in the small courtyard of the Bunker, poured
himself a cup of coffee from a thermos, and took out a pack of Marlboro
cigarettes. He says he wants to tell his story because the public
doesn’t grasp the power hackers exert over modern elections or the
specialized skills needed to stop them.
“I
worked with presidents, public figures with great power, and did many
things with absolutely no regrets because I did it with full conviction
and under a clear objective, to end dictatorship and socialist
governments in Latin America,” he says.
“I have always said that there are two types of politics—what people
see and what really makes things happen. I worked in politics that are
not seen.”
Last
year, based on anonymous sources, the Colombian media reported that
Rendón was working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Rendón calls the reports untrue. The campaign did approach him, he says, but he turned them down because he dislikes Trump.
“To my knowledge we are not familiar with this individual,” says Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks. “I have never heard of him, and the same goes for other senior staff members.”
But
Rendón says he’s in talks with another leading U.S. presidential
campaign—he wouldn’t say which—to begin working for it once the
primaries wrap up and the general election begins.
Now I wonder…who might that be?
JUST A WILD GUESS ON MY PART!!
Frank p
Personally, I don't think there's intelligent life on other planets.
Why should other planets be any different from this one?
Bob Monkhouse
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