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The Phone Dragnet That Caught the World's Top Drug Lord

Posted by timothy on from the prohibition-as-a-rube-goldberg-machine dept.

Daniel_Stuckey writes "The contacts on Zambada-Ortiz's phone, which officials seized, would prove critical in pinpointing cartel stash houses strewn across Sinaloa state in mountainous northwest Mexico. Crucially, the episode would breathe new life into the joint US-Mexico dragnet that recently caught Chapo, who'd been at large for 13 years after famously escaping from Mexican prison in a laundry basket. Zambada-Ortiz's capture and the data scraped from his phone led to more and more Sinaloa phones until a month ago, when Mexican authorities (moving on American intelligence work) successfully carried out a number of raids that scored a cache of weapons and the arrests of a few of Chapo's senior henchmen. With each apprehension came another phone full of leads, 'a new trove of information for officials to mine,' as TIME reported. Then, sometime last week, Mexican commandos 'traced a number stored in a seized cell phone to a stash house outside the provincial capital of Culiacan, where they believed Guzman was hiding,' TIME added."

6 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. What I get from this by AvitarX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    is that traditional investigative work functions to capture people, and not indiscriminate collection of meta data.

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    1. Re:What I get from this by Sockatume · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not sure what more than ten hours of white-knuckle racing action has to do with this, but I've really got to start watching CSPAN if that's what congress gets up to.

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  2. Wrong issue by jaydge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People aren't concerned about being captured right now - they're concerned that indiscriminate collection of their data strips their privacy and allows a future regime who doesn't like people like them to easily group them with the "terrorists" of the day.

  3. Misleading Title by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is just old-fashioned police work. I don't see where a "phone dragnet" was used. When did slashdot become pro-NSA?

  4. and next time, by cellocgw · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The drug lords will wise up and use burner phones, replacing them every X days. Gosh, don't they even watch The Wire down there in Mexico?

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  5. OR... by headhot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    it was the NSA and they used parallel construction.