If only it was that simple! You have to take some relevant circumstances into account: A Hungarian civil society without…
Spying among friends – that just cannot be done!
This was the reaction of German chancellor Merkel 9 years ago, when it became known to her that American NSA tapped her phone. Yesterday a new Direkt36 report was published. Direkt36 is known for well-researched articles, the journalist in charge, Szabolcs Panyi, not afraid of difficult or hard to research topics. This made him dangerous to the Orbán regime and he was spied on with Pegasus, which became a huge publicity in Hungary with his help. The most recent article now revealed that Hungarian foreign minister Szijjártó, who is proud of his medal of friendship he got from his Russian colleague on order of Putin himself, has been completely spied out by Russia ►HU. Now we may see what his reaction is.
Russia’s intelligence service has attacked and hacked the IT of the ministry. Through all the second half of 2021 the Russians had completely compromised the computer network and internal correspondence of foreign affairs and hacked an encrypted network that was used to transmit state and diplomatic information classified as “restricted” and “confidential”, which should only be used with strict security standards, by default classified for 30 years. The hackers involved work for the Federal Security Service FSB, which was previously run by Vladimir Putin, and for the Russian military secret service GRU.
According to Direkt36 Hungarian state bodies have known this for a long time, as Russians have been constantly attacking government networks for at least a decade. Several attacks with malware have been cleaned up in 2013, but Russians were despite Orbán’s ugly pandering not stopping.
When Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó received and with great gratitude the highest medal Russia can give to foreign citizens, the Order of Merit for Friendship, in December 2021, he had long known that Russia’s secret services had attacked and cracked his IT at home, Direkt36 wrote. They also received an internal document proving that even in January 2022 Russia performed attacks on the department.
Direkt36 wrote that at least 150 devices in the ministry were infected. The Russians also broke into the closed system of the protected foreign affairs net (VKH), which is used in all our embassies – as several people testified. These communication lines end up in rooms without windows to prevent from spying, special authorisation is needed to enter these rooms. Foreign affairs staff and Hungarian diplomats use VKH when they want to share national, NATO or EU information classified as state secret with their colleagues. “Every endpoint in the entire foreign affairs network was infected, everyone was involved. The Russians have specifically crawled in and out of the system with domain administrator privileges.” According to a former employee VKH’s integrity was temporarily restored around February 2022, but the internal network for foreign affairs remained infected. It was reported that at least until the same month many EU and NATO diplomats stated that they had not received official information from the Hungarian ministry about the Russian cyber attack, its severity, or whether NATO and EU information was involved. The hackers are so successful that even now, during the war in Ukraine, they have access to some of the information. There is an even more strictly protected channel through which the most serious Hungarian state secrets arrive, but Direkt36 has no information, whether the Kremlin has access to this as well.
The current attack has been done in a technically very similar manner as the attack on the US Democrats during the 2016 election campaign and other Western countries during that time. According to their sources familiar with the internal affairs of the ministry, Péter Szijjártó and the top management of foreign affairs were informed at least six months ago about this very attack.
The exclusion of the Russian secret service from Hungarian foreign service networks is extremely slow, and the process has not been completed yet. According to former intelligence officers, this was due, among other things, to fragmented and slow decision-making and a lack of expertise. “It is important to understand that Hungary is not the main target of these attacks, but the level of security of Hungarian public and private infrastructures is simply so poor that it is easiest to get in here,” said a cyber security expert. According to Direkt36, the infection entered the Hungarian ministry of foreign affairs with phishing attacks and e-mail attachments containing viruses, and then spread throughout the internal network. I for my part would say the most basic training of employees already in small enterprises concerning cyber security could have prevented this. If a default password is the Hungarian word for “secret” followed by 2 ciphers it shows how badly these systems in foreign affairs are protected. This little website is protected by more than a short word followed by a two-digit number.
Unity for Hungary has in the past demanded that Szijjártó should return his medal of friendship, since this is the documentation of the friendship to an aggressor, a war criminal. Now they urge him to resign ►HU.
And our foreign minister reacted ►HU: “We don’t deal with campaign lies.” Of course not, Petike, you invent campaign lies!
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To some degree I discussed the Direkt36 article yesterday in a comment to a post by Wolfi. I am glad our host discussed it in greater detail today.
But I have to say in the US news media there are more and more articles appearing about Orban every day as we approach the election. For the most part they are profoundly redundant and largely not insightful, in good part because almost everyone of them are done by journalists or even scholars with no real knowledge of the Hungarian language. Many appear not even to have read Paul Lendvai’s biography in English “Orban: Hungary’s Strongman” and do not follow the Fidesz media are a regular basis even using google or yandex translation programs. This is a huge problem, not for the masses of Americans who very likely have no idea exactly where Hungary is located at in Europe (see https://www.rferl.org/a/1068259.html), but even for better educated Americans with graduate degrees in the liberal arts.
I will give you an example that appeared today from CNN which ran this opinion article https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/30/opinions/orban-hungary-election-putin-eu-ben-ghiat/index.html written by Ruth Ben-Ghiat who is a very skilled historian of Italian fascism from New York University who has extended her work into all forms of modern authoritarianism from Trump to Orban. Her list of publications, interviews, and brief quotes is simply massive. But she has no understanding of Hungarian, and not a real depth of knowledge of the evolution of Fidesz in Hungary.
Her entire article is built around two things: Orban’s facebook post reading “We support Hungarian interests. We will not let Hungary be dragged into this war!” and this statement made by Zelensky where he discussed international solidarity with Ukraine stating “”Hungary…. I want to stop here and be honest. Once and for all. You have to decide for yourself who you are with. Listen, Viktor, do you know what’s going on in Mariupol?” She does not even answer Zelensky’s question if Orban knows what is going on in Mariupol, if she did answer it she would have to state that PM Orban knows very well what is going on there. Moreover that the Fidesz media he controls covers it in two ways, one is the horror of the plight of civilians trapped in Mariupol and the other is using information largely from the Russian media relating to the Azov battalion. In fact Fidesz media repeats claims made by the Russians that the Azov battalion is keeping civilians trapped in Mariupol.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s story basically repeats polling data that Orban is likely to win the election on April 3 and ends with this statement: “Ultimately, Orbán’s hedge of “strategic calmness,” and his desire to avoid displeasing Putin, make the Hungarian opposition coalition appear as the resolute and principled force in Hungarian politics. “We have to choose Europe, West, NATO, democracy, rule of law, freedom of the press, a very different world. The free world,” says Marki-Zay. That message will likely gather momentum in Hungary, no matter what happens in this election.”
Really so in the long run MZP wins even if he loses, how exactly does she know this? She never says, its the march of history I guess. The worse part of this is she actually is a serious scholar of Italian fascism where the electoral process led to an authoritarian state, why is that outcome not likely? She never says why because that is not what CNN was looking for in her commentary I suspect.
This article appeared today in Fidesz’s Magyar Nemzet and I suspect it will also somehow show up on Hir Tv too https://magyarnemzet.hu/ahelyzet/2022/03/a-gombafelho-arnyekaban The thrust of the article is that Orban’s policy of opposing arms transfers to Ukraine from Hungary will somehow prevent a nuclear war from happening. It was written by Gábor Baranyai who our former host Eva researched and discover back in 2020 had been a regular contributor to Magyar Nemzet. She found “604 articles by him since the paper has been in the service of Fidesz.”
I think it reasonable to consider Baranyai a hack Fidesz operative. But now since he has informed the loyal Fidesz supporters that they may indeed face nuclear destruction as a result of the war in Ukraine, he has no explanation what so ever how Orban’s arms embargo to Ukraine makes that in anyway less possible.
In fact as I see it everything done to weaken Putin’s stature with his own military complex reduces the chance of any order from Putin to unleash the gates of hell of nuclear warfare will be followed by the military that must actually implement the order. The nightmare of death the young Russian infantrymen face in Ukraine everyday raises the question of the rationality of Putin and is to be honest a positive good in preventing Hungary becoming a nuclear waste land. As has been said in many languages in many countries older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die, such is the case with Russia today.
A small correction re Italy. Mussolini did not succeed in elections, but the king made him PM when he gathered ten thousands for taking power violently.
In the 1921 general election the Fascists ran within the National Blocs of Giovanni Giolitti, that was an anti-socialist coalition of liberals, conservatives and fascists. The Fascists won 35 seats and Mussolini was elected in the Parliament for the first time. Although the National bloc did not win a ruling majority in parliament it was a close third to the Socialist Party. However the second party, basically the Christian Democrats called the Italian People’s Party contained a significant percentage of quasi fascists who were also Catholics. Part of the Christian Democrats wanted to create a coalition government with the socialists, but the majority wanted to block with the Italian Democratic Liberal Party and the Italian Liberal Party to create a ruling government.
After a few weeks, Mussolini withdrew his support for Giolitti and his Italian Liberal Party (PLI) and attempted to work out a temporary truce with the Socialists by signing the so-called “Pact of Pacification” in the summer 1921. The Pact led to many protests by the radical members of the Fascist movement, led by local leaders like Roberto Farinacci, who were known as Ras. In July 1921, Giolitti attempted to dissolve the Blackshirts, but he failed; while the Pact with the Socialists was nullified during the Third Fascist Congress on 7–10 November 1921, during which Mussolini promoted a nationalist program and renamed his movement National Fascist Party (PNF), which enrolled 320,000 members by late 1921.
I guess this is the context of the march on Rome, that took place basically in the context of a collapse of a ruling coalition and a general strike called by the socialists. Really Mussolini utilized a crisis within democratic processes to pull off a coup, that was authorized by the King who had a role within the constitutional system who would rather see the fascist ruling than the socialists. So you are right Istvan the fascists did not win a majority in the last election held.
It has been a very long time since I took my graduate level political science class on Italian fascism. When I went back and looked at the history I was amazed at how quickly it all played out really. But as I see it the implementation of the fascist state in Italy grew out of the electoral process itself and the process of building a ruling government. Normally a new election would be called to try and form a government, in this case the fascists seized the power vacuum.
Trump on January 6 actually tried something similar using the electoral college system and just have his hordes seize power to implement god only knows what. I think the issue of how close he came to succeeding is part of the current investigation in the US House of Representatives. I think your corrective comment was appropriate because I way over simplified what happened in Italy.
The role of the king was constitutionally clear, but not his intentions. His refusal to sign the decree allowing the state organs to use violence against armed fascists was already a decision influenced by the violent threat. How much the king feared losing the throne to another family member otherwise has been discussed as well as his refusal of socialists, but doesn’t matter. The decision was caused by the illegal threat. Consequently accepting the resign of the legal government and the appointment of Mussolini was done under the fear of a civil war. Although formally according to the constitution it was definitely a coup d’état.
I am curious to see the reaction of the other EU Member States and NATO partners. Though officially there will not be much to be heard I guess…
Not much reaction at EU level should be expected, since data security is mostly considered a national matter.
But if we judge by the reactions to the data-spying scandal that broke in 2021 in Denmark, certain people must be very much on the alert today. And for that reason, I think it’s reasonable to assume that a deliberate Hungarian cover-up/media censoring effort of some magnitude must have been enforced, in order to keep things secret for so long.
New Chapter in NSA-Danish Intelligence Scandal: NSA Targetted Denmark’s Own Allies (larouchepub.com)
It’s not just a national matter; the EU has ENISA the EU agency for Cybersecurity that coordinates many activities between Member States.
Well, the ENISA makes reports and informative recommendations for security standards, but it doesn’t look like they do much more than that.
It’s not just ENISA but also the Member States, CSIRTs, the European External Action Service (EEAS), Europol and various networks (CERT-EU, CSIRTs Network) and more. Sure cybersecurity is managed at national levels but there is a lot of coordination and exchange of information between countries.
I don’t think this disclosure will have come as much of a surprise to anyone who is even a casual observer of Hungarian politics (like myself): Orbán has cultivated close economic ties with Putin’s Russia and he was surely aware of the consequences of that. For example, the “kémbank” (spy bank), which all the other EU countries abandoned except for Hungary – https://www.napi.hu/nemzetkozi-vallalatok/nemzetkozi-beruhazasi-bank-nbb-szankcio.747405.html
Don’t be surprised in a couple of years time when it turns out Budapest is also the “intelligence hub” in Europe for China, if the current policy continues… In any case Hungary has been protecting Russia’s interests within the EU for several years, so why wouldn’t the Russian regime try to weaken NATO from the inside as well?
The Wuhan University in Bp would certainly be used for spying. Other EU Member States are watching closely any Chinese participation in their national universities out of fear the Chinese will steal technology and other useful data.
Zoltán Gábor Szűcs has a very interesting article on what happens after April 3 in Mérce that can be read here https://merce.hu/2022/03/30/mit-erdemes-atgondolni-a-valasztasok-elott/ in Hungarian, but it translates via google pretty well too. He presents five possible scenarios, now there are always many more possible scenarios to consider, but these 5 are adequate for myself. I see scenario three as very possible, and I as I have said fear Orban will implement a much stronger state after a close election decided by the vote of the Hungarians outside the borders that could indeed cause civil unrest in Hungary. Szűcs does not discuss the possibility of civil unrest in conjunction with scenario 3, I have see this as a real possibility and do not see it as being instigated by MZP either, rather I see it coming from the base of the opposition itself exhausted by the corruption of Fidesz.
Yes, these are the principal possible outcomes.,How Orban might react to any of those set out is the mystery. Even an outright defeat for Fidesz does not, I believe herald a peaceful transfer of power, sadly. I will never forget the night of and the events following the Fidesz defeat in 2002. I heard on the radio Orban making his concession speech and I believed then based on what he said and his tone that had the defeat not taken him by surprise he would have prepared for it to avoid having to resign. The events that followed confirmed this. Do you recall the formation of the “Polgari korok”? And the huge Fidesz organised rallies? Then fast forward to the follow up of the US elections in November 2020. Similarities?
Civil unrest in Hungary? And any reaction to it. Much might depend on how Putin will be next week. We are living through interesting times.
Mail-in votes from Romania & Serbia:
Large-scale electoral fraud
https://transtelex.ro/kozelet/2022/03/30/magyarorszagi-valasztasok-levelszavazatok-visszaeles
https://www.szabadeuropa.hu/a/magyar-valasztasok-szerbiaban-a-nem-fideszes-valasztok-eltunt-szavazolapjai/31775828.html
“Mail-in” ballots received by [election day – 5 days]:
2018: 25,177 including 10,505 dropped off at consulates
2022: 151,304 including 120,832 dropped off at consulates
“Mail-in” ballots received by [election day – 4 days]:
2018: 54,556 including 33,426 dropped off at consulates
2022: 182,022 including 150,467 dropped off at consulates
Campaign on street billboards in March 2022:
Fidesz : Opposition 8:1
Details:
Fidesz*: 12,171 billboards for 3.095 billion forints
*Legal upper limit is 1.177 billion
Opposition Alliance: 1,564 billboards for 0.390 billion forints
https://telex.hu/valasztas-2022/2022/03/30/k-monitor-nyolcszor-annyit-koltott-a-kormanyoldal-plakatkampanyra-mint-az-ellenzek
https://k.blog.hu/2022/03/30/nyolcszoros_tuleroben_a_kormanyoldal_plakatkampanya
The number of Ukrainian refugees exceeded 4 million on March 29, 2022 (on the 34th day of the Russian invasion)
Poland 2.337 million
Romania+Moldova: 0.674
Hungary: 0.365
Russia: 0.351
Slovakia: 0.281
Belarus: 0.011
Total: 4.019 million
Source: UNHCR
Spying among friends is an established practice.
Reactions?
It’s hard to know precisely what the consequences are, since most espionage cases at state levels are held in very closed sessions, under acts of strict secrecy for reasons of “national security”. People might get fired or even tried in court, but very little is referred to the public media about the details.
I was thinking more of moral indignation versus “campaign lie” or clear words to the USA versus siding with Putin.
The opposition organizers have difficulty advertising their campaign events, so let me spread the news about them:
SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2022 AT 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM UTC+02Location: Szabad sajto ut (at the Pest end of the Erzsebet bridge)
against Putin’s aggression, against Orban
SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2022 AT 5:30 PM UTC+02Location: Madách Imre tér,
speeches by the leaders of the opposition alliance
https://www.facebook.com/events/1139203530206283
https://www.facebook.com/events/496020015297319
and yet according to Fidesz, it is Márki-Zay and Gyurcsány who are “dangerous” – these posters are now appearing everywhere, is it too late to start a counter-campaign showing Orbán and Putin as the threat?
https://rtl.hu/valasztas-2022/2022/03/21/uj-frontok-nyiltak-a-valasztasi-plakathaboruban
My wife said anyone who still believe in the Fid crap is a hopeless case just like the Trumpers and antivaxxers. But it seems like there are too many of them in Hungary.
Hard to say! I agree with Wolfi that those who believe can’t be helped any more. The steadily increased hate campaign could encourage those unhappy with their life to vote for the opposition instead of staying at home. But it could make people unsure as well, so that they don’t know what to do. Reaction in statements is possible all the time, but printing new posters will be impossible.
I was thinking more of online campaigning, it’s got to be better than the rather distasteful and disgusting Orbán toilet paper (wipe your arse on this!) adverts that have appeared on facebook, that’s not changing anyone’s mind and just putting people off
I think the reply should NOT be OV & VP.
These posters are using same words as OV&Co previously used in the anti-refugeee/migrant campaigns. So focus on O&Co marking other Hungarians as being foreign refugees/migrants
So my suggestion for counter-campaign is something like:
Do OV&Co consider MZP and GyF as foreign refugees/migrants in Hungary?
How disgustingly wrong, they are TRUE democratic Hungarians!!!
More evidence of massive fraud in the “mail-in” ballots, this time this came from Romania
Fidesz activists open the envelops and burn the ballots and/or throw them in the garbage dumps unless the vote is for Fidesz. They can do this, because the nth iteration of the Fidesz-created electoral law now allows the ballots to arrive in any envelope, not only in the original.
https://atlatszo.ro/tamogatasok/magyarorszagi-valasztasok/valasztasi-visszaelesek-erdely-2022/
https://444.hu/2022/03/31/az-ellenzeket-tamogato-kitoltott-szavazolapokat-egettek-erdelyben
The self-declared Fascist Russian who shaped Putin’s ideology:
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin
in Chapter 1
Snyder – the Road to Unfreedom (2018)
https://willzuzak.ca/cl/bookreview/Snyder2018RoadToUnfreedom.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ilyin