Mexico’s Soda Tax Advocates Targeted by Hackers

Quite the creepy tale out of Mexico today, as The New York Times reports that many of the country’s most vocal backers of its soda tax were the targets of hacking and spyware.

Behind-the-scenes harassment to silence advocates is nothing new, but this was an especially organized effort undoubtedly commissioned by someone (not surprisingly, everyone is feigning shock and washing their hands of any wrongdoing).

Highlights:

• “Last summer, Dr. Simón Barquera’s phone started buzzing with a series of disturbing text messages from unknown numbers. Dr. Barquera is director of nutrition policy at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health.”

• “That same week, Luis Manuel Encarnación, then the director at Fundación Mídete, a foundation in Mexico City that battles obesity, also started receiving strange messages with links.”

• “The messages Mr. Encarnación received were identical to a series of texts sent to Alejandro Calvillo, a mild-mannered activist and founder of El Poder del Consumidor, yet another Mexico City organization that has been at the forefront of battling childhood obesity in the country.”

• “The links sent to the men were laced with an invasive form of spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms dealer that sells its digital spy tools exclusively to governments and that has contracts with multiple agencies inside Mexico, according to company emails leaked to The New York Times last year.”

• “Spyware makers like NSO Group, Hacking Team in Italy and Gamma Group in Britain insist they sell tools only to governments for criminal and terrorism investigations. But it is left to government agents to decide whom they will and will not hack with spying tools that can trace a target’s every phone call, text message, email, keystroke, location, sound and sight.”

• “The discovery of NSO’s spyware on the phones of Mexican nutrition policy makers, activists and even government employees, like Dr. Barquera, raises new questions about whether NSO’s tools are being used to advance the soda industry’s commercial interests in Mexico.”

• “The tax in Mexico — Coca-Cola’s biggest consumer market by per capita consumption — posed an exceptional threat. After the tax passed in 2014, Coca-Cola pledged $8.2 billion worth of investments in Mexico through 2020. And soda giants have lobbied against the tax through various industry groups, like ConMéxico, which represents Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.”

• “The timing of the hacking coincided with a planned effort by advocacy organizations and health researchers — including Dr. Barquera, Mr. Calvillo and Mr. Encarnación — to coordinate a mass media campaign to build support for doubling the soda tax, an effort that stalled in Mexico’s Congress in November. The three men also opposed a failed effort by Mexican legislators and soda lobbyists in 2015 to cut the tax in half.”

• “The health researchers did not discover their phones had been targeted with NSO spyware until August. That month, SocialTIC, a Mexican digital security nonprofit, and R3D warned its contacts to look for suspicious messages. A subsequent forensics investigation by Citizen Lab of the messages sent to Mr. Calvillo, Dr. Barquera, Mr. Encarnación and others confirmed that they were laced with NSO Group spyware.”

Behind-the-scenes harassment to silence advocates is nothing new, but this was an especially organized effort undoubtedly commissioned by someone (not surprisingly, everyone is feigning shock and washing their hands of any wrongdoing).