Hacked! Nicaragua’s silent cyber war

First in a series on Nicaragua’s new youth activism

"The meeting spot will be in front of the Colegio la Salle Villa Fontana at 3 p.m….spread the word, but only by text message, no Facebook…I am Nicaragua!"

That was a text message circulated yesterday afternoon among opposition youth activists who have discovered that trying to organize protests using social media networks such as Facebook—a tactic employed brilliantly in recent months by youths in Northern Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and even the United States—can be harmful to one’s health in Nicaragua.

“They are monitoring our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and they’ve hacked our accounts and our emails,” says activist Israel Lewites, of the opposition youth movement Nicaragua2.0.

Who “they” are is not entirely clear, but the proof is in the beatings.

Since the scandalous 2008 municipal elections, efforts by the opposition to organize protest marches using Facebook have been answered consistently by Sandinista counter-marches. Small protests get shouted down by mobs of Sandinista Youth, and larger opposition marches are met with massive pro-government counter-rallies, sometimes under the pretense of being “festivals for peace, love and ecology.”

At times, however, the predictability of the Sandinistas is helpful to the opposition’s cause, Lewites says. When non-violent protesters are attacked by aggressive Sandinista teens reeking of alcohol and wearing T-shirts alluding to peace and love, “We expose them for who they really are,” Lewites said.

On the other hand, he added, getting punched, kicked and hit with sticks doesn’t do much for recruitment.

“There is a strong debate right now about the pros and cons of using Facebook to convoke protests,” Lewites told The Nicaragua Dispatch.  “If we use Facebook, we are condemning ourselves to a beating from the pro-Orteguista thugs, but if we don’t use Facebook we are condemning our protest to have a low turnout and a low impact. So we’re trying to play it both ways, because both are valid and necessary.”

But the Sandinistas have gone beyond simply monitoring the Internet for possible subversion. They’re also hacking accounts, Lewites says. The activist leader, who comes from a renowned family of Sandinista revolutionaries, claims Nicaragua 2.0’s Facebook account, which now has over 4,700 fans, has been hacked along with the group’s internal emails.

“They take our private emails and add lines about how we are receiving financing from the United States and right-wing groups in Venezuela, and then they publish them on left-wing websites,” Lewites says.

Facebook hackers

Nicaraguan photographer Jorge Mejía, son of famed folksinger and revolutionary-turned-dissident Carlos Mejía Godoy, was another victim of Orteguista hacktivists.

“On Sept. 10, my personal and professional Facebook accounts were hacked, as well as my gmail account and my hotmail account. My hotmail account was the only one I could save because I was able to quickly change the password and block them,” Mejía said.

Mejía, who’s Facebook and Twitter comments are often critical of the Sandinista government, says he was alerted to the fact his Facebook account was hacked when friends asked him why he was sending private messages to his contact list telling people to vote for Ortega on Nov. 6.

The hacker then became more aggressive, using Mejía’s account to post public messages on his wall.

“Now I am going to disable the account of Jorge Mejia, but first we want to clarify that you can’t abuse freedom of expression…not for anything. The same goes for the page by Rejudin. Various accounts will be intervened, so just moderate your comments, we want peace and not war,” the Sandinista hacker and self-appointed enforcer of “free-expression abuses” wrote, singing his post with a “JS19” for the Sandinista Youth.

Mejía said his entire gmail account, along with a blog he had been authoring for three years, was permanently deleted by the hacker.

Mejía thinks he was targeted because he comes from a Sandinista family that is outspokenly critical of President Daniel Ortega—a mortal sin for Ortega loyalists.

“My criticism hurts them even more because I am a Sandinista—the red-and-black flag is sacred to me. But for the past five years, it has been dragged through the garbage,” Mejía charged.

The hacking incident, he says, has only spurred him to get more involved in politics, going to work for the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) during the presidential campaign.

It’s not clear who or how many hacktivsts are working on behalf of the government. There are rumors that the ruling Sandinista Front has employed a small group of pro-government hacktivists to keep tabs on the opposition’s social network sites and occasionally infiltrate an account, similar to the cyber minions working for Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. But the incidents of hacking in Nicaragua still seem too isolated and few to suggest much of a group effort.

Plus, considering less than 10 percent of Nicaraguans are online, it probably doesn’t take a full team of pro-government tech geeks to monitor online activity by the opposition.

The battle for cyberspace

The Sandinistas’ swift foray into cyberspace indicates the ruling party’s obsession with controlling physical space has gone virtual.  

The Sandinistas’ reaction to street protests—a popular expression to which they claim sole intellectual property rights—has practically become party policy for the past three years.

In 2009, Sandinista congressman and union leader Gustavo Porras famously said “The streets belong to us” and called on Sandinistas to never cede an inch of street to the “right wing.” He said street protests are the Sandinistas’ “natural form of struggle,” adding, “With this struggle we have gotten to where we are today, so we have to continue forward.”

A month later, President Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo also called for a permanent mobilization of Sandinista bases to “struggle constantly” against the “enemy.”

“Thirty-one years (after the popular insurrection), our people are again taking to the streets, carving a path toward liberation amid decadent capitalism,” Murillo said at a political rally on March 1, 2009. “We take to the streets for a better future, in reverence to the blood of our heroes and martyrs.”

For the next year, government employees and paid proxies—a group of poor people who were allegedly praying for peace in the rotundas—took turns waving Sandinista flags and occupying space. Then both groups were replaced by concrete Christmas trees, which have been there ever since, protected by a private security firm belonging to the Ortega family.

In the past year, the Sandinista “mobilization” has gone virtual. But unlike the streets, the Internet is still a realm controlled mostly by the educated middle class and upper-middle class opposition.

While pro-government hackers have infiltrated a couple of accounts, their cyber bullying has been mostly ineffectual, Lewites says.

What remains to be seen is to what effect the opposition’s Facebook activity and frequent Tweets will ultimately have on Nicaraguan politics and public opinion.

So far, with the exception of a couple of government websites infiltrated by global hacktivist group Anonymous, the opposition’s Internet activity has mostly been to vent frustrations, share ideas and commiserate. And even Anonymous Nicaragua’s efforts seem to be faltering. Anonymous’ announced cyber attack against government on Oct. 27 seemed to fizzle.

Still, Lewites insists something interesting is happening in Nicaragua. The Internet, he says, is changing the way people communicate, express themselves and organize. It’s democratizing power and decentralizing discontent.

A Facebook post calling on people to come out of their houses on Thursday evening and bang pots and pans in protest of last weekend’s alleged electoral fraud, prompted people in Granada and other cities around the country to step outside and make some noise—a simple action that then prompted passing cars to start honking their horns in support.

It was hardly a headline moment in a country with a long history of revolutions and counterrevolutions, but it showed the Internet’s ability to decentralize protest and reinvent civil disobedience. And that’s what has hacktivists excited.

“The FSLN is losing this battle,” Lewites says. “They can yell on the streets, but the Internet is still a space where the middle class opposition dominates. And since last Sunday’s fraud, our presence on the Internet has doubled.”

Next: different strokes for different folks: More than a half-dozen opposition youth movements have formed in the past two years in protest of Ortega’s government.