A Colombian I.T. Guy Helped U.S. Authorities Take Down El Chapo | Hacker News Reader

A Colombian I.T. Guy Helped U.S. Authorities Take Down El Chapo

nytimes.com

33 pointsNN8830 comments

Didn't we talk about this 6 days ago?[1]

[1] - https://gizmodo.com/the-feds-cracked-el-chapos-encrypted-com...

Yes, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18866729.

> 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.)

They built their own gorilla cell network at one point.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 don't think the concern is that his family will be random targets of violence. Rather that his family will be the victims of targeted violence.

The story repeats itself, Pablo Escobar was also located (and shot) when talking over the phone with his family.

To be fair that was Delta force flying a plane to capture the signal pretty much constantly. They were not fucking around. There was no plan to take him alive.

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.

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.

I don't know anything about South America, but when it comes to Mexico there's a lot of both. In Texas I was hearing from a young age about rampant violence on the border. If you listened to some people, it was always a boiling bloodbath threatening to spill over into the U.S. You hear that year in and year out, and eventually you learn to ignore it. On the other hand, sometimes (much less often) people who routinely visited family in Mexico near the border would say now is not a good time to go, and talk about feeling scared everywhere they went, hearing gunshots and sometimes even seeing bodies despite their best efforts to stay on the safest roads and in the safest parts of town.

I traveled through Central & South America on a motorcycle. No where in South America did I really feel unsafe.

In parts of Central America, I absolutely felt unsafe. Civilian Militias with guns blocking the roadways. Anything of value was guarded by a guy with a shotgun. Things I saw guarded first hand: - Gas Station - Truck with Propane Tanks (Guy was laying in back on top of the tanks) - Banks - Honda Motorcycle dealership - Motels

I was never sure how to feel about the guys guarding our motels with a shotgun. On one hand, it's nice to know there is someone there deterring any weird activity. On the other hand it also means you're in a place where a guy with a shotgun is necessary to protect stuff.

Most places the locals would look at you and have a warm curious smile. In the sketchier areas the smiles were gone. You'd get stares. Stares that said, 'Why would you think it was safe to be here.'

That being said, these sketchy, unsafe areas were not the norm in Central America. Most places I felt completely safe and absolutely welcomed.

I don't know if that's completely true. I worked with a guy who was the boss for all the IT for Colombia's elections back in the late 90s and early 2000s. He told me stories about how they would secretly rent rooms in a hotel to gather the final election data, and even then people would try to break in by digging through the floor below and ceiling above. He got out because the threats were so great. Think of it: the IT guy for elections, not some player in drug land.

Are they exaggerated ? I am from a very small eastern european country in the central/eastern europe and we have had our share of organized crime in the 90s. Remember these groups have not had an access to a large rich market like the US of A and still managed to be very brutal.

Dissolving people in acid was common, having a dedicated mafia graveyards was also common. They had units of assassins that served as hitmen and were connected to the intelligence services. They had access to explosives, sniper rifles and even at some point were able to detonate the bombs remotely (remember this was in the 90s very early after the fall of the Iron Curtain and such devices were really uncommon).

I've been to Mexico, and one thing I knew while there is how corrupt police can be (some cops are genuinely good people to be fair), and I'm not even a drug lord seeking to bribe police officers. My brother in law had a US license plate, so he was popular to pull over, always getting asked for money, another time we all got pulled over by a pickup truck full of men with rifles (all cops) but we were all in a family truck, so they literally said "oh you're with family" and let us go. What in the world? What would they have done if it was just him, or just me and him?

In the El Chapo show, there's a group called "Los Emes" which is basically "Los Zetas"[0] and when I was in Mexico my brother in law told me they were the most dangerous group in Mexico, he certainly was not wrong.

As other comments have shared there's crazy violence in the border alone, a coworkers wife heard gun shots from Texas every day she was near the border for Hurricane relief.

In Puerto Rico where I'm from right now people are killing people in daylight[1], for what reason? Who the heck knows, it could be anything: looked at you wrong, owed drug money, whatever. When a big time drug lord gets arrested what ends up happening is people start killing each other to get to the top. Cops are resigning to work elsewhere in the continental USA due to loss of basic benefits. The former police chief in Puerto Rico doesn't even go outside after night time[2].

Puerto Rico isn't necessarily Latin America, and most people wont see the worse things happening in their lifetime if they don't live in those rough areas, but the cartels are pretty damn awful. I'm sure Netflix / Telemundo (or was it Univision?) wont get every detail right, but plenty of it is pretty darn close.

That all said, I still would go back to Mexico and Puerto Rico. I love both places, I would still be weary whilst in either of those places, but you gotta know where to go really. Drug Cartels are pretty brutal and have massacred civilians.[3]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Zetas

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/us/puerto-rico-crime-murd...

[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/puerto-rico-violence-former-pol...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre

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. :(

The ongoing travails of the unnecessary drug war.

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.

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

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).

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.

I also heard this alternatively phrased as "FBI cracked El Chapo's encrypted comms system by flipping his sysadmin." Not sure whether it makes a difference but the FBI is known for coercion, but the article calls it "recruiting."

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