
A Colombian I.T. Guy Helped U.S. Authorities Take Down El Chapo - NN88
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html
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renholder
Didn't we talk about this 6 days ago?[1]

[1] - [https://gizmodo.com/the-feds-cracked-el-chapos-encrypted-
com...](https://gizmodo.com/the-feds-cracked-el-chapos-encrypted-
communications-net-1831595734)

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sctb
Yes, here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18866729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18866729).

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JumpCrisscross
> _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.)

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paulie_a
They built their own gorilla cell network at one point.

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toufiqbarhamov
Small correction of what I’m guessing is a typo, it’s guerilla rather than
gorilla. Sorry for my pedantry.

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paulie_a
I used the incorrect version of a similar word. Get over it. I could edit but
now won't even bother.

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tomhoward
They were trying to be helpful. Is there any wording of this kind of
correction that you would have graciously accepted?

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paulie_a
Nope, they were just trying to be right over a trivial spelling mistake on the
internet. People that do that are the same people that others avoid at dinner
parties.

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tomhoward
I get that most spelling corrections on internet discussion boards are like
that, but I don't think that's the case here.

It was a substantive error in the use of a whole word/phrase, and the
commenter was trying to do you a favour by relieving you from that
misconception for the future.

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giancarlostoro
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.

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anticodon
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.

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oblomovshchina
They look exaggerated but aren't. The true extent of Cartel violence is far,
far worse than what these series show, and it got worse in the past couple
decades than it ever was in the 80s. The propaganda is mostly about the role
of America in the region.

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roadkillon101
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. :(

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SovietDissident
The ongoing travails of the unnecessary drug war.

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sverige
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.

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
_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._

Untangling the “war on drugs” from the issue of human trafficking and other
ills has to be desirable for everyone involved except the cartels. If you want
a war on human trafficking, I don’t think you’d get much pushback, but let’s
stop conflating that with drugs. Remember that almost 2/3rds of the drugs
coming through is pot, which is a ridiculous thing even just from a trade-
balance perspective.

At any rate, if smuggling drugs becomes unprofitable, cartels will still be
forced to massively downsize. That will impact their whole operational space,
human trafficking included.

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invalidOrTaken
Great! Let's put it all over the news!

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dmix
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).

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darkpuma
I think you're misreading the concern. It's the difference between public
knowledge and common knowledge.

The cartel in question would already know about this IT guy, they don't need
the media to mention it because it's already _public_ knowledge. But without
the media mentioning, it wouldn't be _common_ knowledge. The difference is
important to criminals concerned with reputation. If the IT guy was public
knowledge but not common knowledge, the cartel would almost certainly be
interested in his assassination, to send a message that they're not to be
crossed. But with the IT guy being _common_ knowledge, the value of
assassinating him skyrockets. Bringing the IT guy into common knowledge could
encourage more members of the public to believe the cartel is weak enough to
be betrayed. This is obviously good for the authorities, who want more people
to betray cartels, but bad for the cartels who control people through fear.
The remedy for the cartel is to devote even more manpower to tracking down the
IT guy and killing him.

These sort of news articles are good for the general public, but dangerous for
the individual IT guy.

