She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
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.
I'm quite unfamiliar with the specifics of the whole Mexican cartel situation, but has there been any international aid or effort to help eradicate this?
The time to legalize was before it was possible for drug producers to purchase an entire country and impose tyranny upon its citizens. Those already in control will now do anything possible to maintain their profit streams.
I am tired of this sentiment. It is not necessarily incorrect to ascribe partial blame to someone just because they got the short end of the stick in some situation.
Being a victim does not automatically preclude one from being at fault. For example, if I jump off a cliff without a parachute, it is clearly reasonable to blame me despite the fact that I am definitively a victim of the situation.
In this case, it would be reasonable to ascribe some level of blame to both parties; we ascribe blame to the cartel for murdering people (and clearly most of the blame falls on them), and we also ascribe some measure of blame to the victim for failing to take proper precautions. This is not an affront to the victim's character or a trivialization of their death; it is a recognition of the fact that, with some more preparation, the situation could have turned out much better for the victim. It is important to address these failures so that we might learn from them in the future.
Edit: Downvoters, please comment. I am curious what you think about this. In particular, I am curious why it is never appropriate to ascribe blame to a victim of any sort.
How do you figure?
Someone who can prevent their own misfortune by taking known steps yet doesn't take them is exhibiting behavior deserving of criticism. Finding someone else to blame doesn't change that, so what point are you trying to make by finding even more people to blame?
It is infuriating to me that you would suggest that it is this woman's fault for being murdered. So she's supposed to have a working knowledge of crypto despite being a working woman (in a non-computer related field) in a 2nd world country OR just shut up about rampant murder and kidnapping in her country?
I have no idea what to say to you, or how to express my horror that mind-blind opinions like these are stated on the regular on this news site.
Every time something like this happens, someone posts a comment to the effect of "should have used Tor" and then someone else posts a comment criticizing that comment as victim blaming.
Now suppose we listen to the latter group and everyone stops making the first comment. The idea that victims can protect themselves, and the mentioning of specific methods by which they can do so, disappears from the discourse. Anyone reading this article because they're in a similar situation to the subject never discovers that information. In what kind of world is that a good thing?
You are putting words in his mouth. He simply said that there are things she could have feasibly done differently that would have prevented her death. He is not saying it's "her fault".
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.
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).
The violence here is strikingly close to us. I live in Texas and the violence is really not that far away. The cartels have their tentacles all over the US.
"There's a woman at my work who often uses that same turn of phrase. Wonder if it's her? $50k would really help me."
For example, this lady made what (I think is) a reasonable assumption that a pseudonym was a good enough way of protecting her identity. It wasn't a bad assumption, but because of what happened to her, we should discuss additional precautions so that people like her might fare better in future.
Another thing to consider in this discussion is that sometimes people like this lady know that they are taking a big risk, may end up murdered, but bravely proceed to take their actions anyway.
It's difficult to read a story a soul-crushingly horrible as this and just wallow in the hopeless unjustness of it all. Coping mechanisms kick in. To preserve the comforting world view that people are in charge of their destiny, tragedy is avoidable and the world makes some sense it becomes necessary to demonstrate that the outcome was predictable and avoidable. That the victim failed themselves.
With HNs user base that manifests as a critique of information security practices.
Please elaborate on this.
>just-world fallacy
I don't see how anyone here is subscribing to this fallacy. No one thinks the victim's actions warranted her fate.
>hammers and nails
Crypto would clearly have been more useful in this situation. Sometimes you really do have to hammer in some nails.
The drug cartels do not currently threaten or terrorize other countries, just the people living in Mexico, so arguments about national security (valid or not) also do not apply.
Besides, as terrible as things are right now, does anyone believe having an armed occupation force from another country would be better for the average person living in Mexico? Has that ever turned out well in recent memory? It would just be: 'hey, you know how you get shootings, executions and beheadings? Have some of them drone strikes as well!".
I am not saying international pressure cannot be used to help (there is some pressure coming from the European Union, rather the USA, and it has arguably had some impact in the actions of the Mexican government, at least when coupled with internal pressures). Sending an army, however, is probably the last kind of help Mexico needs right now...
That said, violence spiked significantly after the Mexican government decided to use the army to combat the drug cartels (10 or so years ago). So maybe if drugs were legal within Mexico and we completely refused to have any part on policing their traffic across the border, we might have a more peaceful situation, albeit still one in which organized crime has a huge influence in politics in most or all of the country's territory. Then again, at this point the cat might be out of the bag regarding the violence... a lot of it involves cartels fighting each other for control of different regions or routes at this point.
What does it take for the Mexican government to prohibit the oil export? It does seem that Mexico is some sort of energy/resource-extraction site for the US and for that drug cartels are looked upon as collateral damage. Can it learn from Brazil which doesn't export oil as much? Or is it the case of pseudo democratic government held hostage by a handful of multinational corporations?
That said, a lot of the revenue for the federal government comes from oil exports. This further means that very little of PEMEX revenue gets re-invested into PEMEX, since it mostly goes to pay for what would otherwise be a huge federal deficit every year. It is also widely believed that there are strong political pressures from the U.S. not to reduce oil exports. So, in general, it's not easy for Mexico to prohibit oil exports without creating a huge crisis and/or majorly affecting trade relations.
The above becomes even more complicated when you add things like corruption, shared/disputed territorial water reserves (the Gulf of Mexico has large areas which fall under the territorial waters of the U.S., Mexico and Cuba, but access to oil deposits in those areas is not necessarily equal...) or contraband of "stolen" oil by drug cartels. But at a large scale, the main issue is: the federal government depends on oil exports and trade with the U.S. which might be partially conditioned on oil exports.
(Disclaimer: I am going to add to my posts that all this comes from the perspective of someone who was born and lived most of his life in Mexico and follows what I believe to be reasonable news sources. I am not a subject expert on: organized crime, Mexican law, Mexican trade relations, etc... you get the idea.)
Though if the activities themselves were legal, then a cartel that did not itself engage in violence would have recourse to the state, which is probably also cheaper for the cartel than engaging in violence themselves.
Yes - UN peacekeepers do have a positive effect. They just don't hit the news much because they're not dramatically beating their chests about it and bragging about how big their guns are. They're not perfect, but they're certainly better than just leaving things be.
Have a poke around here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_Nations_peac...
In general I think just having independent media and investigators from outside the country can be helpful, since they can be perceived as not part of the system of internal corruption. I think it gets a lot more complicated when you have international actors as supposed to observers and/or pressure. Not saying it can't work, but it is far from simple to predict... (there are, of course, people who know great many orders of magnitude more about the issues involved than I do, both within and without Mexico, so maybe someone is looking into whether or not that sort of intervention would help).
Yugoslavia was an ugly war, the 'coalition' made plenty of grave mistakes but in the end it did stop a conflict that would have most likely ended much worse.
I have friends on just about all sides in that particular war and it is absolutely incredible how explosive Yugoslavia was under Tito and how vicious a conflict buried for decades flared up right after he died, it was really only a matter of time and even today I feel that it would possibly re-ignite if not for some dire threats.
UN actions (ie. the arms embargo) made the conflict unbalanced - giving the advantage to one side, which then proceeded to run amok. Then, the UN repeatedly failed to protect civilian populations from this aggression. The current 'stability' in many places is an artificial equilibrium, maintained by outside forces and those 'dire threats'.
The conflict should reignite - for justice, but just as importantly, for lasting stability.
PEMEX became the classic example of am inefficient, corrupt and bureaucratic government company which has already extracted all the "easy" oil and sees that this is unsustainable on long term, many of the large remaining oil reserves is now not easy to extract which due to bad management and lack of long term thinking is economically not convenient for PEMEX to try to extract it on its own.
So the government pushed those reforms to allow foreign companies with more advanced technical know-how and more willingness to risk, to invest and at least get some money in terms of taxes and permits.
Ok that doesn't make sense to me. Her murderers weren't Cyber-security experts who tracked her down. They were a group of thugs who kidnapped her, along with other medical personnel. Only after they had her in their clutches did they realize who they had. She was probably going to die anyway, this way the cartel knew who they were killing.
So using tor or whatever would only have the minimal effect on her situation
There were few if any comments here blaming the victim at the time you posted, so I must assume it is the comments discussing proper operational security for one in her position that you are misidentifying as blaming the victim.
It's important that security failures like this be discussed and analyzed so that others who may find themselves in a similar situation can learn from them so as to be able to fight the bad guys without getting killed.
> 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
Security software, or lack thereof, is probably not the most important thing in this kind of operation. Physical security is more important, namely making sure the bad guys do not get access to the computer you conduct your social media operations from or that you use for communications with your fellow activists.
Doing any of your activism from your cell phone, such as accessing your social media from it, is very risky. It means that if the bad guys have some reason to detain you unrelated to your activism they might find out your secret.
In many ways, the anti-cartel activists are in a position similar to that of those who are in an underground resistance in a conquered nation, such as the French resistance in WWII. Success in that situation generally involves maintaining a dual life, with the public side being something innocuous and non-threatening to the bad guys, and the private, resistance side kept very separate.
Is lack of cyber security 'the' problem? No, it's one problem of many for people taking on cartels. Another is lack of resources for the Mexican government. Do I think the the Mexican government not having enough resources is the cause of the issue? Obviously not.
Nobody is saying those things are the cause of the issue, and you're probably smart enough to know that - instead, you've gone on to attack people for attention instead. Flagged.
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.
The US before 1970 (CO/WA for MJ obviously 2014). Amsterdam, Vancouver, Uruguay, Portugal, The Wire (only kidding).
Would you rather stop someone from smoking a joint or actively help fund an army/cartel through policy?
It isn't as easy as that no, but the problem we are trying to fight has caused incredible harm in blowback, and is only just beginning. We don't want to fund armies south of the US any further. We saw what happened in the 80's in South America, now it has spread up to Mexico, and now along the border quite frequently. In 30+ years it has only increased the violence and caused immeasurable harm over that time. When do we start ratcheting it down?
The War on Drugs has not stopped drugs from their destination, in fact it makes it more of a demand product and the benefactors concentrated within criminal organizations. Drug abuse isn't that high for illegal drugs, it is a manageable problem and safer regulated. It is more pharmaceutical drugs that are the problem now in terms of abuse. We don't create a War on Pharma because that is silly, we know people will abuse them and we help them. We don't lock them up and give them felonies unless they are transporting outside of regulation.
Really all we have done with the War on Drugs is make criminals rich and they bought lots of guns. The War on Drugs hasn't, nor will it, stop people from using drugs. Moral laws do not work, history consistently reminds us. If people are going to use anyways and that is the case, the only solution is a non-violent/non-criminal response and tax it like tobacco. People aren't going to go out and start doing drugs tomorrow if they are legal, if they do them they already do them. Where people do use though it is safer with a regulated market as in Vancouver/Amsterdam/etc.
But the real question is... If people are going to do it anyway and stopping it with force won't work, then where should most of the revenues of drugs go? Regulated, taxed and tracked or to criminals to build armies. That is really the question. The War on Drugs is a failure in that it has only made the demand higher and riches from it more concentrated to criminals.
College kids drink and smoke weed sometimes. Do you want your son/daughter, or their friends, to happen to do this at college and have to deal with possible criminal elements if they do, or would you rather it be safer. Why do we think it is safer to have kids deal with dealers that are possible criminals "to keep them safe".
I hear Portugal has had decent results.
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.
How is it possible to know this?
And besides, saying to drug users "Just don't buy the drugs" is like saying to the cartels "Just stop killing and terrorising people." People will buy drugs regardless of what we do—the war on drugs has proven this—and black markets (controlled by cartels) will meet the demand.
You ignore the point that the vast majority of the consumers of the cartels' product is not in Mexico. If these drugs were legal in the target markets, local producers would crop up and cut the cartel's profits. Given the choice, would you buy Cartel Brand® coke or Free Trade Cocaine®?
Large corporations are forced to be accountable to their supply chain, and markets have shown time and time again that consumers will pay a premium for ethically produced products.
I'm not a user, so I honestly don't know, but is there a "fair trade" movement for drugs? If not, then the only thing users could possibly know is that, if there were no war on drugs, there would be no need for violent cartels to produce and distribute them.
Dishonesty? Being dishonest is having the attitude like your position isn't directly creating armies/cartels to be more powerful and concentrated. Which is a bigger problem to you, 'dishonesty' about medical marijuana or active cartel creation? According to your logic, the violence/mafias of the prohibition era were caused by the people wanting a drink and to have fun. There was nothing wrong with that if done safely, it was made unsafe by policy and created more problems than it solved and a bigger problem than the initial problem.
Yes the medical marijuana thing is mostly people wanting to smoke weed but there is also actual patients of it. If you were in immense pain everyday and didn't want to eat or smile... sorry, @paulhauggis doesn't want you to smoke a joint grandma because you are being 'dishonest' about it. Grandma just wanted to be happy but I guess she has to be in pain first.
The first person to buy marijuana in Washington was a 60+ year old lady -- a grandma -- she said it made her happy (http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024022679_storesopen...). The first person in Colorado was a soldier back from Iraq who had PTSD (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/01/sean-azzariti-marij...). I guess they are both 'dishonest'.
I didn't want to get into this but, a large majority of Americans have smoked marijuana. As our police and oversight get better or more militarized and everything is tracked, we are going to have to man up and remove laws that are silly and harmful. We don't want to ruin college kids lives or take grandma's plants from her and throw her in jail.
In prohibition you had to get alcohol from an illegal bar or from the mafia, was that a better situation? That is what we have now with weed that grandma and possibly your kids in college want to smoke and nothing you do will stop them, not even force/laws/shaming. But you can make it safer where people slip up. What we need is to man up and deal with that reality and create structures to help people, and most importantly, reduce the concentration of funds going to cartels. Even if legal and the cartels turn into corporations that is better than black market/highly armed operations to fight the War against them.
Your xenophobia about the 'dishonesty' of it is the problem creating a war south of the border. It will continue as your attitude is prevalent as the US sees black and white not gray which it really is.
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.
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.
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.
I hear Iran and Saudi Arabia are lovely this time of year.
I hear Sealand is cold and lonely year round.
You do realize that the Drug Cartels are committing crimes far far worse than tax evasion, right? And there have been no repercussions for them. By suddenly charging them with tax evasion, do you think they'll be stopped?
Let's try to explain this with math. Suppose X amount of drugs has a market price of $100 and of that, $20 is the actual production cost and $80 is the amortized cost of law enforcement occasionally arresting you and seizing your drugs (and the various measures to attempt to prevent that).
Tomorrow we legalize drugs and impose a $60 tax. Joe Farmer in Iowa plants a field full of marijuana and starts selling it for $85 after taxes, keeping a $5 profit after the $20 cost and $60 tax. The drug cartel now has to hit an $85 price point to compete but they need to charge $100 to justify the costs of breaking the law, so they're out of business.
So, why don't farmers do this? That's pretty much all most drug production is. Perhaps, that a bale of hay isn't worth millions of dollars, has something to do with it?
The comparison to alcohol prohibition is spot-on. You are correct that legalizing drugs would not solve the problem overnight. But again, look to alcohol prohibition as an example: ending prohibition did not destroy the American Cosa Nostra, but it did deprive it of a primary source of funding which, along with some new laws and law enforcement techniques, and time (measured in decades), enabled law enforcement agencies to reduce those organizations to a shadow of their former selves.
So it will go with the Cartels. Yes it will still take time, but you have to start somewhere.
> I'm not against the legalization of drugs, I'm against the dishonesty.
Frankly, the ends justify the means. 20 years ago people would still get hysterical about something as benign as marijuana. If the only way to correct that in the face of a federal government that does (or did, at least, at the time) spend heaps of money reinforcing it, is to introduce 'medical marijuana' at the state level, as a trojan horse, in the hopes of getting people to recognize that, no, in fact, weed will not turn you into a devil and force you to go out and rape women or whatever the fuck else, then I say do it.
I'll point out that marijuana legalization is itself such a trojan horse as well. Just as twenty years ago the mere legalization of marijuana nationally seemed hopeless, right now the full legalization of all psychoactives seems a bit far-fetched. Yet, observing the effects of marijuana legalization (i.e. basically nothing at all happens) will help drive home the lesson that drugs are generally about as big a deal as you want them to be, and not one bit more.
It may be a step along a longer path. Even if it is the only step we end up taking along that path, it will still have been worthwhile step to take.
Really? Your evidence is a movie described as: "The film explores the rise of cocaine and resulting crime epidemic that swept the American city of Miami, Florida,"
The incentive for corruption is greatly increased by the power held by, and amount of money available to criminal organizations.
> 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).
> 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.
So... your claim is that the US government will prevent locals from growing marijuana but will be just fine with the drug companies outsourcing production to criminal cartels with no regulatory oversight? At least try to be consistent in your argument.
> 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.
The abuse of medical marijuana prescriptions does not make use the use of medical marijuana prescriptions a joke. Similarly, the extremely high rates of of abuse of other types of prescribed medications does not make them a joke.
About dishonesty, please indicate the claims that you believe were dishonestly made by supporters of medical marijuana? Please contrast those with the honesty of claims made by the FDA that drugs such as marijuana or MDMA have "No accepted medical use"
Please stop blaming the mexican government for failing to control the cartels that the US has been funding through several decades of failed drug policy.
It's all about volume. People will fake pain once in awhile to get Vicodin, but I don't see 10+ doctors opening up shop for fake scripts. This is he difference.
The U.S. Government has been funding it because people continue to buy the drugs. I blame the consumers, not the government. The consumers just don't want to do the right and difficult thing of boycotting a product that is clearly involved in murder and crime.
If we we talking about tax evasion, the company would be to blame, not failed tax policy. This is no different. He difference is that too many people don't want to give up their beloved MJ.
I only referenced he documentary because it had actual news film footage. You can do the research yourself, I already did and I know the corruption existed. In one year during that time, they had to fire an entire police class due to corruption and payoffs with the cartels. This is a fact.
I guess I really shouldn't care. I will never go to Mexico and legalized drugs really doesn't matter to me. So you can continue to support corruption and violence and Mexico will continue to be a war zone.
That is not a reasonable strategy to reduce the power of cartels. Not that I disagree with you. But it's not a reasonable strategy.
> 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).
Can you explain why no cartels have stopped producing illegal drugs, and started producing, say, quinoa, corn, and wheat instead? If legalization would have no effect on their profits, why do they choose to specialize in illegal markets like drugs and gun-running?
Look, after legalization, cartels would suddenly face a huge amount of competition from companies that don't burn large amounts of cash fighting wars, which are generally quite expensive. Ordinary agricultural production is not generally associated with beheadings, torture, and assassinations. This is not because producers of quinoa are inherently virtuous, but because the incentives faced by black market "companies" are extremely atypical.
> Please..just stop the fucking dishonesty and I might support your cause.
I agree that the legalization of MMJ was to some extent a dishonest attempt to get de facto legalization (successfully, I might add). But it is entirely irrational to base your support for a policy on the actions of some proponents of that policy.
I suppose it's now time to find and report all of the MJ doctors giving out fake scripts.
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.
Yeah, that would have saved her against Mexican drug cartels and a $50.000 dollars reward.
Try and read the article before you comment.
The reward and their "research facilities" would have gotten to her sooner or later. You do know that they also employ very talented hackers (of the Kevin Mittnick sense)? And that of course anybody who knew her identity could have snitched sooner or later?
It was just a matter of how badly they wanted to get to her...
It's more not like not improving anti-bacterial coating in car seats, when there are 200+ others way you can die in a car.
I've got nothing but respect for her. Her execution and the violence and organised crime is abhorrent. I wish there was something I could do.
Even security researchers don't practice it to that level. I went to a security conference last year, and one of the speakers was talking about his wifi sniffing box. Time came to demo how it worked... and it turns out that the wifi for the venue had crashed, and the security delegates in the main conference room behind him all attached to his box for net access - he was able to demo skimming hundreds of accounts, apparently. There was another speaker who mentioned that the security industry throws up so many 'best practice' recommendations that even security specialists can't cover them all.
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.
3.1 Security Assumptions
Our threat model is based on four pragmatic assumptions.
Kerckhoffs' principle: The details of the authentication system that is in place is public information and known to all participants, including Oscar. Alice and Bob retain a shared secret (e.g., a password or set of passwords) that is both private and the foundation upon which the security of the system rests.
Observational principle: Alice communicates with Bob over a semi-private channel that can be observed by Oscar prior to the password being secured (i.e., encrypted or hashed). Namely, Oscar can observe the password(s) used by Alice and could even enter in Alice's password himself, after coercing her into revealing it.
Iteration principle: Unless explicitly prevented by the underlying system, Oscar is not bound to a single instance of coercion against Alice. He may force Alice to authenticate multiple times. Combined with the observational principle (Assumption 2), Oscar can force Alice to use a different password each time.
Forced-randomization principle: Oscar can choose to eliminate any strategy Alice may employ through the order in which she reveals the passwords she knows. For example, Oscar may force Alice into writing down a set of passwords so that he can randomly choose the order in which to iterate through them. The assumption is that this option is available to Oscar, not that he will necessarily employ it.
Kerckhoffs' principle: The details of the authentication system that is in place is public information and known to all participants, including Oscar. Alice and Bob retain a shared secret (e.g., a password or set of passwords) that is both private and the foundation upon which the security of the system rests.
Observational principle: Alice communicates with Bob over a semi-private channel that can be observed by Oscar prior to the password being secured (i.e., encrypted or hashed). Namely, Oscar can observe the password(s) used by Alice and could even enter in Alice's password himself, after coercing her into revealing it.
Iteration principle: Unless explicitly prevented by the underlying system, Oscar is not bound to a single instance of coercion against Alice. He may force Alice to authenticate multiple times. Combined with the observational principle (Assumption 2), Oscar can force Alice to use a different password each time.
Forced-randomization principle: Oscar can choose to eliminate any strategy Alice may employ through the order in which she reveals the passwords she knows. For example, Oscar may force Alice into writing down a set of passwords so that he can randomly choose the order in which to iterate through them. The assumption is that this option is available to Oscar, not that he will necessarily employ it.
I'm not being rhetorical... if I'm missing it, please help me understand.
4.3 Persistent Attacks
Consider a scenario with panic communication and a persistent adversary with goal . In addition, preventing both signals and screens is important.
Working Example: Consider the previously defined improper influence problem in Internet-based voting. Alice could be coerced by Oscar into voting a certain way. Alternatively, Alice may want to sell her vote to Oscar by casting her ballot in his presence. Bob's observable response will be the report of a successful casting of Alice's vote, but he will take the unobserved reaction of disregarding any votes cast under a panic password.
So, in Alice's case, she gets kidnapped. The attackers are aware that she might have a duress code. They tell her that if she enters the duress code, her entire family will be murdered. If Alice lives in an area where authorities are in bed with and inseparable from the criminal element, is she going to take the risk that the authorities are alerted?
If we are talking about a panic code which erases all information on the phone, do you not think that the same bargain can be applied? In fact, such a system might get innocent people murdered and needlessly tortured since, if someone is suspected of having sensitive information - but actually don't - the attacker might get the idea that a duress or panic code was entered which deleted said information.
In any case, it doesn't seem like encryption is going to save people from real harm.
I think many intelligence agencies have a similar outlook.
Seems like one solution would be to have a web browser that keeps no history, and use that to log into Twitter and report about cartels instead of an app that automatically logs you in or keeps history, or gives away the fact you have a twitter account they will demand to know about.
There's also schemes like this which could be helpful to at risk journalists https://www.ccsl.carleton.ca/~askillen/mobiflage/ unless you are kidnapped while in PDE mode.
If it's any small comfort, whoever was seen involved in this kidnapping is now a liability, as this case has brought a lot of heat so they were almost certainly finished off in the desert by their own cartel compadres to avoid potential snitching. The blog borderlandbeat has countless posts of mass executions the cartels do on their own guys as everybody except the capos are disposable.
edit: Likely cartels have employees at telecoms in Mexico to look up logs for them, there's prob no easy solution. It wouldn't be expensive for them to hire anybody to exploit journalists with old carrier builds that are never updated either http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/09/16/shocking-android-...
I wouldn't be surprised if they exported all her facebook data as well, which IIRC includes content marked "deleted".
HN's restrictions on Tor IPs are only for brand new accounts. That's because of past abuses by trolls. Even then, we routinely override the restriction for accounts that are obviously legit. Anyone who sees a case of this (i.e. legit noob comments that are dead) should email us. In most cases we fix them immediately.
Aside from HN however, I am positive that Cloudflare completely blocks vanilla Tor browsers from many of their properties.
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?
like a government sponsored drone-strike-for-sale hotline? put the hitmen out of business with pure capitalism and good old legal (international) murder.
Person A kills Person B, person B is affected.
We totally live in a deterministic world where 1 action affects only 1 person, and everything else is isolated from one another.
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.
What I'm trying to say is that when there are enough people using illegal drugs it is very difficult to use prisons and courts to get them to stop. Much like you can dam up a river but then the water flows around into other undesirable places. As with prohibition it seems a much more practical strategy to regulate the industry, if effect rerouting the river to where it does the least harm. Use regulation to make drugs safer and to minimize the harm to our communities when the the $100 billion dollars spent every year ends up in criminal hands.
Well, strictly speaking, there are more elements to the causal relationship. If no one wanted to purchase drugs, this would also preclude the cartels from having customers. In this sense, irresponsible drug consumers are at fault as well. Indeed, many conscientious drug users have turned to various dark markets for "fair trade" drug suppliers.
That seems to be an unpopular statement, but it's still true.
Blaming the customers is ineffective, because there's no way to end the demand for drugs entirely - we have decades of prohibitions that prove that[0]. Whether or not you or I would like them to boycott these products on principle en masse is a moot point, because it's just not feasible.
[0] If we can't even keep federal prisons drug-free, how could we keep the rest of the country drug-free?
Not sure what type of event it would take to finally push people over the edge to favor an end to drug prohibition but I imagine it is so drastic that the vested interests in the cartels wouldn't be stupid enough to do it.
Or are you being sarcastic?
Making a link between homosexuality (consenting adults) with the paraphilia paedophilia (adults predating children) is a fucking weird thing to do.
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.
second offense - one way ticket to Reynosa or Cd. Juárez or Sinaloa for six months. Think of it as "Survivor: Edición Frontera"
White people use coke.
Did you decide on the truth of all of these assumptions by yourself?
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.
I mean, diseases have been going on for all of human history, but we've wiped out a few different kinds.
There are a number of disconcerting realities surrounding companies like Nestle and Apple. None of those come close to the direct violence perpetrated by the Cartels in Mexico and to claim they are even in the same realm is pretty obtuse.
I would be EXTREMELY happy if the levels of abuse perpetrated by mexican cartels were reduced to within an order of magnitude to those perpetrated by FoxConn.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023032777045793...
Yes, the cartels are established and entrenched and will be difficult to remove. However, ending prohibition would at least stop funneling large amounts of money to them now. We could then start the generations long process of rooting out and destroying these organizations created by our failed drug policy.
I'm not sure if legalization of all drugs would end cartels, because they would just move onto a different good or service (i.e. prostitution/human trafficking or water if its scarce). I think the system we have in the world today is irrevocably broken, but nobody wants to have a candid discussion about it. Until we have a conversation instead of a monologue, between the developed and developing world, nothing will change.
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.
I sincerely hope for America's sake that there's no substance to the claims that the CIA are working with these cartels.
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.
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).
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.
I just highly doubt the effectiveness and existence of any long running conspiracy. See:
I made no such claim. There is much that the CIA is not involved with. Clearly you have zero interest in civil discourse, so take your strawmen and fuck off.
Would you be able to point out some references?
edit: maybe start here [1]. Reagan's administration was complicit after congress cut off funding for their war crimes in south america.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_traffic...
In what possible scenario could we ever hope to learn the full extent of their crimes? Intelligence agencies burn their records when they are threatened. The Stasi had to destroy paper records, which they failed to do rapidly enough to prevent the public from physically seizing them. The CIA watched this happen. They learned from those mistakes. And this time, only encryption keys need to be shredded to put those documents beyond our reach.
They didn't only watch; in the chaos they also broke-into Stasi offices and made off with sackloads of documents.
The US properly has jurisdiction in Mexico only when necessary to protect Americans, and we seem to not have crossed that threshhold.
Wait, what? Does Mexico have jurisdiction in the US when necessary to protect Mexicans?
Use batman?
Let's see what happens.
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?
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.
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"
Then try to use less insensitive language. "It amazes me that people don't take these basic precautions" sounds an awful lot like "Look at this poor misguided savage, killed because she was too stupid to know what an Onion Router is." Maybe try something like "We need to educate whistleblowers about security technology to avoid tragedies like this."
I would say that for some of these local journalists, you're correct in suspecting that their technical expertise isn't high...however, it's not easy to report on dangerous local conditions from outside that locality. For one thing, you've introduced another attack vector for a MITM attack -- between the local stringer and the international point-of-contact who then publishes the content.
But the bigger problem is this: the people most passionate about this kind of local reporting, well, they're passionate about it because it is in their town or neighborhood. It's generally not feasible to be a long-time resident (the type who really gives a shit about the terror that's going on in the neighborhood) and then uproot so that you can do reporting safely. For one thing, you're just not as connected to the events once you've left the area.
Some newspapers (correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was NY Times) have even started running an .onion website where people can leave so called "dead drops".
Are a terrible idea. You need to trust the operator that they won't screw you by keeping logs. Since these are centralized they are always at the whims of cartels and the like. Just stop and think for a second if you won't give everything you have to them if they took your children hostage as an extreme example.
The only way to deal with a situation like the one in Mexico is to get the whole community to use something like Tor. The cartels already are so they can't kill all such connections, and if everyone uses it all the time then you can't target anyone for using it. The reporters are protected by the crowd they hide in.
This is the same reason why tor isn't blocked in the first world. It gives all the alphabet soup agencies proper anonymity that doesn't raise red flags when used in other countries which might not be friendly.
Opsec is not a simple matter, as the death of this woman shows and people like the grugq try to explain.
You need serious technical nous to get it right.
Unless, you know, the "outside country" is one participating in those surveillance schemes, like 5-eyes, and is in bed with your local goverment and not beyond sending a tip or two (or even supporting its own thugs acting on the ground in your country).
More or less like it has been throughtout the 20th century in Latin America.
Anyway, tor wouldn't have helped the woman in the article; she was found by them going through her local app.
(Also upvoted you.)
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.