Hacktivists open government doors but also expose personal data

The government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador does not like public scrutiny.  Since Bukele took office in 2019, access to government and public information has been sharply curtailed, and the dictates of the country's open records law largely ignored.  In particular, information about public spending is frequently hidden from public view.  

Bukele also likes to tout the country as a technological innovator. It is clear, however, that the government has not always implemented sufficient cyber-security safeguards to prevent hackers from accessing data on government servers, and as a result the data that the government tries to hide is getting released anyways.

Most recently, the "hacktivist" group calling itself "CiberInteligenciaSV" released payroll data leaked from the Salvadoran social security institute for 970,000 Salvadorans including government officials and virtually everyone else who has a job in the formal economy.  The data includes names, salaries, employers, home addresses and more.



In May of this year the same group leaked the personal identification data including photos of more than 5 million Salvadorans as well as the source code for the Chivo Bitcoin wallet ATMs.  

People have been pouring over the records and publishing information about how much money various public officials are receiving from taxpayer funds. Perhaps the most highlighted is Douglas Rodríguez, President of the Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador.  Rodriguez receives a salary of $41,400 monthly according to the leaked documents (half a million dollars a year). 


Others noticed in the leaked data that the sister of Rodriguez, Claudia Juana Rodriguez, receives $9000 per month from a state-owned construction company.  (She is a close aide of Bukele, and was the person appointed acting president for the final six months of his first legal term in office, to prop up the fiction that he could be elected to a second consecutive term).


Other public officials were found to have two full time jobs for which they were receiving salaries -- one in the public sector and one in the private sector.  Spouses of public officials showed up with large earnings from other government entities.

The salaries of these public officials are being compared with what a typical Salvadoran employed in the private sector makes -- 81% of those in the data had monthly salaries of $1000 or less.

What has the Bukele government said about all this leaked information?   Nothing at all.   That's the standard public relations approach of the government to news that it does not like.   Even when the personal information of every Salvadoran citizen was leaked in May, there were no public statements of concern or announcements of the results of investigations.   Better to ignore the story and let it be drowned out by a wave of positive propaganda.

It is worth mentioning that the tactics of CiberInteligenciaSV to simply dump the entire dataset onto the public internet cannot be condoned. In addition to public officials who may be corrupt or just getting fat at the public trough, there are hundreds of thousands of hard-working Salvadorans who have had their personal salary information, home addresses exposed.   This is compounded by the illegal leaking of the personal data of virtually every Salvadoran citizen in May, exposing them to identity theft or more.  These "hacktivists" may be claiming good motives, but they show little respect or concern for collateral consequences.  

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