Investigation Uncovers Israeli Disinformation Team That Says It Manipulated Over 30 Elections
A new investigation has exposed a team of Israeli contractors who claim to have changed the course of more than 30 elections around the world through hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media. The team, based in Modiin in central Israel and working under the codename Team Jorge, has been working to manipulate elections in countries around the world for over two decades. It is run by Tal Hanan, 50, a former Israeli special forces operative using the fake name Jorge. Hanan has denied any wrongdoing. Six hours of undercover footage was filmed by three reporters, who approached Team Jorge posing as prospective clients working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying an election.
Among Team Jorge’s tactics is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, that controls thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. The team also told undercover reporters that they gathered intelligence on rivals by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts and that they planted material in legitimate news outlets, amplifying them with the Aims bot-management software.
The team’s work was uncovered by Disinfo black ops, a special investigation exposing the deliberate spread of false information around the world. It is part of Story killers, an international collaborative project involving journalists from 30 news outlets, including the Guardian, Observer, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Radio France, Paper Trail Media and the Washington Post, and the Israeli newspapers Haaretz and TheMarker. The project was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, the French nonprofit that spearheaded the Pegasus project, which uncovered the Pegasus spyware created and sold by the Israel-based NSO Group and which has been used by certain governments to spy on human rights activists, politicians and journalists.
