How an Army vet became the “Cyber Rambo” in an alleged Bolivian coup

Former Army Sgt. Luis Suarez, a student enrolled in the Tracked Vehicle Recovery Course at Regional Training Site Maintenance-Fort Hood, Texas, during his re-enlistment in 2015. He was medically discharged in 2016. He was recently highlighted in reporting about social media mass tweeting and posting following the resignation of Bolivian President Evo Morales. (Army TImes archives) Do these guys know how to party or what?*grin*

This interesting article comes to us from Ex, via Skippy. Sort of a convoluted route, but not that unusual among Admins. Seems a former US Army Sergeant, medically discharged, was learning computer skills, including coding. What happened after he developed an algorithm that would re-tweet certain comments was both comedy gold and helped to bring down a South American socialist president. Read on..

Todd South

Accusations of voter fraud rose and protests erupted in Bolivia late last year, leading to the resignation of President Evo Morales. Some news outlets and social media sites were calling it a coup d’état.

But, nearly 4,000 miles away, that’s not how U.S. Army veteran Luis Suarez saw it.

“It was not a fair fight,” Suarez, a Bolivian native, now U.S. citizen, told Army Times.

What the 38-year-old former Army sergeant did next landed him in the center of an online storm accusing him of being a traitor, “Cyber Rambo” and, in some conspiracy theories, an agent of the Army’s Cyber Command trying to topple foreign governments.

Suarez saw claims of a coup by Morales supporters as their own form of misinformation, so he wrote a 25-line code algorithm that would retweet anti-Morales posts. It was, he said, something that “any programming student could have done.”

It worked.

The algorithm managed to cycle more than 13,000 retweets in just a few days, at one point managing 69 tweets per second.

And that little algorithm thrust Suarez into the midst of online accusations, conspiracy theories and headline news across major media outlets focusing on Latin America.

Suarez laughed off the claims in an interview with Army Times, pointing out that he was a mechanic in the Army who reached the rank of sergeant and was medically discharged in 2016 and never served in a cyber unit.

His special Army training? Tracked vehicle recovery.

An Army spokesman told Salon that Suarez had served from 2010 to 2016 as a mechanic with one deployment to Afghanistan. An email request for Suarez’ service history to Army Human Resources Command was not immediately returned Friday.

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Articles by El Diario, a left-leaning Spanish news site and by Salon pull from research by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which identified some of the larger social media patterns.

The commission’s December report found 68,000 fake Twitter accounts in support of Morales’ opposition party candidate Luis Fernando Camacho created 14 hashtags that were then shared by 252,090 different accounts, making for a grand total of 1.05 million tweets in over an eight-day period in November.

Morales resigned that same month following mass protests claiming election fraud.

Read the entire article here: Army Times

Thanks, Skippy!

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