Belarusian dictator pwned by “cyber-partisans”

When a secretive autocrat has no more secrets.

Belarus is “Europe’s last Soviet dictatorship,” a country ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, an absurd authoritarian caricature who once had a one-armed man arrested for clapping:

https://loweringthebar.net/2013/01/one-armed-man-arrested-for-clapping.html

Lukashenko’s brutality is absurd, but it’s no joke. Belarus has a terrible human rights record: it’s a corrupt land of secret disappearances and torture (it’s also my heritage: my grandfather was born in Nowy Swerzne, Belarus).

Lukashenko is a clown, but he possesses the administrative competence to avail himself of high-tech surveillance — a decade ago, he was already using mobile carriers’ records to obtain lists of every person who attended anti-government demonstrations.

https://charter97.org/en/news/2011/1/12/35161/

But as the saying goes “any weapon you don’t know how to use is your enemy’s.” Lukashenko’s regime is highly digitized — and badly secured. Earlier this year, hacktivists called the Belarusian Cyber Partisans announced that they’d obtained a huge trove of government docs.

The trove includes the identities of police informants, government officials’ personal information…