U.S. Elections: Will the Dead Vote and Voting Machines be
Hacked?
by Paul Craig Roberts
“He who casts a vote decides nothing. He who
counts the vote decides everything.”
-Joseph Stalin
Whether or
not he said it, Stalin’s quote has entered into folklore. For a vote to mean
anything, those counting the ballots must have a greater respect for the
integrity of democracy than they have lust for power.
Since
Stalin’s time, the technology has changed. With electronic voting machines,
which leave no paper trail and are programmed with proprietary software, the
count can be decided before the vote. Those who control the electronics can
simply program voting machines to elect the candidate they want to win.
Electronic voting is not transparent. When you vote electronically, you do not
know for whom you are voting. Only the machine knows.
[...]History has
shown that when an election is close and there’s no expectation for a clear
winner, these are the easiest ones to steal. Even more important, the
divergence between exit polls, perhaps indicating the real winner, and the
stolen result, if not overdone, can be very small. Those who stole the election
can easily put on TV enough experts to explain that the divergence between the
exit polls and the vote count is not statistically significant or is because
women or racial minorities or members of one party were disproportionately questioned
in exit polls[...]
Digital
Votes
In a
fascinating article in Harper’s Magazine (October 26, 2012) Victoria Collier notes
that in the old technology, election theft depended on the power of machine
politicians, such as Louisiana Senator Huey Long, to prevent exposure. With the
advent of modern technology, Collier writes that “a brave new world of election
rigging emerged.” The brave new world of election theft was created by “the
mass adoption of computerized voting technology and the outsourcing of our
elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little
oversight or accountability. This privatization of our elections has occurred
without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and
least understood crisis in the history of American democracy. We have actually
lost the ability to verify election results.”
The old
ballot-box fraud was localized and limited in its reach. Electronic voting
allows elections to be rigged on a statewide and national scale. Moreover, with
electronic voting there are no missing ballot boxes to recover from the
Louisiana bayous. Using proprietary corporate software, the vote count is what
the software specifies.
The first
two presidential elections in the 21st century are infamous. George W. Bush’s
win over Al Gore was decided by the Republicans on the US Supreme Court who
stopped the Florida vote recount.
In 2004,
George W. Bush won the vote count although exit polls indicated that he had
been defeated by John Kerry. Collier reports:
“Late on
Election Day, John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling, and
many considered his victory all but certified. Yet the final vote tallies in
thirty states deviated widely from exit polls, with discrepancies favoring
George W. Bush in all but nine. The greatest disparities were concentrated in
battleground states – particularly Ohio. In one Ohio precinct, exit polls
indicated that Kerry should have received 67 percent of the vote, but the
certified tally gave him only 38 percent. The odds of such an unexpected
outcome occurring only as a result of sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553. To
quote Lou Harris, who has long been regarded as the father of modern political
polling: ‘Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.’”
The electronic
vote theft era, Collier reports, “was inaugurated by Chuck Hagel, an unknown
millionaire who ran for one of Nebraska’s U.S. Senate seats in 1996. Initially
Hagel trailed the popular Democratic governor, Ben Nelson, who had been elected
in a landslide two years earlier. Three days before the election, however, a
poll conducted by the Omaha World-Herald showed a dead heat, with 47 percent of
respondents favoring each candidate. David Moore, who was then managing editor
of the Gallup Poll, told the paper, ‘We can’t predict the outcome.’”
“Hagel’s
victory in the general election, invariably referred to as an ‘upset,’ handed
the seat to the G.O.P. for the first time in eighteen years. Hagel trounced
Nelson by fifteen points. Even for those who had factored in the governor’s
deteriorating numbers and a last-minute barrage of negative ads, this
divergence from pre-election polling was enough to raise eyebrows across the
nation.”
“Few
Americans knew that until shortly before the election, Hagel had been chairman of
the company whose computerized voting machines would soon count his own votes:
Election Systems & Software (then called American Information Systems).
Hagel stepped down from his post just two weeks before announcing his
candidacy. Yet he retained millions of dollars in stock in the McCarthy Group,
which owned ES&S. And Michael McCarthy, the parent company’s founder, was
Hagel’s campaign treasurer.”
Vote theft
might also explain the defeat of Max Cleland, a Democratic Senator from
Georgia. As Collier documents:
“In Georgia,
for example, Diebold’s voting machines reported the defeat of Democratic
senator Max Cleland. Early polls had given the highly popular Cleland a solid
lead over his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, a favorite of the Christian
right, the NRA, and George W. Bush (who made several campaign appearances on
his behalf). As Election Day drew near, the contest narrowed. Chambliss, who
had avoided military service, ran attack ads denouncing Cleland – a Silver Star
recipient who lost three limbs in Vietnam – as a traitor for voting against the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Two days before the election,
a Zogby poll gave Chambliss a one-point lead among likely voters, while the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cleland maintained a three-point
advantage with the same group.”
Rigged
Game
“Cleland
lost by seven points. In his 2009 autobiography, he accused computerized voting
machines of being ‘ripe for fraud.’ Patched for fraud might have been more apt.
In the month leading up to the election, Diebold employees, led by Bob
Urosevich, applied a mysterious, uncertified software patch to 5,000 voting
machines that Georgia had purchased in May.”
“We were
told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do,”
Diebold consultant and whistle-blower Chris Hood recounted in a 2006 Rolling
Stone article. “The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done.
. . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from
the state. . . . We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I
received instructions directly from [Bob] Urosevich. It was very unusual that a
president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that
level.”
When the
Republican Supreme Court prevented the Florida recount in the deciding state
between George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, the
Democrats’ response was to acquiesce in order not to shake the confidence of
Americans in democracy. Similarly, John Kerry acquiesced in 2004 despite the
large disparity between exit polls and vote counts. But how can Americans have
confidence in democracy when voting is not transparent?
For now
Republicans seem to have the technological advantage with their ownership of companies
that produce electronic voting machines programmed by proprietary software, but
in the future the advantage could shift to Democrats. Early voting aids
electronic election theft. Successful and noncontroversial theft depends on
knowing how to program the machines. The victory needs to be within the range
of plausibility. Too big a victory raises eyebrows, but if the guess is wrong
in the other direction theft fails. Early voting helps the voting machine
programmers decide how to set the machines.
Voting
2.0
The absence
of transparency is a threat to whatever remains of American democracy. In the Summer 2011
issue of The Trends Journal, Gerald Celente made the point that “if we can bank
online, we can vote online.”
Think about
it! Across the globe, trillions of dollars of bank transactions are made each
day, and rarely are they compromised. If we can accurately count money online,
we can certainly count votes accurately online. The only obstacles blocking
online voting are entrenched political interests intent upon controlling the
ballot box.
The lack of
transparency has given rise to election litigation. On October 29, The
Washington Post reported that “thousands of attorneys, representing the two
major presidential candidates, their parties, unions, civil rights groups and
voter-fraud watchdogs, are in place across the country, poised to challenge
election results that may be called into question by machine failures, voter
suppression or other allegations of illegal activity.”
Voting
online, if properly arranged, can provide the transparency that the current
system lacks. While the GOP might remain active in voter suppression, the
Democrats could no longer vote graveyards, and the count of those who do manage
to vote would not be subject to secret proprietary software.
In 2005 the
nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded that the integrity
of elections was compromised by those who controlled the programming.
Proprietary private ownership of voting technology is simply incompatible with
transparent elections. A country without a transparent vote is a country
without democracy.
Paul
Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and
associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business
Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide
following. Visit his web site at the Institute
for Political Economy.
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It
was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly
elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a
family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he
was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City
headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled
for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to
power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence,
fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.
When Peña
Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash
drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then
broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down
the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with
Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the
dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight
years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major
political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job was by far
his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies,
manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and
installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a
right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he cracked
bottle after bottle of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election
night, he was alone.
Sepúlveda’s
career began in 2005, and his first jobs were small—mostly defacing campaign
websites and breaking into opponents’ donor databases. Within a few years he
was assembling teams that spied, stole, and smeared on behalf of presidential
campaigns across Latin America. He wasn’t cheap, but his services were
extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack
smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The
premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital
interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully
laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepúlveda says many of the
candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he says he met
only a few.
His teams
worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador,
Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns mentioned in
this story were contacted through former and current spokespeople; none but
Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of Guatemala’s National Advancement Party would
comment.
As a child,
he witnessed the violence of Colombia’s Marxist guerrillas. As an adult, he allied
with a right wing emerging across Latin America. He believed his hacking was no
more diabolical than the tactics of those he opposed, such as Hugo Chávez and
Daniel Ortega.
Many of
Sepúlveda’s efforts were unsuccessful, but he has enough wins that he might be
able to claim as much influence over the political direction of modern Latin
America as anyone in the 21st century. “My job was to do actions of dirty
war and psychological operations, black propaganda, rumors—the whole dark side
of politics that nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” he says in Spanish,
while sitting at a small plastic table in an outdoor courtyard deep within the
heavily fortified offices of Colombia’s attorney general’s office. He’s serving
10 years in prison for charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy
to commit crime, violation of personal data, and espionage, related to hacking
during Colombia’s 2014 presidential election. He has agreed to tell his full
story for the first time, hoping to convince the public that he’s
rehabilitated—and gather support for a reduced sentence.
Sepúlveda
provided Bloomberg
Businessweek with what he says are e-mails showing conversations
between him, Rendón, and Rendón’s consulting firm concerning hacking and the
progress of campaign-related cyber attacks. Rendón says the e-mails are fake.
An analysis by an independent computer security firm said a sample of the
e-mails they examined appeared authentic. Some of Sepúlveda’s descriptions of
his actions match published accounts of events during various election
campaigns, but other details couldn’t be independently verified. One person
working on the campaign in Mexico, who asked not to be identified out of fear
for his safety, substantially confirmed Sepúlveda’s accounts of his and
Rendón’s roles in that election.
Sepúlveda
says he was offered several political jobs in Spain, which he says he turned
down because he was too busy. On the question of whether the U.S. presidential
campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal. “I’m 100 percent sure
it is,” he says.
Sepúlveda
grew up poor in Bucaramanga, eight hours north of Bogotá by car. His mother was
a secretary. His father was an activist, helping farmers find better crops to
grow than coca plants, and the family moved constantly because of death threats
from drug traffickers. His parents divorced, and by the age of 15, after
failing school, he went to live with his father in Bogotá and used a computer
for the first time. He later enrolled in a local technology school and, through
a friend there, learned to code.
In 2005,
Sepúlveda’s older brother, a publicist, was helping with the congressional
campaigns of a party aligned with then-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Uribe
was a hero of the brothers, a U.S. ally who strengthened the military to fight
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). During a visit to party
headquarters, Sepúlveda took out his laptop and began scanning the office’s
wireless network. He easily tapped into the computer of Rendón, the party’s
strategist, and downloaded Uribe’s work schedule and upcoming speeches.
Sepúlveda says Rendón was furious—then hired him on the spot. Rendón says this
never happened.
For decades,
Latin American elections were rigged, not won, and the methods were pretty
straightforward. Local fixers would hand out everything from small appliances
to cash in exchange for votes. But in the 1990s, electoral reforms swept the
region. Voters were issued tamper-proof ID cards, and nonpartisan institutes
ran the elections in several countries. The modern campaign, at least a version
North Americans might recognize, had arrived in Latin America.
Rendón had
already begun a successful career based partly, according to his critics—and more
than one lawsuit—on a mastery of dirty tricks and rumormongering. (In 2014, El
Salvador’s then-President Carlos Mauricio Funes accused Rendón of orchestrating
dirty war campaigns throughout Latin America. Rendón sued in Florida for
defamation, but the court dismissed the case on the grounds that Funes couldn’t
be sued for his official acts.) The son of democracy activists, he studied
psychology and worked in advertising before advising presidential candidates in
his native Venezuela. After accusing then-President Chávez of vote rigging in
2004, he left and never went back.
Sepúlveda’s
first hacking job, he says, was breaking into an Uribe rival’s website,
stealing a database of e-mail addresses, and spamming the accounts with
disinformation. He was paid $15,000 in cash for a month’s work, five times as
much as he made in his previous job designing websites.
Sepúlveda
was dazzled by Rendón, who owned a fleet of luxury cars, wore big flashy
watches, and spent thousands on tailored coats. Like Sepúlveda, he was a
perfectionist. His staff was expected to arrive early and work late. “I was
very young,” Sepúlveda says. “I did what I liked, I was paid well and traveled.
It was the perfect job.” But more than anything, their right-wing politics
aligned. Sepúlveda says he saw Rendón as a genius and a mentor. A devout
Buddhist and practitioner of martial arts, according to his own website, Rendón
cultivated an image of mystery and menace, wearing only all-black in public,
including the occasional samurai robe. On his website he calls himself the
political consultant who is the “best paid, feared the most, attacked the most,
and also the most demanded and most efficient.” Sepúlveda would have a hand in
that.
Rendón, says
Sepúlveda, saw that hackers could be completely integrated into a modern
political operation, running attack ads, researching the opposition, and
finding ways to suppress a foe’s turnout. As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to
understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of
real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in
newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends
fabricated, all relatively cheaply. He wrote a software program, now called
Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter
accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and
biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the
public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it,
“When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality,
I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything.”
Sepúlveda’s
head. The upper tattoo is a QR code containing an encryption key.
According
to Sepúlveda, his payments were made in cash, half upfront. When he traveled,
he used a fake passport and stayed alone in a hotel, far from campaign staff.
No one could bring a smartphone or camera into his room.
Most jobs
were initiated in person. Sepúlveda says Rendón would give him a piece of paper
with target names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers. Sepúlveda would take
the note to his hotel, enter the data into an encrypted file, then burn the
page or flush it down the toilet. If Rendón needed to send an e-mail, he used
coded language. To “caress” meant to attack; to “listen to music” meant to
intercept a target’s phone calls.
Rendón and
Sepúlveda took pains not to be seen together. They communicated over encrypted
phones, which they replaced every two months. Sepúlveda says he sent daily
progress reports and intelligence briefings from throwaway e-mail accounts to a
go-between in Rendón’s consulting firm.
Each job
ended with a specific, color-coded destruct sequence. On election day,
Sepúlveda would purge all data classified as “red.” Those were files that could
send him and his handlers to prison: intercepted phone calls and e-mails, lists
of hacking victims, and confidential briefings he prepared for the campaigns.
All phones, hard drives, flash drives, and computer servers were physically
destroyed. Less-sensitive “yellow” data—travel schedules, salary spreadsheets,
fundraising plans—were saved to an encrypted thumb drive and given to the
campaigns for one final review. A week later it, too, would be destroyed.
For most
jobs, Sepúlveda assembled a crew and operated out of rental homes and apartments
in Bogotá. He had a rotating group of 7 to 15 hackers brought in from across
Latin America, drawing on the various regions’ specialties. Brazilians, in his
view, develop the best malware. Venezuelans and Ecuadoreans are superb at
scanning systems and software for vulnerabilities. Argentines are mobile
intercept artists. Mexicans are masterly hackers in general but talk too much.
Sepúlveda used them only in emergencies.
The
assignments lasted anywhere from a few days to several months. In Honduras, Sepúlveda
defended the communications and computer systems of presidential candidate
Porfirio Lobo Sosa from hackers employed by his competitors. In Guatemala, he
digitally eavesdropped on six political and business figures, and says he
delivered the data to Rendón on encrypted flash drives at dead drops.
(Sepúlveda says it was a small job for a client of Rendón’s who has ties to the
right-wing National Advancement Party, or PAN. The PAN says it never hired
Rendón and has no knowledge of any of his claimed activities.) In Nicaragua in
2011, Sepúlveda attacked Ortega, who was running for his third presidential
term. In one of the rare jobs in which he was working for a client other than
Rendón, he broke into the e-mail account of Rosario Murillo, Ortega’s wife and
the government’s chief spokeswoman, and stole a trove of personal and
government secrets.
In Venezuela
in 2012, the team abandoned its usual caution, animated by disgust with Chávez.
With Chávez running for his fourth term, Sepúlveda posted an anonymized YouTube clip
of himself rifling through the e-mail of one of the most powerful people in
Venezuela, Diosdado Cabello, then president of the National Assembly. He also
went outside his tight circle of trusted hackers and rallied Anonymous, the
hacktivist group, to attack Chávez’s website.
Colombia
Supported reelection of Alvaro Uribe for president, 2006; congressional
elections, 2006; failed campaign of Oscar Iván Zuluaga for president, 2014
Honduras
Supported Porfirio Lobo Sosa, elected president 2009
Nicaragua
Against Daniel Ortega, 2011
Mexico
Supported Enrique Peña Nieto, over a three-year period
Venezuela
Against Chávez and Maduro in 2012 and 2013
Costa
Rica
Supported Johnny Araya, failed presidential candidate for center-left National
Liberation Party, 2014 election
Panama
Supported Juan Carlos Navarro, presidental candidate for the center-left
Democratic Revolutionary Party, 2014 election
After
Sepúlveda hacked Cabello’s Twitter account, Rendón seemed to congratulate him.
“Eres noticia
:)”—you’re news—he wrote in a Sept. 9, 2012, e-mail, linking to a story
about the breach. (Rendón says he never sent such an e-mail.) Sepúlveda
provided screen shots of a dozen e-mails, and many of the original e-mails,
showing that from November 2011 to September 2012 Sepúlveda sent long
lists of government websites he hacked for various campaigns to a senior member
of Rendón’s consulting firm, lacing them with hacker slang (“Owned!” read one).
Two weeks before Venezuela’s presidential election, Sepúlveda sent screen shots
showing how he’d hacked Chávez’s website and could turn it on and off at will.
Chávez won
but died five months later of cancer, triggering an emergency election, won
by Nicolás Maduro. The day before Maduro claimed victory, Sepúlveda hacked
his Twitter account and posted allegations of election fraud. Blaming
“conspiracy hackings from abroad,” the government of Venezuela disabled the
Internet across the entire country for 20 minutes.
In
Mexico, Sepúlveda’s technical mastery and Rendón’s grand vision for a ruthless
political machine fully came together, fueled by the huge resources of the PRI.
The years under President Felipe Calderón and the National Action Party (also,
as in Partido Acción Nacional, PAN) were
plagued by a grinding war against the drug cartels, which made kidnappings,
street assassinations, and beheadings ordinary. As 2012 approached, the PRI
offered the youthful energy of Peña Nieto, who’d just finished a successful
term as governor.
Sepúlveda
didn’t like the idea of working in Mexico, a dangerous country for involvement
in public life. But Rendón persuaded him to travel there for short trips,
starting in 2008, often flying him in on his private jet. Working at one point
in Tabasco, on the sweltering Gulf of Mexico, Sepúlveda hacked a political boss
who turned out to have connections to a drug cartel. After Rendón’s security
team learned of a plan to kill Sepúlveda, he spent a night in an armored Chevy
Suburban before returning to Mexico City.
Early polls
showed Peña Nieto 20 points ahead, but his supporters weren’t taking
chances. Sepúlveda’s team installed malware in routers in the headquarters of
the PRD candidate, which let him tap the phones and computers of anyone using
the network, including the candidate. He took similar steps against PAN’s
Vázquez Mota. When the candidates’ teams prepared policy speeches, Sepúlveda
had the details as soon as a speechwriter’s fingers hit the keyboard. Sepúlveda
saw the opponents’ upcoming meetings and campaign schedules before their own
teams did.
Money was no
problem. At one point, Sepúlveda spent $50,000 on high-end Russian software
that made quick work of tapping Apple, BlackBerry, and Android phones. He also
splurged on the very best fake Twitter profiles; they’d been maintained for at
least a year, giving them a patina of believability.
Sepúlveda
managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to shape
discussion around topics such as Peña Nieto’s plan to end drug violence,
priming the social media pump with views that real users would mimic. For less
nuanced work, he had a larger army of 30,000 Twitter bots, automatic posters
that could create trends. One conversation he started stoked fear that the more
López Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew
the currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the candidate’s
own internal staff memos.
Just about
anything the digital dark arts could offer to Peña Nieto’s campaign or
important local allies, Sepúlveda and his team provided. On election night, he
had computers call tens of thousands of voters with prerecorded phone messages
at 3 a.m. in the critical swing state of Jalisco. The calls appeared to
come from the campaign of popular left-wing gubernatorial candidate Enrique
Alfaro RamÃrez. That angered voters—that was the point—and Alfaro lost by a
slim margin. In another governor’s race, in Tabasco, Sepúlveda set up fake
Facebook accounts of gay men claiming to back a conservative Catholic candidate
representing the PAN, a stunt designed to alienate his base. “I always
suspected something was off,” the candidate, Gerardo Priego, said recently when
told how Sepúlveda’s team manipulated social media in the campaign.
In May, Peña
Nieto visited Mexico City’s Ibero-American University and was bombarded by
angry chants and boos from students. The rattled candidate retreated with his
bodyguards into an adjacent building, hiding, according to some social media
posts, in a bathroom. The images were a disaster. López Obrador soared.
The PRI was
able to recover after one of López Obrador’s consultants was caught on tape
asking businessmen for $6 million to fund his candidate’s broke campaign,
in possible violation of Mexican laws. Although the hacker says he doesn’t know
the origin of that particular recording, Sepúlveda and his team had been
intercepting the communications of the consultant, Luis Costa Bonino, for
months. (On Feb. 2, 2012, Rendón appears to have sent him three e-mail
addresses and a cell phone number belonging to Costa Bonino in an e-mail called
“Job.”) Sepúlveda’s team disabled the consultant’s personal website and
directed journalists to a clone site. There they posted what looked like a long
defense written by Costa Bonino, which casually raised questions about whether
his Uruguayan roots violated Mexican restrictions on foreigners in elections.
Costa Bonino left the campaign a few days later. He indicated recently that he
knew he was being spied on, he just didn’t know how. It goes with the trade in
Latin America: “Having a phone hacked by the opposition is not a novelty. When
I work on a campaign, the assumption is that everything I talk about on the
phone will be heard by the opponents.”
The press
office for Peña Nieto declined to comment. A spokesman for the PRI said the
party has no knowledge of Rendón working for Peña Nieto’s or any other PRI
campaign. Rendón says he has worked on behalf of PRI candidates in Mexico for
16 years, from August 2000 until today.
In
2012, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s successor, unexpectedly
restarted peace talks with the FARC, hoping to end a 50-year war. Furious,
Uribe, whose father was killed by FARC guerrillas, created a party and backed
an alternative candidate, Oscar Iván Zuluaga, who opposed the talks.
Rendón, who
was working for Santos, wanted Sepúlveda to join his team, but Sepúlveda turned
him down. He considered Rendón’s willingness to work for a candidate supporting
peace with the FARC a betrayal and suspected the consultant was going soft,
choosing money over principles. Sepúlveda says he was motivated by ideology
first and money second, and that if he wanted to get rich he could have made a
lot more hacking financial systems than elections. For the first time, he
decided to oppose his mentor.
Sepúlveda
went to work for the opposition, reporting directly to Zuluaga’s campaign
manager, Luis Alfonso Hoyos. (Zuluaga denies any knowledge of hacking; Hoyos
couldn’t be reached for comment.) Together, Sepúlveda says, they came up with a
plan to discredit the president by showing that the guerrillas continued to
traffic in drugs and violence even as they talked about peace. Within months,
Sepúlveda hacked the phones and e-mail accounts of more than 100 militants,
including the FARC’s leader, Rodrigo Londoño, also known as Timochenko. After
assembling a thick file on the FARC, including evidence of the group’s
suppression of peasant votes in the countryside, Sepúlveda agreed to accompany
Hoyos to the offices of a Bogotá TV news program and present the evidence.
It may not
have been wise to work so doggedly and publicly against a party in power. A
month later, Sepúlveda was smoking on the terrace of his Bogotá office when he
saw a caravan of police vehicles pull up. Forty black-clad commandos raided the
office to arrest him. Sepúlveda blamed his carelessness at the TV station for
the arrest. He believes someone there turned him in. In court, he wore a
bulletproof vest and sat surrounded by guards with bomb shields. In the back of
the courtroom, men held up pictures of his family, making a slashing gesture
across their throats or holding a hand over their mouths—stay silent or else.
Abandoned by former allies, he eventually pleaded guilty to espionage, hacking,
and other crimes in exchange for a 10-year sentence.
Three days
after arriving at Bogotá’s La Picota prison, he went to the dentist and was
ambushed by men with knives and razors, but was saved by guards. A week later,
guards woke him and rushed him from his cell, saying they had heard about a
plot to shoot him with a silenced pistol as he slept. After national police
intercepted phone calls revealing yet another plot, he’s now in solitary
confinement at a maximum-security facility in a rundown area of central Bogotá.
He sleeps with a bulletproof blanket and vest at his bedside, behind bombproof
doors. Guards check on him every hour. As part of his plea deal, he says, he’s turned
government witness, helping investigators assess possible cases against the
former candidate, Zuluaga, and his strategist, Hoyos. Authorities issued an
indictment for the arrest of Hoyos, but according to Colombian press reports
he’s fled to Miami.
When
Sepúlveda leaves for meetings with prosecutors at the Bunker, the attorney
general’s Bogotá headquarters, he travels in an armed caravan including six
motorcycles speeding through the capital at 60 mph, jamming cell phone
signals as they go to block tracking of his movements or detonation of roadside
bombs.
In
July 2015, Sepúlveda sat in the small courtyard of the Bunker, poured
himself a cup of coffee from a thermos, and took out a pack of Marlboro
cigarettes. He says he wants to tell his story because the public doesn’t grasp
the power hackers exert over modern elections or the specialized skills needed
to stop them. “I worked with presidents, public figures with great power, and
did many things with absolutely no regrets because I did it with full conviction
and under a clear objective, to end dictatorship and socialist governments in
Latin America,” he says. “I have always said that there are two types of
politics—what people see and what really makes things happen. I worked in
politics that are not seen.”
Sepúlveda
says he’s allowed a computer and a monitored Internet connection as part of an
agreement to help the attorney general’s office track and disrupt drug cartels
using a version of his Social Media Predator software. The government will not
confirm or deny that he has access to a computer, or what he’s using it for. He
says he has modified Social Media Predator to counteract the kind of sabotage
he used to specialize in, including jamming candidates’ Facebook walls and
Twitter feeds. He’s used it to scan 700,000 tweets from pro-Islamic State
accounts to learn what makes a good terror recruiter. Sepúlveda says the
program has been able to identify ISIS recruiters minutes after they create
Twitter accounts and start posting, and he hopes to share the information with
the U.S. or other countries fighting the Islamist group. Samples of Sepúlveda’s
code evaluated by an independent company found it authentic and substantially
original.
Sepúlveda’s
contention that operations like his happen on every continent is plausible,
says David Maynor, who runs a security testing company in Atlanta called Errata
Security. Maynor says he occasionally gets inquiries for campaign-related jobs.
His company has been asked to obtain e-mails and other documents from candidates’
computers and phones, though the ultimate client is never disclosed. “Those
activities do happen in the U.S., and they happen all the time,” he says.
In one case,
Maynor was asked to steal data as a security test, but the individual couldn’t
show an actual connection to the campaign whose security he wanted to test. In
another, a potential client asked for a detailed briefing on how a candidate’s
movements could be tracked by switching out the user’s iPhone for a bugged
clone. “For obvious reasons, we always turned them down,” says Maynor, who
declines to name the candidates involved.
Three weeks
before Sepúlveda’s arrest, Rendón was forced to resign from Santos’s campaign
amid allegations in the press that he took $12 million from drug
traffickers and passed part of it on to the candidate, something he denies.
According to
Rendón, Colombian officials interviewed him shortly afterward in Miami, where
he keeps a home. Rendón says that Colombian investigators asked him about
Sepúlveda and that he told them Sepúlveda’s role was limited to Web
development.
Last year,
based on anonymous sources, the Colombian media reported that Rendón was
working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Rendón calls the reports
untrue. The campaign did approach him, he says, but he turned them down because
he dislikes Trump. “To my knowledge we are not familiar with this individual,”
says Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks. “I have never heard of him, and the same
goes for other senior staff members.” But Rendón says he’s in talks with
another leading U.S. presidential campaign—he wouldn’t say which—to begin
working for it once the primaries wrap up and the general election begins.
—With Carlos Manuel RodrÃguez and Matthew
Bristow
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