Mexican Drug Gangs Kidnap Computer Hackers and Programmers
resources.infosecinstitute.com
resources.infosecinstitute.com
I'd be very interested to hear of corroborated incidences of such kidnapping or recruitment occurring. I was in Sinaloa, Mexico this month actively looking for such evidence as part of my work. There's some indication that the cartel have reasonable IT infrastructure (which isn't surprising, given their size), and some growing involvement in physical piracy (counterfeit items in markets have to be marked with a cartel symbol, which is purchasable). But I've yet to see strong evidence that they are involved in "cybercrime" in any organized fashion.
They certainly take discussion forum flamewars pretty seriously though: http://www.cpj.org/internet/2012/03/online-news-sites-as-bat...
From my personal experience, that's saying they have bored inexperienced coders, who use outdated tools and techniques that any CS sophomore would laugh at. And are much more worried about working the internal politics to get promoted. Than to get any actual work done.
I bet mexican hackers are better than that.
I'm just curious - are you implying that you've personally encountered this sort of thing at government spy agencies or just that much of the government seems to have these characteristics?
Would work especially well if two or more kidnapped hackers were forced to monitor each other, adding a prisoner's dilemma to the mix. If one failed to catch the other's escape he/she and their family would be killed.
So it isn't impossible to enslave security professionals.
And you just described what would be an amazing cyberpunk novel.
Two security professionals both try to escape and prevent the other from escaping at the same time. If done right it could quickly become the best kind of thriller; the one where you're actually speculating as to what happens next.
But maybe that's your third act right there.
Possibly the worst part is that this happened to us(and is still affecting us) in almost exact detail during the prohibition of the 20s and yet we continue to shrug our shoulders and keep giving them more money.
Aren't the ones shrugging their shoulders (who are for the war on drugs), and the ones giving them money (who buy drugs), two completely separate and opposite groups?
Don't look at me, I don't belong to neither. But that sentence sounds like an over-simplification of a complex problem.
It's pretty well known that you dont get far treating the symptoms.
The real problem is police/government corruption. It's the reason they were allowed to get this powerful in the first place.
Secondly, even if there weren't a war on drugs, the gangsters would find something else to peddle, like people. Gangsters existed before prohibition and existed after, they just moved into different rackets.
Here's a UN document which is reasonably cautious.
(http://www.ungift.org/docs/ungift/pdf/knowledge/ebook.pdf)
Global profits are > $30billion USD.
> the total market they can address will be smaller.
Bigger profits.
You can also reduce their profits in other areas. The whole reason they are able to make money is that there is demand for services that cannot be provided legally. Now, some of these services really should be illegal, as they are scams or have very harmful externalities, but for many of the more lucrative ones, you need to ask yourself "is banning this really worth the cost of enforcing it and the costs of the black market generated?"
For instance, human trafficking happens due to demand for labor that isn't being met by local markets, and the illegality of prostitution. Could that demand be better met by making our immigration easier, and making prostitution legal, spending the money saved on programs to help people who may be trapped in bad situations rather than perpetuating the situation by putting them into a permanent criminal class?
I don't pretend to know all of the answers. But I think it's a question that we need to consider seriously, and without resorting to knee-jerk "soft on crime" rhetoric against anyone who suggests that maybe this system is incredibly expensive, damaging to liberty, and producing more harm than good.
Sure, but it's not like there's a fixed supply of "gangsters", like "continents" or "elements" -- some constant number of people floating around out there spending their time committing crimes. Prohibition is the perfect counter-example -- it turned half of America into gangsters or customers of gangsters for a little while.
On the flip side, if you increase the cost and decrease the benefit of earning money illegally, then a portion of the labor supply will move to legal markets. The war on drugs started with exactly that plan -- increase the cost and decrease the benefits of selling drugs, by locking people up when they do it. It made intuitive sense. But since demand for addictive drugs is inelastic, prices rose proportionally to risk and that plan didn't work. It just increased the revenue available to organized crime.
So I mean, maybe I'm not saying anything too astonishing. It's obvious that changing the incentives to commit crime will change the level of crime. But it's also really important, because when you assume there are a fixed number of gangsters in the world, you're labeling real people as inherent "gangsters" who will always be "gangsters." But that kid slinging crack in the projects because it's less work and more money than his other options, and it's what his friends are doing -- he's not a lifetime gangster. We don't win if we lock him up, stamp "gangster" on his hand, take away his right to vote and let someone else take his place for a little more money. We win if we turn him back into a citizen.
Instead we invade Iraq and Afghanistan based on the political connections of a former Haliburton employee and stockholder.
And if we do not wake up soon.. WWII will be on our doorstep.
I guess our lives and peace are not worth the intervention.
Messing that up would be foolish.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/house-approves-aviation...
So far, they have captured or killed 24 out of the 37 most wanted drug lords.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexicos_37_most-wanted_...
I was reading Herwig Wolfram's "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples" and he makes an interesting case that the collapse of the Western Empire a thousand years before the collapse of the Eastern Empire was due in large part to undue concentration of wealth in the West. Despite this, most of the book is about the rise of the Goths within the Empire as essentially a non-state armed force.
It occurs to me that the drug cartels are in a similar place to the Goths, although they are arising in neighboring countries rather than our own country. They are, however operating on both sides of the border and so have a tangible presence in US border states. Perhaps these are all similar as well?