The beautiful thing about technology is that it empowers individuals or small teams to create amazing products and services (we often get excited about this). The ugly thing about technology is that it bestows the same powers on the bad guys (we often ignore this, as we’re largely doing when it comes to the celebration of AI). The ugly part explains how a small group of folks in Israel, known as Team Jorgé, have been able to play a covert role in more than 30 elections across the world. Journalists from several outlets ran a longterm covert operation of their own to uncover the truth about a group determined to destroy it. The Guardian: Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections. “In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news outlets … Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair.”

+ “Journalists from The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Le Monde, the international organization of investigative journalists OCCRP, Radio France, Haaretz, TheMarker and other media outlets worked in France, Kenya, Israel, the United States, Indonesia, Germany, Tanzania and Spain to examine the veracity of Jorge’s claims about his worldwide deeds. Shockingly, many of the allegations were corroborated. The proprietors of this toxic international chaos machine, as uncovered in the course of the investigation, are two Israeli brothers, Tal and Zohar Hanan, who live and work in the Israeli commuter city of Modi’in.” Haaretz with a very detailed look at the investigation of The people who kill the truth.