
She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder - danso
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/21/she-tweeted-against-the-mexican-cartels-they-tweeted-her-murder.html
======
theobon
Why are the majority of the comments here blaming the victim?

This is the death if a person who tried to stand against an overwhelming
force. To try and stand against the cartels where the police didn't dare and
instead of honouring her work or get death you mock her for not using tor.

If you seriously think that lack of cybersecurity is the problem then at least
use this to highlight the lack of good easy to use security software.

~~~
legacyfruit
In the epilogue one of his books (maybe "the drowned and the saved"?),
Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi describes giving a talk to a group of
schoolchildren. One boy asked him to describe the layout of the camp, and then
described how he would have escaped if he had been in Auschwitz. Nothing Primo
Levi could say would convince the boy that escape was impossible.

Now I'm not saying that it was impossible for this citizen journalist to hide
her identity, but the comments strike me as having a similar tone. People are
simply assuming that her capture and death was preventable, because it is
psychologically difficult to face the alternative. Namely, that only by
accepting personal risk, was this woman able to stand up to the cartels. Even
if the technology to protect her identity existed, maybe a person in this
woman's situation would be very unlikely to know about it.

Of constructive suggestions are great, although I'm not qualified to judge
their technical merit.

~~~
tn13
It seems that you have reached the heart of the problem. Most of us are miles
away from that sort of threat. When the word is out that people are out there
looking to murder you, it is immensely stressful. You cant eat or sleep.

If I was in her place I would have fled to a different city taking a few days
off from work or simply given up the activism to reduce it to a level where
the mob would not have bothered that much.

Note: Those who think that she could have managed to conceal her identity, why
dont you take her work forward ? Whatever she did you too could do it from
safety of USA. (Rhetorical challenge of course).

~~~
jpatokal
A few days, and then what? Her job is at home, and so is the mob. Most people
can't just hop across a border and start a new life on a whim.

~~~
tn13
I once picked up fight with a local goon who then threatened to take revenge
(which probably meant some thrashing). I was scared, I moved to a different
city for a month and things cooled down after that.

------
drawkbox
We've created a monster with the War on Drugs.

It will only get worse unless we reverse course. Unless we do, the
violence/terrorism on the border could increase dramatically. We have a
historical model in alcohol prohibition and know what it does and what happens
after.

We blame Mexico, Central and South America for much of this but policies and
our actions there are creating these black markets where only criminals get
the revenues. How is that the best solution we have? We are actively creating
armies south of the border that aren't state associated, I believe that is
terrorism.

~~~
paulhauggis
Well, drug consumers can stop purchasing drugs that you know that involve the
cartels. But most people that talk about the "War on Drugs" would rather blame
the US drug policies instead, rather than the own up to the fact that they are
contributing to the problem.

I would also like to point out that legalizing drugs would not solve the
problem. The problem is corruption, not the drugs themselves. Look at Miami in
the 1970s. It was a war zone, just like Mexico is today. The reason is because
you could buy off any cop or government official in the city (check out the
documentary "Cocaine Cowboys" for some real news footage from the time).

If drugs are legalized tomorrow, what do you think would happen? If I were the
cartels, I would continue selling my product, this time legal (similar to how
companies are outsourcing to China..drug companies will outsource to Mexico).
My power would continue or increase, because I could just buy off any cop
and/or government official and the violence would continue (ruling by fear).

Fix the corruption..and you fix the cartel issue. At this point, the US would
need to bring the military in there to fix the problem.

I also don't think people would stop buying drugs in the black market if drugs
were made legal. Why? MJ will not ever be legal in the sense that you can just
grow it and sell it out of your house with no government intervention. It will
be taxed and regulated, which means much higher prices. Many people won't want
to pay those higher prices and there will still be a demand for a black market
(just like software and music piracy).

I'm not against the legalization of drugs, I'm against the dishonesty.
Supporters were dishonest about "medical marijuana"..which is quite honestly,
a joke. There are 10 doctors in my area that will give you a prescription for
MJ for pretty much anything..it will just cost you $70. The majority of people
that I know that have their prescriptions just want to smoke weed.

I wish I was one of those doctors...they are probably able to retire on the
proceeds.

Please..just stop the fucking dishonesty and I might support your cause.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Fix the corruption..and you fix the cartel issue.

You have the cause and effect inverted. Everyone has a price. The reason there
is so much corruption in Mexico is that we've made corruption so profitable.

> If I were the cartels, I would continue selling my product, this time legal
> (similar to how companies are outsourcing to China..drug companies will
> outsource to Mexico). My power would continue or increase, because I could
> just buy off any cop and/or government official and the violence would
> continue (ruling by fear).

If drugs were legalized then competition would increase and drive down
margins. Meanwhile the government would collect taxes, preventing the lower
margins from actually lowering prices and increasing demand. All of which
means less money for the cartels.

> It will be taxed and regulated, which means much higher prices. Many people
> won't want to pay those higher prices and there will still be a demand for a
> black market (just like software and music piracy).

Tax evasion is a felony. The cost of continually having your employees
arrested and assets seized can easily exceed the cost of just paying the taxes
(which is kind of the idea).

The sensible thing to do with drugs is to make possession legal but impose
high taxes and then significant fines and mandatory rehab for using drugs or
being high in any public place. Meanwhile use 100% of the money from the taxes
and fines for anti-drug campaigns and free rehab for anyone who wants it and
otherwise doing whatever possible to encourage people to voluntarily give up
drug use.

~~~
fleitz
So we're shutting down Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Altria, and Anheuser Busch?

It seems as a society we have other thoughts on what the sensible thing to do
with drugs is, namely, let users of it use it as long as they don't harm
others.

Using drugs and being high in public is as common as coffee on the morning
commute, to paraphrase Coca-Cola, getting high in public is the real thing.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> It seems as a society we have other thoughts on what the sensible thing to
> do with drugs is, namely, let users of it use it as long as they don't harm
> others.

Drug users _do_ harm others. People crash their vehicles into pedestrians or
put psychoactive or harmful substances into the air without the consent of
others or commit robbery for money to buy drugs. Alcohol and cigarettes belong
in exactly the same category.

Blanket prohibitions just don't work to prevent the harm. It only leads to the
rise of organized crime. But permitting the substances while discouraging
their use is quite effective -- as has been demonstrated in the recent past
with the reduction in cigarette smoking in the US.

This is also why there is never any objection to caffeine. People drinking
coffee has essentially zero capacity for harm to third parties.

~~~
fleitz
> Alcohol and cigarettes belong in exactly the same category.

I hear Iran and Saudi Arabia are lovely this time of year.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> I hear Iran and Saudi Arabia are lovely this time of year.

I hear Sealand is cold and lonely year round.

------
monochr
This is why we need not only password locks and full encryption but panic
passwords and hidden logins on every piece of electronics we own. That no
mobile OS offers these yet is pathetic.

When twitter and facebook don't let you connect anonymously from tor, this is
what the result is. If you have a major website that is used by dissidents and
journalists in countries such as Mexico or Iran and you don't have a plain
html form to fall back on and insist on javascript being on all the time you
really do have blood on your hands.

~~~
coldtea
> _This is why we need not only password locks and full encryption but panic
> passwords and hidden logins on every piece of electronics we own._

Yeah, that would have saved her against Mexican drug cartels and a $50.000
dollars reward.

~~~
monochr
Yes, it literally would have since they found out who she was by looking
through her phone after kidnapping her for an unrelated death of a cartel
member.

Try and read the article before you comment.

~~~
cynicalkane
So in your theory, bloodthirsty murdering cartels are going to kidnap people,
but let them go if they hit the panic encryption button on their phones or
happen to be using a secret password.

This is an interesting view of how drug cartels work. Personally, I don't know
what the penalty for "contempt of drug cartel that just kidnapped you" is, but
it seems unlikely to lead to a positive outcome.

~~~
icpmacdo
It would be interesting if you could have 2 codes to two different user
accounts on the phone so she could give them the passcode "5555" and have it
link to a harmless twitter/FB and then have another one to use for a private
user account.

------
chuckcode
When can we stop the madness and regulate drugs rather than criminalizing
them? Didn't we learn anything from prohibition?? In a time when so many
people are aware of the limitations of government why do so many people think
that we're going to resolve the drug problems with more government in the form
courts and prisons. We're just creating a market opportunity for the cartels
by inflating prices and turning their customers into criminals.

~~~
handle_bars
Are you suggesting that we legalise everything that is currently illegal, so
that we would have no need to prohibit anything and turn nobody into
criminals?

We could very well apply this logic to say, murder. Why not let us legalise
murder, set up appropriate channels for people to hire hitmen to kill each
other, so that the underground killers would not have any more customers and
then they will gradually die out?

~~~
rurounijones
Person A takes drugs, person A is affected.

Person A kills Person B, person B is affected.

~~~
handle_bars
This has got to be the most naive reasoning I've seen.

We totally live in a deterministic world where 1 action affects only 1 person,
and everything else is isolated from one another.

~~~
Dylan16807
Congratulations, you figured out that a simplification of an argument is a
simplification.

If you would like answers about the details you can search google or ask.

If you want to sound smart for figuring out that there _are_ details, it's not
going to happen.

------
blrgeek
And that is what the USA 'War on Drugs' is doing to the poorer neighbours.

~~~
Natsu
And what about all the customers of this cartel who give them the money to pay
people enough to do things like this?

~~~
ripb
>And what about all the customers of this cartel who give them the money to
pay people enough to do things like this?

Drugs are a fact of life, they've been used since the dawn of man and will be
used likely until the end of man. They're not going away.

It's abhorrent that in order to access drugs, you've to essentially send money
down the chain to people carrying out such acts...but people are going to do
drugs, and in the face of no alternatives, this is where they're going to get
them.

The people buying these drugs, generating the income for these cartels, are so
removed from the reality behind them that it may as well be totally
unconnected as far as all are concerned. We, first world Westerners, are
generally very disconnected from the realities surrounding many of the
products we buy, from legitimate products like those manufactured by Nestle,
to cheap clothing manufactured in terrible conditions in the East, through to
illicit substances such as cocaine which are manufactured in South America and
whose trade fuels a bloody war there.

Indeed, many of our tech products that we all here use are manufactured by
Foxconn, a company whose working practices are so bad that they had issues
with people killing themselves on the job and tackled it by installing suicide
nets around the back of the buildings and in the stairwells.

As such, there is a lot of inherent immorality associated with a lot of the
consumerism we here fuel, but the reality for us is that we are extremely
disconnected from these issues.

But what are the alternatives? Go even harder on those found with drugs, while
continuing to let Western consumerism promote without any interference
terrible working conditions for our manufacturers in the East?

One potential solution to all these issues is to apply a similar approach to
all - manufacture these in the 1st world under regulations and subsidize their
sale so that the consumer points towards these regulated manufacturers rather
than using products manufactured abroad.

Unfortunately, while this may be the solution, it itself raises so many other
issues. If we took coke production out of the hands of South America and made
it in the US, for example, what in hell's name is going to happen when the
vast numbers of not just cartel members, but relatively innocent coco farmers
in South America can no longer derive anywhere near the same income from them?

Manufacturing these things ourselves would also, if not greatly subsidized for
promotion, drive prices for the consumer up and thus have them pointing in the
wrong direction again.

It's a complex issue and personally I'm not sure of what the best potential
solution may be, but I find it hard to sit here and criticize those using coke
in the US from a product containing FoxConn parts where people are miserable
and ending their lives because of what our demand for the products being made
there is doing to them.

~~~
handle_bars
> Drugs are a fact of life, they've been used since the dawn of man and will
> be used likely until the end of man. They're not going away.

Did you decide on the truth of all of these assumptions by yourself?

~~~
ripb
I'm on my mobile so can't do much linking, but there is evidence of narcotics
use dating back throughout recorded history.

Drugs are extremely popular today.

Using the two above, I made the assumption that people will be using narcotics
so long as our species continues, unless their effects can be explicitly
replicated and induced by technology at some stage in the future, although I
wouldn't necessarily say that such an act would not be doing drugs.

~~~
Natsu
Unless, perhaps, we can find a cure for addiction itself.

I mean, diseases have been going on for all of human history, but we've wiped
out a few different kinds.

------
jacquesm
Mexican cartels will become much less of a threat when the US decides to treat
drug addiction like a disease instead of a crime and will legalize drugs to
the point where the street value will drop to where crime is too high a price
to pay for the profits that can be made with them.

This will probably take longer than I'm going to be around for but in the end
that and only that will get the drug 'war' over and done with. It's
politically hard because it would be in the eyes of some admitting defeat and
in the eyes of others admitting being wrong. Those are both hard things for
politicians. But if that doesn't happen the war on drugs will be the US
equivalent of the war in Afghanistan for the Russians. Unwinnable, a
continuous sapping of funds and energy that could go to better uses.

In the meantime we rely on people like this extremely brave woman that stood
up for what was right, and I sincerely hope that those that are on the
consuming side of the equation ('a man that needs a little help to dream')
wise up and see that they are very much part of the problem and that they and
everybody else fractionally kill people (sometimes even themselves) on a daily
basis.

The drug trade is supremely ugly.

------
ripb
It's somewhat amazing that it was a seemingly unrelated kidnapping that lead
to her discovery given that she seemed to be tweeting from her own phone,
probably publishing from her own (unsecured?) computer etc. and the reach that
the cartel are purported to have in law enforcement / military in those areas.

I sincerely hope for America's sake that there's no substance to the claims
that the CIA are working with these cartels.

~~~
Crito
The CIA working with cartels abroad is not mere rumor. There is substantial
evidence that this takes place.

Unfortunately, nobody in this world has the combination of power, opportunity,
and desire to take the CIA down for its crimes. They are the closest thing to
a god that has ever existed; and organization that is profoundly beyond the
grasp of society at large. They smite as they see fit, and there is nothing
that can be done about it. Even if the American democratic system were
functioning as designed/desired, the CIA would have ample opportunity to burn
all of their records (as the Stasi unsuccessfully attempted). Black budgets
(see:their involvement in the drugs trade) is one of their many insurance
policies against accountability.

~~~
coldtea
> _Unfortunately, nobody in this world has the combination of power,
> opportunity, and desire to take the CIA down for its crimes._

That's assuming they are something like a rogue agent, and not a coherent part
of an overall national strategy (not for the common folks of course).

~~~
Crito
Black budgets alone are enough to make them a rogue agent for all practical
intents and purposes.

How do you audit an organization like the CIA without the CIA's cooperation?
In order to audit the CIA you must first trust the CIA, but the purpose of the
audit would be to establish trust in the first place.

Trust of the CIA cannot be bootstrapped. They cannot be audited without trust.
Since we cannot trust them, it would be foolish to believe that they are
subservient to us.

~~~
coldtea
It's not like those giving the black budgets don't know what they get in
return.

~~~
dllthomas
It might be like that. First, anyone approving a budget knows what they're
told, but probably has the capacity for very little first-hand verification.
Second, not all budgets are "given" \- we've previously seen the CIA raise
money independently to fund illegal operations.

~~~
coldtea
Let's put it this way: the president, and the congress could squash that in a
second if there was a will.

~~~
dllthomas
Plausibly. I'm not sure how we'd tell. And there being "a will" may be
dependent on an understanding of what's going on whose absence could - in
principle - persist indefinitely.

------
mjfl
We live in a surveillance state.. I don't understand why the CIA can't find
the leaders of these organizations and slip arsenic in their morning coffees.

~~~
javert
The US should not play world police.

The US properly has jurisdiction in Mexico only when necessary to protect
Americans, and we seem to not have crossed that threshhold.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The US properly has jurisdiction in Mexico only when necessary to protect
> Americans

Wait, what? Does Mexico have jurisdiction in the US when necessary to protect
Mexicans?

~~~
javert
Yes.

------
sidcool
Many people here are thinking of this as a technical problem than a social
one. I know we are HNers, but we do think of stuff in different perspectives
too, don't we? I mean technology is not the farthest we can look.

~~~
GhotiFish
I'm a tech, I can suggest tech solutions. I have no idea how to deal with
cartels.

Use batman?

------
judk
The US has drones. Why don't they firebomb every drug plantation and capo
hacienda in L Latin America?

~~~
afro88
Because the US isn't the world police

------
Shorel
I offer myself as a proxy for such twitter accounts.

Let's see what happens.

------
leeber
If the Cartels have such a hole on media down there, then how did such a
detailed account of this story get out?

~~~
jn1234
Because they put it on an extremely popular Twitter account that was followed
by the American media?

------
VexXtreme
If you're going to whistleblow on your local government online (be that a
legitimate government, or a violent drug cartel), the only reasonably safe way
to do it is from outside the country AND using Tor. It amazes me that people
don't take these basic precautions.

Mexican cartels are known to have infiltrated ISPs, where they were able to
tie IP addresses to identities. Using encryption is the only way.

EDIT: may I ask why the downvotes? Did I say something offensive or break the
HN rules?

~~~
tomengland
I'm not sure how you're going to get out real journalism about the events
going on within your city from another country... Did you read the article?

~~~
VexXtreme
I did, and it clearly says that other citizens were sending her information to
post online. I don't know much about her situation, but presumably that
wouldn't require her to be in the country.

And even if that's not the case, using Tor and not linking your online
vigilante identity to your real identity (e.g. by having your whistleblower
twitter account linked to your personal phone) is a very basic precaution.

I REALLY don't want to sound insensitive, but if people are going to use
technology to fight people who wield the power of physical violence, they DO
need to learn how to apply it properly.

~~~
mkal_tsr
No, see, people call that "victim-blaming" and not "educating yourself about
the risks by utilizing the global sum of all human knowledge". The _only_ way
people are going to be safe is if they're educated about the risks/rewards to
using technology. Lately it's gotten very weird in that anyone that falls prey
to predators and become victims could never ever possibly ever have made any
possible mistakes/misteps, for they are the immaculate victim that must not
ever have any responsibility for their actions.

This flies completely contrary to precautionary measures and utilizing
knowledge/education as a barrier to attack. The sooner society gets away from
the "that's 'victim-blaming'" mentality and embraces education for all, the
sooner everyone is better of for it. It's not saying, "yeah, they had this
coming, this is their fault" but rather, "let's analyze the situation and
provide mitigation for the future"

------
tn13
The blame rests on her. She was rich, able to afford college education and
unnecessarily painting the poor equal-opportunity lacking folks on street as
thieves.

Instead of tweeting against the cartels she should have tried to build a
bridge to their hearts, reach to the root cause of crime and should acted like
a responsible citizen. She instead chose adventurism.

US is doing a great service to these people by continuing to have a drug-
prohibition and letting their uneducated/unskilled labor get safe citizenship
and welfare money at the expense of American taxpayers. She should have
learned something from USA.

^^#sarcasm

I hope that she is safe.

~~~
handle_bars
According to the article, she's dead.

~~~
tn13
The body is not found.

------
rokhayakebe
Should we invest serious funds (billions) into creating a 1) legal drug which
is 2) not addictive, and 3) far more superior than weed, cocaine, heroine, and
all the other drugs.

~~~
thefreeman
If it was that good it would be addicting regardless of any physical effects.

~~~
zerr
The point is that it should be harmless - for the person and for the
surrounding people as well...

