An undercover investigation led by journalists from Haaretz, TheMarker, and Radio France exposed a secretive Israeli company that offers a wide range of services within the realm of political subversion.
The three undercover reporters—posing as representatives of a potential client from Africa—approached the firm with a specific request: help them postpone an African election, without good cause, perhaps indefinitely. The price for the operation was set at €6 million, and the company began pitching their ideas over the course of six meetings—meetings which revealed an advanced toolbox for hacking, extortion, and election interference at the most sophisticated level.
The company, which simply goes under the name ‘Team Jorge’ after its executive’s pseudonym, is led by brothers Tel and Zohar Hanan. Tel Hanan (aka ‘Jorge’), who apparently is the mastermind behind the subversive operations, took the undercover journalists through the entire process, showing them past projects and live demonstrations as he showcased his extensive disinformation weaponry.
The services offered by Team Jorge are multifaceted, for lack of a better word, to describe the incredible variety of methods the company uses to take down political opponents or influence election outcomes on behalf of their powerful clients.
They include hacking into phones and encrypted accounts of just about anyone, anywhere in the world, to gather private information; leaking documents and fabricating scandals to harm individuals; conjuring new narratives out of thin air by making fake blogs and news sites to back up their lies; as well as sowing widespread disinformation by using an army of fake social media avatars that can collectively push an idea or campaign for months, with the power of disrupting entire countries’ democratic processes.
Team Jorge’s most valuable asset is a platform named AIMS—Advanced Impact Media Solutions—an intelligence-level manipulation tool whose existence was revealed by this investigation for the first time. The software is capable of creating and deploying extremely sophisticated social media avatars (bots, if you will), which are almost impossible to spot by standard anti-disinformation algorithms.
These are not just your average bots created for a few hours to push one ‘like’ button and then disappear. AIMS avatars are designed to last and be deployed over and over. They each have credible background information and personal networks, matching geographical locations, multiple social media accounts, and even telephone numbers; accompanied by real people’s pictures—people, who are unaware that their alter egos are leading a different, more politically active life somewhere in Latin America, for instance.
At the end of the investigation, Team Jorge’s AIMS had over 40,000 active avatars at its disposal. They were each ranked based on how sophisticated they were and for what purpose they could be deployed and put into different geographical groupings. The target areas seen by the undercover reporters included Europe, Canada, the United States, Russia, Ukraine, South America, Africa, Arabia, and many other smaller, individual countries, mostly in Central Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia.
Addressing the request of the reporters’ made-up client, Hanan told them how many of these avatars he would need to deploy to successfully postpone an African election without any good cause. “Do we need 10,000? No, we need about 1,000,” he said, adding that half of those could be “virgin”—new avatars, created for this specific operation—and the rest would be already existing, locally deployed profiles.
Naturally, the price of services offered by Team Jorge varied greatly based on objective, location, and target. Hacking one phone number—with all of its associated accounts—could be arranged for €50,000 (which Hanan demonstrated by hacking into a high-ranking Kenyan official’s phone and sending Telegram messages from there), while weeks-long AIMS campaigns sell for millions of euros.
In exchange for their high prices, however, Team Jorge was also promising quality service and a high success rate. In just a decade since they’ve been active in the “industry,” the company influenced 33 presidential elections—27 of them successfully. And that’s just the presidential ones, not counting other national or local elections.
The total number of their past mass disinformation campaigns (which included operations on behalf of both political and corporate clients) remains unknown. Nonetheless, the reporters gained evidence of at least 19 separate campaigns in 18 countries, primarily conducted on Facebook and Twitter, including one against California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Besides being published on the publication home sites of the participants, the investigators also sent the report to over a hundred journalists working all over the world, as well as to the relevant authorities.
After reading through these findings, the question unavoidably emerges: if a small company with a handful of employees was able to do such damage to individuals, parties, and entire electoral processes, what is the true extent of such operations carried out by much larger organizations or governments?
As the Twitter files showed, social media is becoming the most prolific political weapon of our age, while the ongoing AI revolution will probably just make everything worse. Either way, as an incredible feat of investigative journalism, I recommend reading the entire report here.
