The Intercept’s hacked (not leaked) messages, Greenwald and an intriguing coincidence
(This is an opinion article published originally on Poder360, a political newsletter based in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, headed by Fernando Rodrigues, of HSBC leaks fame. The original article is here, and it contains photos of the hackers who negotiated with Greenwald — often holding guns and thick wads of 100-dollar bills.)
“When I sat down with [Edward Snowden], my number one priority by far was to try and understand what his actual motive was.”
That was said by Glenn Greenwald in March 2015, in a
lecture to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, about his first meeting with Edward Snowden, the subcontracted CIA employee who leaked millions of documents revealing America’s surveillance of people and countries, private citizens and businesses. Like that Greenwald, I am also curious to know the true motives of the criminals who invaded the private communications of dozens, perhaps hundreds of Brazilian authorities. [Those men are criminals not because they hacked phone conversations, but because their activities consisted in swindling people of their bank account passwords. More ahead.] According to the prosecutors, at least 1,330 different people suffered attacks by those hackers. Among their targets were deputies, senators, judges, businessmen, journalists.
Some of the victims are people unknown to the public, women dubbed “puta”, which suggests criminal vendetta against people whom they know or even with whom they are related. The vast majority of targets, however, are people whose public life could be destroyed with blackmail. But blackmailed in exchange for what? No one seems to know the answer to that. What we do know is that the hacked messages had the power to coerce the victims, because a member of the group made it clear when he said that, if he had to destroy their cache of hacked communication, we would lose “all our strategic assets (trump cards).”
In the book I wrote about espionage for an English publisher I explain how this underground world uses blackmail to “recruit” agents. The acronym MICE was created by intelligence operators to explain the four most common ways an intelligence service can transform a citizen into a traitor: Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego. The most efficient of all, according to experts, is coercion. It is through blackmailing that people who were once free become enslaved. The issue of privacy is so crucial to a healthy and free society that Greenwald has made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling books and giving talks defending that very right, as here, where he was chosen by Ted
Talks to speak only and exclusively about this: Why Privacy Matters.
For those who still think that only people who commit crimes should be concerned with privacy, a basic exercise of imagination shows that we have,
all of us, something we would like to hide from someone else: a mother who says to a friend she sometimes prefers one child to the another; a husband who makes a joke about how hot his sister-in-law is; a grandson who can’t stand it anymore taking his grandparents to the mall; an employee who complains about the bad breath of his boss; an intimate photo; an adultery; a dream. Greenwald explains this well in his participation in The Munk Debate, which ended up becoming a book .
“Imagine if you were to call an abortion clinic, or an HIV specialist, or a drug addiction or suicide hotline, or if you were to call someone who wasn’t your spouse repeatedly late at night.”
For Greenwald, this privacy is sacred, and should be accessed by few people, and only when the targets have been found guilty by the courts of justice. “What is legitimate is to have targeted, focused surveillance on people who the courts have determined are actually guilty of some wrongdoing.”
In a debate with author Naomi Klein, Greenwald admits to her the risks
of privacy invaded by hackers. “All those discussions from 2013 about the dangers of having privacy eroded by the state certainly apply to having privacy eroded by these stateless actors who are hacking and publishing people’s private communications indiscriminately. That too kills privacy in a really profound way. And it’s hard to care about one but not the other.”
One can have an idea, therefore, of the extraordinary power in the hands of a gang of fraudsters who held 7 terabytes of communication from and to the most powerful and influential people in the country, from president Jair Bolsonaro to the head of senate Davi Alcolumbre, from Supreme Court judges like Gilmar Mendes to Alexandre de Moraes. Worse, several of these targets were being monitored by the hackers in real time, at the very moment they sent messages and made decisions. In some cases, the gang went further and not only monitored live conversations, but interfered in them. At a certain point, Walter Delgatti, the probable leader of the crime gang, sends a message to journalist Lauro Jardim as if the message had been sent by congresswoman Joice Hasselmann.
“The government is already letting out that it considers the office of the attorney general [public prosecutors] as an enemy.”
It is worth asking here: What interest does a band of fraudsters have in
creating intrigue between the office of federal prosecutors and the government? How do they know the intricacies of Brazilian politics? Who would benefit from that message?
We don’t know who benefited, but we know who wrote that text message: Luiz Molição, the hacker with whom Greenwald negotiated the leak of the hacked conversations.
For someone allegedly concerned about the “real motivation” behind
Edward Snowden’s leak, it must have been painful to contemplate the distance between Snowden’s purpose and the goals of the Araraquara gang. Clearly, until very recently the group’s motivation had been financial. Not one of them seems to have any trace of nobility of character or elevation of purpose, on the contrary — the group used the lowest type of fraud against unsuspecting people, often the elderly, who were led to believe that Delgatti
was their bank manager calling to ask them to change their password — “for your protection, m’am,” a phrase Delgatti repeated incessantly to whoever made the mistake of taking his call [often showing the phone number of the bank as the caller, a trick made possible by Voice Over IP calls]. Simple and credulous, those people lost a hard-earned money that Delgatti boasted in large wads of 100 dollar bills, often along with guns.
PHOTOS can be found in the prosecutor’s indictment piece, here:
Delgatti was well-known as a criminal. He was a fugitive with a prison warrant issued in 2015. He even had an associate whose name he used so as to be able to rent a house and pay utilities like electricity. That accomplice had had two bank accounts that handled the amount of almost a million reais (R$ 893,000) between August and December 2018. It was at that time, coincidentally, that Greenwald deleted 27,000 tweets from his public account on Twitter, as told in the New Yorker.
It must not have been easy for Greenwald to make the decision to delete his own tweets — if not for principle, at least out of shame —considering that just a month earlier he had publicly humiliated journalist Matt Yglesias for doing exactly what he, Greenwald, would do a month later:
“That’s because you constantly and systematically delete your tweets like a coward so that you have no accountability for what you say.”
I made a search for tweets that Greenwald wrote about the NSA, Snowden and Brazil. Greenwald became a hero in Brazil when he revealed the way the United States had hacked phones of Brazilian authorities, like Dilma, and public companies in strategic areas, such as Petrobras. My curiosity had piqued when I noticed that Greenwald started referring to the Snowden leaks as “theft,” right after the Vaza Jato publications [Vaza Jato — the selective leak of hacked conversation between Brazilian authorities, a cache held by The Intercept and only shared with journalists willing to visit The Intercept newsroom and use an airlocked computer]. Until then, I don’t remember having ever seen Greenwald using that verb (stealing) to describe
what Snowden did, unless it was within quotes or mentioned sarcastically.
To my surprise, however, of the hundreds of tweets written by Greenwald that I remember reading specifically about surveillance by the NSA (National Security Agency) in Brazil, and against companies and Brazilian authorities, only eight remain. That’s right. Of hundreds of tweets, only eight survived, and almost all of those written before September 2018 were deleted (with the exception of two inconsequential tweets).
See here the search results that should contain the word NSA and
any of the following words: Brazil Brasil brazilian
brazilians brasileiro brasileira brasileiros brasileiras
But how can I prove that tweets in which Greenwald spoke of the NSA and
from Brazil were deleted? It’s easy. Just do the reverse search with the same keywords — tweets addressed to Greenwald on the subject. Currently, almost all of those tweets responding to Greenwald are actually addressing tweets that have been deleted: “This tweet is no longer available.” Check it for yourself. Here is the result of the search with hundreds of tweets responding to something that Greenwald chose to delete.
I found this coincidence very intriguing. When did Greenwald
delete those tweets about NSA and Brazil? Were they by chance
deleted in the batch of 27 thousand tweets obliterated from sight around August 2018? If so, why at that time specifically? I will not get into the merits of what was revealed by Vaza Jato. I’m interested at the moment to know who was behind it, and what interests were decisive for the choice of what would and would not be disclosed. I also want to know why a political party and a Supreme Court judge thought it was a good idea to consider Glenn Greenwald a person above suspicion, who should be exempted a priori from any investigation. We all know that condemning someone beforehand, without due legal process, is a tyrannical measure, typical of authoritarian governments. But exempting someone from criminal liability when a crime has clearly been committed is as authoritarian and arbitrary. No one should be above the law. There are several considerations to be made about Vaza Jato, and many are being solemnly ignored. This column, therefore, will have a sequel next week — if I’m not hacked, of course.