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The Exposure of Team Jorge:What’s the Bigger Picture?

Team Jorge and Israel’s Cottage Industry of Malign CyberWarriors—privatized covet operations against democratic elections and political foes is their MO.

By Pat Fahey, MEGATRENDS. KXSF-FM. February 7, 2024

In a recent article in Haaretz, Politico, and several EU journalist sources, “Hacking, Extortion, Election Interference: These Are The Tools Used by Israel’s Agents of Chaos and Manipulation”, a world public had its eyes opened about the international threat to democracies everywhere.

This 5-year investigation —that resulted in a sting operation in 2022 that led to the arrest, indictment and conviction in 2023 of Tal Hanan, Team Jorge’s group's leader and former Israeli special forces operative and his entire operations team— demonstrates the role of Journalism joining forces with state cybersecurity agencies to combat and expose a dangerous cottage industry.

These dark operatives made use of the malicious antidemocratic AI, LLMs and deep-learning models in their election interference, disinformation and cyber crimes.The group was exposed in February 2023 by an award-winning undercover operation of journalists from Israel and France as part of consortium of investigative journalists coordinated by Forbidden Stories. Active since at least 2015, they boasted of having manipulated 33 presidential elections worldwide, many of them in Africa.

They were exposed in a 2022 sting operation in Tel Aviv, carried out by three undercover journalists, who posed as prospective clients and filmed their interactions with Tal Hanan, the group's leader and former Israeli special forces operative who explained the inner workings of the organization. Tal Hanan used the pseudonym "Jorge" when working with the hacking & disinformation group.

THIS BEGS THE QUESTION: How was Team Jorge any less of a terrorist or violent extremist organization, using election interference, sabotage and bot farm social media campaigns to manipulate the outcome of elections worldwide?HOW IS AIPAC doing the same election interference with impunity not being investigated?Why is AIPAC not registered as a foreign agent? Why is AIPAC not subject to the same constraints as a 5th column foreign agency operating as a foreign influence on US elections in 2024?

At the same time, research being conducted by the US Department of Homeland Security Combating Terrorism Center at West Point have shifted their focus from the rise of international terrorism to the rise and predominance of the threat of domestic terrorism since the rise of the MAGA movement during and after the Trump Presidency…and for the foreseeable future in this election year 2024 and beyond.