Written by Sarosh Bana, Mumbai Correspondent.
Following the explosive emergence in 2019 of the infamous Israeli state-of-the-art mobile phone spyware suite called Pegasus that had convulsed civil society in India, there has been another such scandal involving yet another ultra-secret Israeli cyber mercenary firm, called Team Jorge, that can for a hefty fee manipulate the outcomes of elections.
Produced and marketed by Israel’s NSO Technologies Group based in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, Pegasus had helped authorities across 45 countries, including India, to cybersnoop on some 1,400 persons that included senior government and military officials, political dissidents, academics, intellectuals, journalists, lawyers and civil libertarians.
While the Narendra Modi government denied all charges, even as it refused to confirm or deny using the surveillance software, the Supreme Court too found “no conclusive proof” about its application. And Pegasus and its machinations had a quiet burial.
The case of Team Jorge loomed in February, when the shadowy firm was exposed by an international consortium of some 30 news outlets – including Israel’s Haaretz Group’s Haaretz and The Marker newspapers, alongwith French non-profit Forbidden Stories – as a global disinformation contractor specialising in malign cyber activities, including hacking, sabotage and bot farm-run social media disinformation campaigns, to manipulate the outcomes of elections in 30 countries, again including India.
Masterminded by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former special forces operative who goes by the pseudonym ‘Jorge’, Team Jorge is located in Modi’in, a namesake town of Prime Minister Modi that lies 35km south-east of Tel Aviv. Modi’in’s nomenclature has no connection with Modi, but the coincidence is remarkable. Incidentally, after Modi became India’s first Prime Minister to visit Israel, in July 2017, the Benjamin Netanyahu government named the Israeli chrysanthemum flower after him.
The reports on the trickeries of Team Jorge were found credible by India’s social media, on grounds that India-Israel ties have flowered under Modi who has cultivated a firm rapport with his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu. Social media users also recalled that the Supreme Court-appointed technical committee in the Pegasus case had found a “definite presence of malware” on some of the handsets examined, though the panel could not conclude whether this malware was Pegasus.
Many Indians also perceive the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government as striving to win all state and central elections, with the party’s own IT Cell, the largest social media cell in the country, waging a massive propaganda and disinformation campaign at elction time and beyond.
Senior BJP leader and Home Minister Amit Shah had in 2018 reportedly claimed that the 3.2 million volunteers in his party’s WhatsApp groups had the power to make anything go viral, even fake news. “We are capable enough to spread any message among the people, whether sour or sweet, real or fake,” he had said during a social media volunteers’ conclave in Kota, Rajasthan, while encouraging the audience to make no distinction between fact and misinformation. “Through social media, we have to set up governments in both the state and at the Centre,” he had added.
When the Congress party demanded investigation of Team Jorge’s alleged links with the Modi government, the government, instead of addressing the issue, shifted focus away from it. It drew attention to the liberal billionaire financier-philanthropist George Soros’s vehement criticism of the Prime Minister for stifling comment on US investment research firm Hindenburg Research’s scathing report that alleged stock price manipulation and other business frauds by prominent Indian billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani.
Modi made no comment on the report on Adani, while his Ministers called Soros’s remark a “declaration to destroy India’s democratic processes”. The Opposition parties pointed out that the government should be aware that democracy can be effectively subverted by engaging the clandestine services of overseas firms to snoop on critics and for rumour-mongering. They also recalled the time Modi himself had openly campaigned for Donald Trump when he was seeking re-election in 2020 as President of the United States.
In their undercover operations, three journalists from Haaretz, The Marker and Radio France held a series of video calls with Team Jorge over six months last year, posing as potential clients interested in delaying an election in a large politically unstable African country. Their efforts culminated in their meeting last December with an unsuspecting Hanan in his unmarked Modi’in offices.
A report by The Guardian, one of the 30 investigating news outlets, notes that the team members claimed to have meddled in 33 presidential-level elections across the world, with successful results in 27 of them. One team member boasted, “This is our experience… to hurt the logistics of the opponents, to intimidate them, to create an atmosphere that nobody will go to the elections.”
The exposé cited Team Jorge as offering a sophisticated software package called Advanced Impact Media Solutions (AIMS) to clients as a key service that would aid in disinformation campaigns, false intelligence, hacks and blackmail to benefit those customers willing to pay a hefty fee to subvert democracy. While he denied all wrongdoing, Hanan spoke of Team Jorge’s ability to hack accounts of top officials, as also a range of social media platforms to swiftly create networks of upto 30,000 propaganda bots on social media.
“We are now involved in one election in Africa… We have a team in Greece and a team in [the]Emirates… You follow the leads,” said Hanan during the meeting, which was attended by four of his colleagues. He also showed the reporters his “blogger machine”, essentially an automated system that creates genuine-looking websites posting false information that could then be used by the bots to spread the fake news. “After you’ve created credibility, what do you do? Then you can manipulate,” he said.
There are often charges of elections being rigged in India, with bribery being additionally rampant during electioneering, with voters wooed with money and free liquor, household goods, and even chickens and goats.
The Congress and many other Opposition parties have repeatedly alleged that the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) that the BJP is firm on deploying for all polls can be hacked or tampered with, and have demanded a return to paper ballots and manual counting.
India is one of only about 20 countries out of about 120 that practise democracy that have experimented with, or use, EVMs to elect their governments. While the Election Commission hails the EVMs for being “infallible” and “perfect”, there are many major democracies like Australia, the US, the UK and Germany that use paper ballots, with US states also variously using direct vote-recording machines as well as paper audit trail machines.
Germany had introduced electronic voting in 2005, but its Constitutional Court in 2009 ruled the use of EVMs as unconstitutional, while observing that such a practice lacked transparency.
Unfazed by the taint of Team Jorge or the EVM debate, the BJP is already predicting a resounding victory for itself in the crucial national elections of 2024.
What role Team Jorge may or may not have played, or will or will not play, in elections in India will, however, never be known.
