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

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."

Comments

What I get from this

[AvitarX]

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

Re:What I get from this

[i kan reed]

Wikipedia sucks with their damned, redirects. And that's all I have to say about my mistake.

Re:What I get from this

[Sockatume]

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.

Re:What I get from this

[Sockatume]

I thought the issue with Operation Fast and Furious was that it basically let a lot of known gun-running operations act unhindered, while getting no real result?

Re:What I get from this

[AvitarX]

Yes, targeted collection of meta-data (and I assume actual phone conversations) appears to work.

It details finding a phone, following up on the contacts of that specific phone, and then finding more phones, repeat. They didn't find the first phone and dismantle the entire network from the office, as it appears is the justification for the indiscriminate collection of meta-data and the ability to pull up past records without a warrant.

Each step was an investigation into a phone as they worked their way up old school.

Re:What I get from this

[Charliemopps]

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

Actually, I suspect that in the near future we'll find out that the NSA cracked the phones or something. I find it hard to believe the Mexican/US government couldn't have nailed this guy years ago. They usually leave these "Big fish" alone because a headless cartel is less predictable than one with a boss they can manipulate and control. I suspect this is all an orchestrated publicity stunt.

Re:What I get from this

[Attila Dimedici]

You mean that it is traditional to encourage known criminals to commit obtain a device to be used in a crime and then stop following the device when it is passed off to another party.
The "logic" offered behind Fast and Furious was that it was an attempt to trace straw purchases to the higher ups who were ordering the guns. The problem with that was that the "higher ups" were in Mexico and they did not inform the Mexican government, or even the U.S. agents working in Mexico, that they were doing this. In addition, when the straw purchaser passed the guns off to someone else, ATF agents were ordered to NOT follow the person(s) who now had the guns. In other words, no attempt was actually made to track the guns to the people who they claimed were the target of the investigation.
Interestingly enough, right about the time they started facilitating the movement of guns into Mexico, high level Administration officials (including the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and the President) began making regular speeches about how the majority of guns used in crimes in Mexico were traced back to sales in the U.S..

Re:What I get from this

[Talderas]

It's almost as though the ATF planned this operation to confirm what the high level officials were saying. That's conspiracy though and that certainly could never happen.

Wrong issue

[jaydge]

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.

Misleading Title

[Anonymous Coward]

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

and next time,

[cellocgw]

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?

Re:and next time,

[CKW]

They still need to store that massive list of crucial phone numbers somewhere, and also increase communication via other means in order to propogate the phone number changes.

The only thing burner phones is good for is not allowing the cops to easily pull your number from phone company records by name so as to put a trace on your phone.

Instead they have do do actual legwork to figure out what phone you're calling from, and depending on which opponents you are facing and whether they have "high priority" FBI/FSB van-full-of-technology-on-your-ass nearby watching the call metadata from ALL the calls to nearby towers...

Burner phones are also good for people whom the police do not know about nor whom they can physically find ... but that quickly breaks down as they hunt you down from the calls you make to numbers and people they do know about.

OR...

[headhot]

it was the NSA and they used parallel construction.