Report: Israeli Companies Try to Influence Elections Around the World

Tel Aviv, MINA – An Israeli company attempted to influence more than 30 elections worldwide for clients by hacking, sabotaging and spreading disinformation, according to a classified media investigation published on Wednesday.

The report says there is growing evidence that private companies around the world are profiting from invasive hacking tools and the power of social media platforms to shape public opinion. Thus quoted from The New Arab.

The company was nicknamed “Team Jorge”, based on an investigation by journalists posing as potential clients to gather information about its methods and capabilities.

The report says its boss, Tal Hanan, is a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operations officer who boasts of controlling a supposedly secure Telegram account, thousands of fake social media accounts, and shaping news.

The investigation was carried out by a consortium of journalists from 30 outlets, including Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany and El Pais in Spain, under the direction of a France-based non-profit organization known as Forbidden Stories.

“The methods and techniques described by Tim Jorge pose new challenges for large technology platforms,” writes The Guardian.

“The global private market’s evidence of disinformation aimed at elections will also ring warning bells for democracies around the world,” he added.

Hanan did not answer detailed questions, saying only: “I deny wrongdoing.”

He told three undercover journalists that his services, which are often called “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies.

“We are now involved in one election in Africa… We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates… [We have completed] 33 presidential campaigns, 27 of which were successful,” The Guardian quoted him as saying.

British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, since closed, was allegedly used to develop software that steered voters towards Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.

The group collected and exploited the personal data of 87 million Facebook users, who had been granted access by the platform, leading to hefty fines and lawsuits.

On Tuesday, the head of Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, admitted creating a notorious troll farm that is suspected of inflaming online feuds and disrupting Western elections.

An investigation led by Forbidden Stories in 2021 said the powerful Israeli-made Pegasus spyware was sold by cyber intelligence firm NSO Group Technologies to governments and used against at least 50,000 people worldwide.

Forbidden Stories is a collaborative platform founded in 2017 on the initiative of French documentarian Laurent Richard, with support from Reporters Without Borders, and bringing together more than 30 different media outlets from around the world. (T/RE1)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)