Sinaloa Cartel Used Phone Data and Surveillance Cameras To Find and Kill FBI Informants in 2018, DOJ Says (aol.com) 36
Designated as a foreign terrorist group by multiple countries, Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel fiercely defends its transnational organized crime syndicate.
"A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official's phone records," reports Reuters, "and use Mexico City's surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency's informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday." The incident was disclosed in a Justice Department Inspector General's audit of the FBI's efforts to mitigate the effects of "ubiquitous technical surveillance," a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data... The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché's phone number "to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data."
The report said the hacker also "used Mexico City's camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with." The report said "the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses."
"A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official's phone records," reports Reuters, "and use Mexico City's surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency's informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday." The incident was disclosed in a Justice Department Inspector General's audit of the FBI's efforts to mitigate the effects of "ubiquitous technical surveillance," a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data... The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché's phone number "to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data."
The report said the hacker also "used Mexico City's camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with." The report said "the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses."
This is why surveillance culture is bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever the government does, good or bad intention-wise, bad actors will always have incentive to use themselves.
That's why you don't want government backdoors in things.
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I guess the FBI had something to hide (Score:2, Funny)
What're you afraid of, if you have nothing to hide?
Re:We could stop this tomorrow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We could stop this tomorrow (Score:4)
Watching propaganda will do that to your brain.
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As opposed to San Francisco where nobody takes anything stronger than an aspirin ever?
Re:We could stop this tomorrow (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever seen someone on meth? PCP? Consuming those drugs instantly makes a person a danger to society.
Do we need a major reform when it comes to drug legislation and enforcement? Absolutely. But that's much different from "legalize all drugs." Each substance needs to be judged separately and treated as such.
For marijuana, in many places legalization has meant that you can prop up a store and sell it. That appears to be working out okay. Should we allow stores to sell LSD over the counter? Probably not. People generally don't take LSD in massive doses and they don't get addicted to it, but it's such a powerful drug and it only takes a drop to make one fall into a full blown hallucinogenic state. You don't want LSD to be an over the counter drug not because you're worried that people will take it recreationally, but because it could so easily be used for horrible pranks (that could lead to real psychosis). It's dangerous! LSD probably shouldn't be legal, but it's also probably not worth law enforcement's time to worry about this niche drug.
Then there's cocaine and heroin and all that. The idea about the government giving it away is completely antithetical to the next idea about providing addiction services. If you give addicts everything they need to continue being addicts, they will have no motivation to ever stop.
There is probably no perfect solution when it comes to drugs. Extreme prohibition causes dangerous black markets and the violence associated with them. But to swing the complete opposite direction and just legalize everything is just crazy. There's a reason we have a distinction between prescription drugs and over the counter drugs. Even the most nuanced policies won't be perfect, but you can't just treat "drugs" as a single category enforced under a single policy.
Re:We could stop this tomorrow (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever seen someone on meth? PCP? Consuming those drugs instantly makes a person a danger to society.
How many alcohol related deaths do we have every year? Everything from drunks plowing into a family in the oncoming lane to people drinking themselves to death. How many fights and acts of violence are started because of alcohol? Think of all the lives we could save without alcohol.
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I'm not sure if you're seriously recommending a return to alcohol prohibition or if you're using it as a sarcastic counterexample to my point. However, in either case my answer would be that alcohol is still significantly different than meth and PCP in how dangerous it is, how much demand there is for it, and how easy it is to make.
1. As we learned from our first attempt at alcohol prohibition, it's just not worth it. The black market violence ended up being worse than the violence caused by drunks and so m
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Meth and PCP both require knowledge of chemistry, special equipment, and obtaining other hard to acquire chemicals to produce. As with pharmaceutical drugs, the difficulty of production makes regulation easier.
And yet 12 years ago there was a meth lab raid in the suburban condo complex I lived in like in 2011, operated for almost 3 years I heard. Any metro area probably has at least a couple operating right now.
By attempting to completely restrict the supply it's become valuable enough that it's about as common as moonshine. One of our most popular media properties is about two guys making it in an RV.
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By attempting to completely restrict the supply it's become valuable enough that it's about as common as moonshine.
Meth is about as common as moonshine today, but it's not nearly as common as alcohol during prohibition.
The meth lab in your condo complex got busted for a reason.
Relevant to the story here:
But after the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 went into effect in 2006, the Drug Enforcement Administration reported a sharp decline in domestic methamphetamine production and consumption.[8] As a result, the amount of methamphetamine seized, the amount of domestic drug labs shut down, and the number of associated deaths and emergency room visits also declined.[9]
However, since then, drug cartels have become the dominant producer of methamphetamine consumed in the US. They manufacture the product in clandestine facilities in Mexico and smuggle it across the border into the country. Deaths linked to methamphetamine overdoses quadrupled between 2011 and 2017.[10][11] As of 2020, there are nine cartels involved in this process, with the Sinaloa Cartel being the dominant and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel coming in second.[12]
wiki [wikipedia.org]
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Relative to it's userbase? I'd be interested to see that. Basically if you want meth today you can get it, pretty low friction transaction.
So we passed even more enforcement, spent who knows how many millions or billions on the extra law enforcement to shut down those domestic labs, made everyone else's life more of a pain in the ass by restricting Sudafed heavily and what did we get? Meth is cheaper and more pure than it was in 2005.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u... [nbcnews.com]
So here we are in 50+ years of the war
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I'm certainly not going to argue that the war on drugs has been conducted ethically, logically, effectively, or efficiently. But I'll also never argue in favor of decriminalized or legalized meth.
One of the biggest problems with we have with meth is that we have been so undiplomatic with China and Mexico that the former has taken a page out of the opium wars and exports the chemicals required to produce meth and fentanyl to the latter. Our ability to take on the cartels has also been stymied by our horrible
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In order to regulate you need to decriminalize otherwise you have de facto created a thing that cannot be regulated.
Sorry but I can easily think of a world where meth is not criminalized and there is less suffering nor am I claiming it begins and ends there. Again we have alcohol as an example, if you're relationship with it is harmful we have alllllllll these ways to get help. Why should drugs also risk a jail sentence strictly for possession? Just get people help, improve conditions so not so many peopl
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Have you ever seen someone on meth? PCP? Consuming those drugs instantly makes a person a danger to society.
How many alcohol related deaths do we have every year? Everything from drunks plowing into a family in the oncoming lane to people drinking themselves to death. How many fights and acts of violence are started because of alcohol? Think of all the lives we could save without alcohol.
To be fair, drinking yourself to death takes decades of systemic abuse... Meth, PCP and Heroin are pretty destructive in the short term.
That being said, I'm broadly in favour of decriminalisation because it makes it easier to both offer services to help people off these drugs and for the users to seek help to get off the drugs. Keeping them illegal doesn't remove the harm, it just hides it out of sight of the "drugs are baaaaad m'kay" crowd, makes it harder for addicts to deal with their addiction and he
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Little problem with that: The religious are routinely more cruel than atheists, often much more so because they hallucinate that they have God on their side. They want people to suffer.
Re: We could stop this tomorrow (Score:2)
Re: We could stop this tomorrow (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Fascists just want to kill you and out of the picture. Christians want to torture you for all eternity.
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Legalize all drugs.
All but Naloxone. What right do you have to intefere with another's decision to die?
Live by the sword ... (Score:2)
What (Score:2, Funny)
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It's always Biden's fault.
Not really. He wasn't really running things. :-)
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It's always Biden's fault.
Not really. He wasn't really running things. :-)
...and Trump is? He's just as much of a tool (in both senses).
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good news, the panopticon was always too juicy for any to pass up
hope you've got enough hate to go around
It was seven years ago (Score:2)
Seven months ago and this would be a worrisome story.
Remind me (Score:2, Funny)
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Yep, from yourself. Ideally they will kill you "lawfully" or protected by immunity so that you cannot harm yourself! Total safety and total genius!
Absolutely no surprise (Score:1)
Create a network-based surveillance and personal data capturing system of any kind, see the bad guys use it sooner or later. Whether that may be criminal cartels or a government that has gone bad does hardly matter.