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Data Mining, Cocaine and Secrecy
hightimes writes: "Business 2.0 uncovers one of the world's most sophisticated IT network in where else, Colombia. According to the story, Colombian drug cartels have spent billions of dollars to build a huge infrastructure that's helping them smuggle more dope than ever before." Even though this is about a raid that took place most of a decade ago, it's an interesting example of the power (and potential abuse) of large-scale data mining.
Hey, are they hiring?
What were they trying to do? Send cocaine over Cat5 Cabling?
(Dopewars: Unix, Palm, Macintosh, and Windows versions.)
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
They'll have to buy a client license for every drug user they supply. That should promptly clean out their "unlimited" budget.
The United States should really put a stop to the ludicrous, expensive and entirely ineffective "War on Drugs". Especially before going off half-cocked on another ludicrous, expensive and entirely ineffective "War on Terrorism". What a joke.
The so-called Santacruz computer was never returned to Colombian authorities, and the DEA's report about it is highly classified. But Business 2.0 has ferreted out many of its details.
It must not have been too highly classified. It it was and some internet magazine can figure it out then you have to wonder if this data mining system was overkill. They say it was used to find moles and then the undercover agents would be assasinated. Personally I wouldn't want to be an agent for some agency that can't keep this kind of stuff under wraps.
There are times when keeping things secret is a good thing. Our government seems incapable of doing so most of the time. (on a side note this is why I don't buy into most conspiracy theories-- the govt. is way too inefficient at keeping things quiet)
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'd be sceptical about any claims in this piece about "highly classified documents"... surely this is something the guys in grey suits would love to see as it gives them the perfect ammunition to enact all kinds of new and exciting laws. Buying a router? register with your local cop shop. Using an IP address? register with your local cop shop... Here in NZ we're getting new laws to deal with criminals using technology because apparently it's going to be a big issue one day. One day. I asked how many crimes were committed using text messaging or email and the answer is: none. Not one. Which begs the question: why are these laws necessary yet? It's not like govts have a good track record on being pro-active when it comes to legislation so why this time? ... well, some of you anyway.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here
I am a leaf on the wind
Wish I was the salesman who sold this setup. Even though I despise them, think of the COMMISSION he made!
They must be using Snort for intrusion detection.
...
Snif snif
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
crack for checking passwords.
Finding God in a Dog
Please, His "datamining link" was to a disgusting porn site, but he later changed it to a legit info site. He controls the site he linked too, and therefore can change his page back to the porn picture. Please mods, listen to me, I saw the same picture that the anonymous coward saw. Halgary is putting fake comments below to keep his post modded up. thank you.
"The computer was essentially conducting a perpetual internal mole-hunt of the cartel's organizational chart."
I can't wait to run ratoutasnitch@home.
Excerpt:
...the system fingered at least a dozen informants, [who] were swiftly assassinated by the cartel."
"...the cartel had assembled a database that contained both the office and residential telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in Colombia, along with the entire call log for the phone company in Cali, which was leaked by employees of the utility. The mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining software. It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange's traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials....
That was in 1994. They've become more sophisticated since then.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
With the amount of cocaine and coffee in columbia, i'm suprised they didn't build the entire infrastructure in a single evening. Followed by cleaning the entire country top to bottom.
Searching for matching records in a database (phone call logs) with known values (phone #'s of known agents) is not data mining. It's simply setting up an indexed data warehouse and issuing queries.
Data Mining is looking for UNKNOWN relationships between that data, not KNOWN relationships. So although referring to it as Data Mining may make it sound advanced and exotic, it's incorrect.
- CySurflex
Since we're talking about the 'war on drugs' here, I'm wondering exactly *when* the idea of a 'war on drugs' started exactly.
I mean, when did a government (of any type, anywhere) start trying to control the citizen's access to a then desirable substance 'for the good of the country/kingdom/fiefdom/whatever'
I can think of many examples where this has been done so the 'government' could make money off taxes on the substance that was being smuggled in, but I can't quite find any decent resource that would tell me that, for example, it was King Foozle in some_year that used his power to ban chocolate (for example) in his kingdom.
The only thing approaching the 'war on drugs' that I can think about is the 'war on proscribed texts' by various religious entities (Catholic Church during the middle ages for example), but that's about it.
Anybody?
-- the cake is a lie
Cheech and Chong were spotted in Columbia recently. They said they were trying to gain employment as IT admins.
...that the would-be "War on Drugs" is a laughable waste of time, money, and lives. There is no way on this earth that the DEA and other police forces will ever come remotely close to controlling, let alone stopping, drug trafficking.
Imagine if the umpteen billions that are pissed away on fruitless DEA efforts were instead put into drug education and drug rehab programs.
Imagine if instead of creating a criminal underground, all drugs were legalized. The criminal underground would literally vanish: there would be no profit in the trade. We'd have as much a criminal drug trade as we have in criminal moonshine trade: which is to say, virtually none.
Imagine if the government were to tax these drugs, as they do nicotine and alcohol. Imagine if those tax revenues were put into safe injection centres, better policing of impaired drivers, a crackdown on petty thefts, and job training programs for prisoners.
There'd be a drastic reduction in crime. There'd be a reduction in drug abuse, as the abusers would be able to seek the help they need without arrest and with reduced stigmatization. The government would save billions of dollars. Income taxes could be lowered. There'd be world peace.
But will this ever happen? Probably not. There's too much money being made by the people who are in control of the "War on Drugs." Follow the money trail... you'll see that for the powerful, drug illegalization is profitable.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
How about the Irish potato famine, and England's control of the food traffic within the country? They effectively created an Irish holocost.
http://www.codewolf.com - Just good stuff to waste time
Mod the parent down. Porn picture or no porn picture, the last thing we need is a link to a personal site with ads which simply redirects to the actual site provided. If you have a link to post, post the real thing. We don't need your redirects. Thankfully it was blocked by my anti-banner ad HOSTS file.
The datamining link should be:
www.ccsu.edu/datamining/resources.html
th printable version - which has all th text on one page
and less advertising and graphics - is here
in general it is a nice courtesy
to link to th printable version of stories
when this option is available
(this is not meant as criticism of th submitter of this story
- i appreciated yr submission)
Hmm. I'm currently working as a data mining analysis for an internet advertising startup. The job has it's moments, like figuring out that credit cards should be sold to women when they make online purchases for makeup(no I am not kidding). However it would be much more exciting to work for a rich and powerful drug cartel... Does the job come with your own personal E15k?
Of course organized crime is going to abuse the power that technology brings. They aren't regulated and don't answer to anyone. We could wipe out these cartels overnight by legalizing and regulated the trade of cocaine and other recreational drugs - just like we do for alcohol.
http://neoteric.nu/history.html
Then why not post the link directly? Why the redirect?
Whats kind of amusing about the whole thing is the series of popup/under, banner-adds, and tracking cookies gracing the initial redirect page. It actually plays to the "datamining isn't evil" argument rather nicely.
Either the poster is clueless, trying to play troll games, trying to convert the Slashdot Effect to cash, or has a really crooked sense of humor.
...that's 1 degree of seperation. That's business w/
(yeah, it was low;)
Does anybody have a crack for it?
*groan*
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
ba da da DUM ba da DUM
If you wanna deal, you gotta use SQL, cocaine
If you wanna get stoned, you gotta write the code, cocaine
Data mine, data mine, data mine, COCAINE
ba da da DUM ba da DUM
ba da da DUM ba da DUM...
Data mine, data mine, data mine, COCAINE
We could wipe out these cartels overnight by legalizing and regulated the trade of cocaine and other recreational drugs - just like we do for alcohol.
There are many who would argue with you on that. Personally, I think legalizing some of these drugs would seriously hurt them (although I'd stop short of saying "wipe them out"). However, there's also another way of winning the war on drugs.
We could make this so-called war on drugs a real war. We go in to Columbia with some military force and start taking out the cartels. I'm not trolling -- I'm serious. I'm sure our satellites must be able to detect some large drug facilities. We'll just go in there and bomb them.
I can hear people screaming that we don't have the right to do that. We don't have "jurisdiction" to take out the cartels -- we're supposed to wait for the Columbian government to clean up that mess. But how would that be different than what we just did in Afganistan? There was an organization in that country that caused serious damage to the United States. We ordered the ruling government (the Taliban) to turn over the terrorists or we'd go in there and do it ourselves. They didn't so we did. So how would it be different for us to demand the Columbian government takes care of the drug cartels. And if they don't, we'd do it ourselves.
Either we should legalize these drugs or we should fight a full-scale war. This half-assed bullshit that we're doing now is just not going anywhere. Are we fighting a war on drugs or not?
GMD
watch this
Can you imagine how livid agents of the DEA and CIA would be if this was common knowledge amongst them? I'm not suggesting that it isn't, but who better can you think of to keep this kind of knowledge from -- "yeah, yeah, we're sending you on assignment to fight the Cali cartel, oh, and by the way, they've been tracing your hotel phone calls for 3 months")
Security is a process, not a check box option,
- RLJ
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of course, it would be unpatriotic to suggest that this will never happen because the cartels are spending far more on US politician campaign contributions than they are on IT, right?
Tech Public Policy stuff
100% markup doubles the price (n + 1.00 * n). :-)
17000% markup multiplies the price by 171. Still a formidable value. I had always heard the street value of drugs was inflated roughly 100 times due to being illegal. Not much real difference between 100 and 171
Infuriate left and right
With pot growing in BC, and meth being produced all over the states, not to mention that cocaine is being transplanted to other areas.
And look at Afganistan, we blew the piss out of it, and have taken control of the country, but that doesn't stop the opium poppy crop from being the first thing replanted.
Your going to have to take out every country in the world, as well as all your neighbors houses.
Be a whole lot easier to legalize it, just like caffiene is legal. Regulation is far more effective than prohibition.
What would the US gub'mint destroy the Columbia drug cartels that it created, funded, gave "aid" to (free airplanes and guns), and even flown their drugs in CIA planes? The CIA has been aiding drug cartels, toppling their competition and political opposition, and sabotaging DEA investigations and arrests in South America for many decades. This has been well documented in many sources. See Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press for a good introduction.
Of course, the CIA has also been funding drug cartels in Afganistan and Pakistan, but that is a story for another time..
cpeterso
On the societal consequences: First, they are empirically denied. Look back to the 19th century when drugs were legal. No one was stealing and there were no crack babies.
And the British empire was bent on making sure that drugs were legal... in China. Talk about foreign influence - if you control the drugs, you can can control the users (ie, the addicted bureaucrats.) You know, there's a reason why if you have drugs in your posession, you're subject to execution in China today...
If they searched the cartel's server disks... would it be a "RAID raid" ??
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
"The central feature of the facility was a $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe..."
Is that street value?
Get your Unix fortune now!
You read an article like this, and you can only imagine why people would want to legalize drugs and legitimize criminal scum like this. Let's see... the cartels have a monopoly on the North American drug trade. All drugs are legalized. Do you magically think the cartels will all fold up and go out of business? No, they'll try to maintain that monopoly, and you'll have a little mini-Colombia in the USA. I wonder how many American pharmecutical factories would be torched...
I hate to break it to all the apologists who always sympathize with the underdog (even when they're so blatantly wrong as like in this case), but _drug dealers are killers_. They kill with drugs, they kill by shooting people in the head. You do not "put them out of business" by legalizing drugs. You put them out of business by arresting them and putting them in front of a judge, or perhaps far more satisfyingly, shooting each and every one of the bastards in the heads.
To hell with "out of Colombia". To hell with "what will the rest of the world think?". It's amazing that Nader-lovers and other socialists can spew the crap they do, really. According to them, the US _deserved_ 9/11. That sort of talk is _morally repugnant_. Next thing you know, Israeli babies who get slaughtered in suicide bombing attacks deserved it, too! Oh, wait, they already do say that! I could care less that the "poor people of Colombia who've been horribly hurt by globalization, and now need to turn to drugs for money". That's totally inane. YOUR SUFFERING DOES NOT GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO HURT OTHER _INNOCENT_ PEOPLE. Really! If the rest of the world thinks that saving your citizens' lives through force is wrong, then I really could care less what they think. Better to be alone and doing the right thing than being wrong with everyone else. Moral relativism will kill us all someday.
My countrymen are _dying_ because our country is too damn timid to go in and fix a problem, as the last resort, with the barrel of a gun. Drug dealers are taking over a country with the fruit of their deadly labors, and _terrorizing_ it. Diplomacy doesn't work unless you've got a solution when it fails. Diplomacy has failed - the friendly drug dealers aren't listening to us or the Colombian government. We need to start giving them another sort of talk - the type with lead teeth.
For all those who'd like to convince me otherwise, I've had this sort of discussion a hundred times before, and I've listened, too. I just _don't agree_. Yes, people can disagree and be educated and not fanatical. Don't even bother wasting your misguided fingers on me by typing out some response I've already heard before. Go pamphlet a campus with pro-Nader flyers or something that'll be far more entertaining than reading your responses.
Before you all crucify me for my views, realize that I am not totally against the legalization of marijuana. I just do not believe that legalizing crack cocaine and kow-towing to drug dealer scum will help anyone in this world, and would prefer to deal with them in a more terminal way, or arrest them.
My apologies for being forceful. I understand what the other side of the issue is... I just seriously do not agree.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
BTW - my current high score is 164,737,425 :)
Countries that like to crack down on dissidents are going to love this stuff. So far, China doesn't seem to be able to bring it off, but eventually they'll probably get it.
You obviously haven't visited Afghanistan ever, nor read a book about war in some time. It's the Taliban, and we didn't really kick them out; most of them simply switched sides. And it's the brown shirts, and while both the brown shirts and the Taliban are bad news, they are nothing like one another. The military force we backed in Afghanistan is known for the same abuses as the Taliban; in fact the guy who first came up with te idea of throwing acid in women's faces who weren't wearing burqas was a Northern Alliance hero.
> this is mostly a result of legal and economic
> consequences of the drug war.
Do drugs destroy people? Yes, drugs *do* destroy people by making them *slaves*to*the*drug*habit*. Do you condone slavery? Why do you oppose the government clamping down on extremely addictive drugs then?
My point briefly is this:
Hey, maybe you're a "liberal". Maybe you say that "Hands-off! People are solely responsible for what they do to their own bodies"
Hey, just maybe, a few centuries back, you'd be one of those unsavory Europeans making a fortune trading booze to native Americans.
A true liberal is kind and loving to people. You probably are a fake liberal - the type who puts his own desires first and assuages your own conscience by throwing money at problems... yours and other's tax dollars.
This is one server you definitely don't want to hack...
One Word: Prohibition
The original "War on drugs" And incidentally the cause of much gang related crime in the US. You dont really hear about people going blind from moonshine anymore these days, but it was a big problem during prohibition. I wish more people would learn lessons from history.
Look back to the 19th century when drugs were legal. No one was stealing and there were no crack babies.
Indeed crack is kind of form of a drug that you might expect prohibition to encourage. Consider what happened when they made alcohol illegal in the US. The black market tended to cook up spirits rather than beer.
Although it makes sense, coke will never be legalised. Neither will heroin, crack, or any of the other seriously hard drugs. (pot and maybe hash are in a different category, for various reasons)
The first politician who seriously tries to legalise these drugs and _doesn't_ get kicked out of office will die horribly in a car accident. So will the second one. If they start getting too serious about it, then a few politicians will end up with bullets in their heads, just to drive the point home.
The drug cartels will never let their 'industry' be legalised--it's too lucrative, too rich, and gives them too much power. They're not dumb.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Oh- lot's of people pointed out my 'ignorance'.
Once again- why are you people so intolerant? Why is someone who has a different opinion ignorant or stupid? I just don't get it.
Second, there's fetal alcohol syndrome as well as myriad other ways that people can mess up their children. You still don't have the right to decide what substances they can ingest or how they entertain themselves.
Wrong.
(This is what I mean. I'm not ignorant or stupid. I just don't agree with you- could we find a way to accept that?)
I think it should be illegal to knowingly consume alcohol while pregnant. Do you know what FAS does to children? Do you know what the costs to society are? Way too high in my opinion. I would rather not bear them and I think we should try to do something to stop these crimes of abusive mothers against their children.
We do have the right to dictate limits on what people ingest and how they entertain themselves. If Jeffrey Dahmer were alive you could give him a call and ask him about it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
No they won't, for the simple reason that making and distributing legal drugs is not their core competence. Smuggling and distributing contraband is their core competence. Once their product is no longer illegal there are lots of companies with the knowledge and infrastructure. Purity requirements alone are enough to put the illegal dealers out of business because only drugs made to sufficient purity will be legal to sell, and underground labs can't come anywhere near meeting those requirements.
If drugs are made legal then the illegal dealers will be out of business. They have a huge infrastructure dedicated to shipping those drugs into the country, and it will no longer have any value. I don't know of any product other than illgeal drugs that could use that infrastructure, so they can't switch to any other product.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I am not a Philip Morris employee, I would add, and this is largely conjecture.
But, why on earth would PM not sell heroin. The problem with cigarettes has always been that the tobacco companies lied to consumers ("no, of course they're not addictive", and "these cigarettes will actually help your lungs"). Even after the tobacco companies had definitive evidence their products killed people, allegedly, they continued to sell them.
Now with Heroin (brand name: Get-u-High?) that's hardly an issue. The packet of 12 syringes would contain a "are you mad? these things are more dangerous than... well, most things" leaflet.
--- My dad's political betting
So you're suggesting that a company selling legalized drugs would be protected against lawsuits because they have a warning on the package? That doesn't make sense.
Cigarettes sold in the US have had increasingly strident government-mandated warnings on every package since 1966. Radio and television ads for tobacco products have been forbidden since 1971. For at least 30 years everyone has known pretty definitively that cigarettes were bad for you (and quite possibly for other people around you), it's just a matter of how bad they are.
Despite all this there are stupid people who start smoking every day. And despite having ample warning it hasn't stopped the tobacco companies from being hammered by lawsuits filed by some of those same stupid people.
Combine that same stupidity, the disregard for personal safetly we already see with alcohol, and the even more severely intoxicating effects of many drugs. Now, tell me again how legalizing drugs will make everything better.
Maybe we could suggest to the Thais that they just assassinate the US senators from both Carolinas?
--
E_NOSIG
Protected against lawsuits?
Of course not. But, if you examine the lawsuits brought against (and the settlements with the states) the tobacco companies were done for:
* Saying cigarettes were not addictive, etc. when they had clinical proof they are.
* Advertising aimed at minors.
* Increasing the health care costs of smokers.
Cigarette companies have *never* TTBOMK been sucessfully sued outside these parameters.
It's like cars, if you drive off the road (your choice) into a concrete wall, then you made the choice not the car company.
*r
--- My dad's political betting
Abuse and use are two different things, and it's the use that is illegal, not the abuse. You can use many drugs without serious health effects, just as you can abuse alcohol -- which is legal -- with very serious effects (death). So again, why are some legal and some illegal?
In Amsterdam, decriminalization resulted in lower use rates of marijuana, mushrooms, and heroine. This directly contradicts your statement that illegality decreases use.
It's your choice. Don't abuse drugs, and this will not happen to you.
It's your choice not to exercise regularly which is a serious health risk. Are you saying that should be made illegal too? As well, criminalization doesn't stop drug use, thus it only adds risks, not decreases them. Finally, the health risks are mine to take, just as when I skydive or ski. It does no good to add more risks on top of the activity. Rape and murder are illegal because another person is harmed without their consent. This is not the case with drug use.
It cripples the drug market and puts the dope fiends where they belong.
No, it creates a billion-dollar black market for drugs. This market is unregulated, isn't taxed, causes violence and crime, and puts money into the hands of criminals. A legal drug market would be taxed, add to the GNP, create jobs, etc. Your use of "dope fiends" tells me that you believe drugs should be illegal on moral grounds rather than as a safety issue. Do "ski fiends" belong in jail too?
structural reforms such as greater fines and increase confiscation of the property of the criminals involved.
We don't confiscate property for any other crimes. Why not take a rapist's house or a murderer's car and money? Why does the crime with no victim have the most brutal punishment?
No, it is much less likely if the substances are illegal (and thus have more limited availability)
Again, decriminalization has shown to reduce drug use across the board.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Regardless, if the Thai people elect representatives that pass a law banning some forms of advertising, who are we to force them to change the law? If we think they are doing something wrong, we're free to take our toys (tobacco) home and not play with them, but that of course would hurt corporate profits. So instead we bully our way in and reverse their democratic process when it interferes with profit-making.
The same happened in South Vietnam. The population, mostly rural farmers, overwhelmingly chose a government that looked too much like Communism for us, so we began exterminating the population and driving the rest to the cities, called urbanization. If people democratically elect a government, who are we to deny them that right in the name of democracy?
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Well there's a reason I said, 'the first politician who attempts it and _doesn't_ get kicked out of office...'
You're quite right, though. The 'moral' groups are doing a very good job of promoting the drug cartels, inadvertent though it may be.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If we cared about the rights of Thai people, we wouldn't have interfered with their process of democracy. Remember, this isn't a dictator that decided to ban tobacco advertising. And how do you know that the Thai people were unhappy with the law? If they were unhappy, they would have done something to change it.
Finally, I don't believe that public advertising is free speech or a right of corporations. My senses are mine, and I should be able to control them. Advertising like billboards takes away my right to view nature and my surroundings unobstructed. Just because you want to sell cars does not give you the right to force an image of your car into my face.
Free speech says you have a right to speak and I have a right not to listen. But public advertising takes away my right not to listen. It is in my face; I must first see it and then look away. Therefore I have no way to never listen to your message.
Ponder billboards on the side of the freeway for a moment. They are designed to attract your attention -- and hold it -- in order to feed you a message and sell you a product or brand. Yet you're supposed to be focusing your attention on the road so you don't cause an accident! Doesn't that seem a little stupid?
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!