Election day sabotage?

A deeper probe into the arrest last Tuesday of a Chinese national who appeared to be attempting to eavesdrop on the headquarters of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) is called for.

After the incident, Comelec boss George Garcia insisted that nothing important was compromised, saying, “We don’t have any election data in our main (office).” He admitted, however, that the Comelec was running tests there.

But Chinese suspect Tak Hoi Lao may not have been after crucial electoral data, since Comelec presumably had taken steps to secure its operations, especially the transmission of election results.

The suspect might have been seeing how he could disrupt the Comelec’s busy operations on Election Day.

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) said the suspect was in possession of an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catcher, a device for intercepting mobile phone traffic.

IMSI catchers, says the ScienceKonek website, are cell site simulators that can send fake SMS messages which many will presume are coming from legitimate sources.

Local fraudsters and scammers are said to be increasingly using IMSIs to take over a bank’s or an e-wallet’s messaging system.

How these handy, easily assembled, and easily bought devices that are carried in backpacks or in vehicles work is by impersonating legitimate cell towers.

The IMSI catcher then broadcasts a signal stronger than a nearby legitimate cell tower to trick mobile phones into connecting to it.

Once connected to this fake cell tower, the IMSI catcher can either downgrade a phone’s connection to an older, less secure 2G network or allow anyone to intercept or send messages which appear legitimate.

It doesn’t take much to imagine that if the Chinese suspect had not been collared, he could have sent out fake messages or misleading instructions that Comelec personnel would have taken as authentic.

The ensuing havoc on Comelec’s official communications would have devastated the poll body’s credibility and questioned the elections’ integrity.

Which means the Comelec now needs to urgently take steps to either foolproof its digital communications networks or keep ready at hand an alternate analog communications network.

Security officials, as of press time, are still mum about the suspect’s background or about his cohorts. But authorities revealed he was a first time visitor to the country and only arrived last 25 April.

Given recent alarms raised over suspected Chinese interference in the coming elections reportedly being carried out by Chinese sleeper cells, his arrest is cause for grave concern.

The Comelec, in fact, should be highly alarmed, says Danilo Arao of the poll watchdog Kontra Daya, over the arrest of someone with an IMSI device.

Significantly, this suspected direct intervention comes amid a recent survey showing the electorate’s overwhelming preference for senatorial candidates who would assert the country’s rights against China’s aggressive actions in the West Philippine Sea.

Interpreted, the survey results indicate that suspected China-funded influence operations to win the public over to pro-China candidates have largely failed, thus prompting a direct physical interference in Comelec operations by shadowy foreign agents.

As such, the arrest doesn’t mean dark operations to “shape the narrative” or disrupt the polls outright have stopped but are ongoing.