Martin said: “This is unlike any of the digital espionage or human influence operations we have seen from hostile states in the past. This is not to say that a nation state is not behind these actions. We don’t know anyway, based on the information made public.
Inconsistent
POLITICO has so far verified 22 British politicians who received messages from these numbers, and three others who were contacted by “Charlie” on the gay dating app Grindr. A man contacted police after ‘Charlie’ stole Facebook photos from his account to create a fake profile.
As more details emerged, key elements struck victims and experts as inconsistent with a hostile state attack.
First, the testimony of William Wragg. The Conservative MP resigned on Tuesday after admitting giving the phone numbers of “some” colleagues to a man he met on Grindr. Yet neither he nor a Labor staffer who sent explicit photos to “Abi” said they had been extorted in any other way – for example to obtain intelligence from inside Parliament .
Martin said: “It would be a bit strange for a sophisticated state blackmailer to have an MP sitting around a barrel and only demanding the phone numbers of other MPs, as appears to have happened here. »
Second, “Charlie’s” behavior seems to have changed over time. As POLITICO reported Monday, “Charlie” sent messages to attendees at the September Lib Dem conference on Grindr and the October Labor conference on a mix of Grindr and WhatsApp.
Politices
