> The I.T. specialist, Christian Rodriguez, had recently developed an extraordinary product: an encrypted communications system for Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo
Interesting they decided to roll their own instead of e.g. piggybacking on Signal. (Or something open source and Tor-based.)
I really hope they are keeping his family safe. The cartels are pretty nasty. Just watch Narcos, Narcos: Mexico ("Season 2" of Narcos) and El Chapo on Netflix (both in mostly Spanish, especially El Chapo) and see all the crazy history.
I'm a software engineer from Colombia and Narcos is definitely exaggerated and over dramatized. The cartel war of the 80s and 90s was definitely very brutal and absolutely terrible for the country but for the vast majority of people that lived through those times (me included) we watched the violence in the news like everybody else. Only in very specific areas of the country some people got to experience actual violence.
Colombia has a population of 50 million and at most those cartel gangs add up to 15,000 members in total (counting the guerrilla groups) which is a pretty scary number but still only around 0.03% percent of the population in total. Cartels tend to operate in very marginalized or remote areas (like the jungles) so for many Colombians violence like the one showed in Narcos is something we rarely experience.
I've never been to South America and I have only a couple friends from there, but I've watched these shows and they definitely look like exaggerated propaganda. Same way my country and my nation is always portrayed by Hollywood: grumpy blood thirsty villains dreaming of killing all people in the world. So I don't really believe it.
Why settle for hollywood shit? LiveLeak has the real stuff
Personal favorites being them cutting a rival cartel members leg off and beating him to death with his own leg, chainsaw execution, or cutting out and holding a guys beating heart in front of his face
Don't bury your head in the sand, we live in a cruel world
I guess you need to be selective about who your clients are. Just because they can pay you very well and buy any equipment or service you suggest, doesn't mean you should have them as a client. You don't want a client who will hunt you down and kill you if the network goes down. :(
Except now the cartels have expanded into smuggling people (and the attendant unsavory side businesses), and may make more money from that than drugs. It may seem unnecessary, but there's a lot of real human suffering directly arising from cartel activities. I certainly think there are better approaches to stopping them than what we've been doing for the last 30 years though.
You can't stop what happens in the courts from becoming public (which is how this information got out). It helps put scrutiny on police tactics anyway, which then helps the average person defend themselves against abuse of power.
Law enforcement will always have an advantage over criminals anyway. Even if we know their tactics, they still have full access to phones, networks, business databases, they can coerce people to turn informant, etc, etc, etc. They'll still win.
Law enforcement information control is overrated in its utility. Not to mention 99.9% of criminals make dumb mistakes (which is all it takes to get caught, one minor mistake).
[+] [-] renholder|7 years ago|reply
[1] - https://gizmodo.com/the-feds-cracked-el-chapos-encrypted-com...
[+] [-] sctb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|7 years ago|reply
Interesting they decided to roll their own instead of e.g. piggybacking on Signal. (Or something open source and Tor-based.)
[+] [-] paulie_a|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilsleep|7 years ago|reply
Colombia has a population of 50 million and at most those cartel gangs add up to 15,000 members in total (counting the guerrilla groups) which is a pretty scary number but still only around 0.03% percent of the population in total. Cartels tend to operate in very marginalized or remote areas (like the jungles) so for many Colombians violence like the one showed in Narcos is something we rarely experience.
[+] [-] bithavoc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anticodon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tossaccount123|7 years ago|reply
Personal favorites being them cutting a rival cartel members leg off and beating him to death with his own leg, chainsaw execution, or cutting out and holding a guys beating heart in front of his face
Don't bury your head in the sand, we live in a cruel world
[+] [-] RodericDay|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] roadkillon101|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SovietDissident|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverige|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] invalidOrTaken|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|7 years ago|reply
Law enforcement will always have an advantage over criminals anyway. Even if we know their tactics, they still have full access to phones, networks, business databases, they can coerce people to turn informant, etc, etc, etc. They'll still win.
Law enforcement information control is overrated in its utility. Not to mention 99.9% of criminals make dumb mistakes (which is all it takes to get caught, one minor mistake).