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The Mexican Drug Cartels' Involuntary IT Guy
sarahnaomi writes: It could have been any other morning. Felipe del Jesús Peréz García got dressed, said goodbye to his wife and kids, and drove off to work. It would be a two hour commute from their home in Monterrey, in Northeastern Mexico's Nuevo León state, to Reynosa, in neighboring Tamaulipas state, where Felipe, an architect, would scout possible installation sites for cell phone towers for a telecommunications company before returning that evening. That was the last time anyone saw him.
What happened to Felipe García? One theory suggests he was abducted by a sophisticated organized crime syndicate, and then forced into a hacker brigade that builds and services the cartel's hidden, backcountry communications infrastructure. They're the Geek Squads to some of the biggest mafia-style organizations in the world.
What happened to Felipe García? One theory suggests he was abducted by a sophisticated organized crime syndicate, and then forced into a hacker brigade that builds and services the cartel's hidden, backcountry communications infrastructure. They're the Geek Squads to some of the biggest mafia-style organizations in the world.
The Mexican Drug Cartels' Involuntary IT Guy, maybe, just guessing really
FTFY.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Next time I have to stay late at the office, I can just tell my spouse I was kidnapped by the drug cartel to work on their IT infrastructure. I wonder how close one must be to the border to make that look legit?
It would be a good excuse if you want to leave it all behind and start up somewhere new - "the drug cartel made me do it!"
I wonder if that's the same guy who worked under a fictitious name, for cash, to set up the private e-mail server and domain that Hillary Clinton used for HER back-channel communications, in lieu of an official mailbox, throughout her entire tenure as Secretary of State. It has to be odd to be an IT consultant with a high profile customer like that and be unable to mention the gig on your CV. We've all worked under NDAs, but I guess working for a well-funded person or group that insists you actually use a fake name with the registrars and take cash (if you're lucky!) for the job would certainly take on a different flavor.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Ran out on his wife
If you find the topic interesting, there was a very thorough and interesting feature in Popular Science last year, Radio Tecnico: How the Zetas Cartel Took Over Mexico with Walkie-Talkies.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Wife and kids? Ain't nobody got time for that! He probably drove to a marina and sailed away.
... for the mafioso:
* Kill your prospective IT guy before you let him touch your computers, or
* Kill him after you discovered he used his skills to undermine your operation.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Story seems to be the setup for an episode of either Mission Impossible (original series), or maybe The A-Team (if you can find them).
Once upon a time one of the tester guys at my workplace found out his wife was cheating so took off to Las Vegas for a couple of weeks, blew the joint savings, and never returned. I lol'd. Some people knew what happened - but to a few others, I imagine he'd "just disappeared".
Never underestimate the ability of the media to give you one unlikely and incomplete angle to every story.
So they break the mafia computers while scavenging through them for nudes to upload to /b/, all while working under the pretense of "fixing the computer"? Then they try to sell worthless extended warranties? /b/.
Sounds like a dangerous and ill advised hobby, as I imagine most of those cartel guys do not want their wedding tackle showing up on
Why abduct a guy and force him to do IT work. It's not like there is a lack of skilled people, that can't be bothered with moral/legal questions about who their employer is or what they are doing. If there was banks, mpaa/riaa, phone/cable companies, etc... would all having to abduct IT staff too.
like, the headline reads like they know. but they don't.
more likely killed for snooping around. that was his job anyways.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Cartel leader: "My phone is broken, fix it!"
IT Guy: "Ok what is wrong with it?"
Cartel Leader: "IT IS BROKEN ESE! YOU GET ME BACK MY FLAPPY BIRDS OR YOU DIE!"
IT Guy: " I cant, they removed it from the App market"
Cartel Leader, pulls gun and points it at the IT guy..
Cartel Leader: " GET ME BACK FLAPPY BIRD OR WE PLAY ANGRY BIRD WITH YOUR HEAD!"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here we have people setting up independent, robust, secure channels of communication. Why aren't we doing the same for our internet so we can bypass the ISP and government censors?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Seems to me they could simply find and hire the right IT guy.
Hell, for the right amount of money I would do what ever they wanted. Drop me a couple of million and Ill give them a network and services that are close to untraceable and allow for the management of their business with little worry of the DEA figuring it out. I'd even include classes to teach there guys how to maintain security.
Raul Tejada?
Is that you?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Another theory is that someone shot him and buried him.
Maybe he ran away to America.
Spontaneous human combustion?
Thinking that's the most likely outcome from my POV as well.
After all, if you're pressed into service as a "hacker", it wouldn't take much to discreetly slip information to the authorities, considering that most cartel types don't strike me as being technically uber-literate. Sure it would be a massive risk, but totally doable depending on the environment.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
She didn't break the law, she didn't do anything nefarious, in fact, she didn't do a single thing wrong.
Well, she didn't break the law. Nefariousness and wrongness are different.
Nonsense, Mr/s Clinton apologist. Well before that law was passed, there was already a requirement to retain all official communications, including emails. She set this up specifically to get around such scrutiny, and did it the moment that she was named as the nominee for the job. Her use of a false name on the registration and cash payment to the consultant just contributes to the atmosphere (and reality) of deliberate avoidance of the legal requirements.
A law the speaks directly to the matter of forwarding along private messages from private mailboxes that get occasionally used in connection with official duties doesn't mean that the already existing laws about retaining all official communication didn't already exist. They did. She chose not to establish an official mailbox at State. Her personal mail account on her phony-name-registered domain WAS BY DEFAULT her official email channel. And she did not in any way comply with the existing laws that required ongoing official storage of her communications within government systems and available for things like FOIA requests. Countless FOIA requests for her correspondence were in fact completely ignored because of this deliberate loophole that she established (look! no official records of my communication exist because there are no records!).
And because it's her own private email sandbox, SHE gets to decide which messages she should or shouldn't pass along for official archiving per the law. We as her employers have no recourse to see if her judgement on the matter is or was sound, or even legally correct. This was a deliberate act on her part to avoid legally mandated scrutiny of her communications as a government official. Combine that with her panhandling for donations from foreign governments (WHILE she was Secretary of State!) to fund the foundations from which her family drew income and which did things like fly them around the world in luxury accommodations, and you can see why she might indeed want to dodge the law and hide her communications.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yeah, um, no.
The federal records management laws have been in place for much longer than Obama has been in office. Just because he updated them somewhat, just a bit, doesn't mean they didn't exist before then.
http://www.archives.gov/about/...
But you are welcome to try to ignore all the laws on the books about how very illegal what Hillary did is.
For the inevitable, "but Palin did it!", Palin has not held federal office, therefore she did not fall under the federal records management laws. As I am unfamiliar with the Alaska laws that the Governor falls under, I cannot comment on if Palin broke the law.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Well, she didn't break the law.
Actually, she did. The law requires all official communication to be archived by the government. She deliberate set up mechanism to avoid that. That legal requirement was in place long before it was further enhanced by a later bill that spoke directly to the issue of personal email accounts and the timeliness of forwarding personal mail to offical mailboxes. She HAD NO OFFICIAL MAILBOX, because she didn't want that record keeping to even happen in the first place. She set up a personal platform so that she, and only she, could decide what content, if any, might eventually be passed along to a platform subject to FOIA requests, etc.
She was both nefarious AND wrong, and in every way that matters here, acting deliberately outside the law for her own purposes. And she paid cash to someone operating under a false name to set it up, just to make sure we'd all eventually realize just how sleazy she was really being about it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The jobs market is so bad in Mexico that thousands cross the border daily to get into the USA. The cartels would be better off setting up a dummy company and hiring IT guys to simply do the work, no questions asked.
Why go through all the extra trouble of kidnapping people and making them work? In the end, if they are smart, they'll figure a way to get out a message or screw you some other way. Much simpler and more secure to simply hire them.
Heck, they are IT guys. Get them a couple of hot women who don't mind getting naked and blow them, and those IT guys will do whatever you want. Much easier.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I get it - when someone knows some of your secrets and many of your weaknesses, you "keep" that someone indefinitely.
But Geek Squad? That's the most ridiculous comparison ever - no organization would keep around a bumbling wanna-be IT person who could just barely install Windows and would be lucky to finish a new installation without also installing a Trojan. No, if this guy were like the Geek Squad for a cartel, they'd have killed him pretty quickly when they realized he was completely useless.
Because everyone designated Secretary of State should be able to misplace $6 billion or so.
from the citation:
Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account — hdr22@clintonemail.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym — for official State Department business.
So you're saying it's proper for the third ranking member of the U.S. Government to conduct their office via private e-mail servers?
more:
The New York Times reported Monday that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account it did not specify to conduct State Department business. The disclosure raised questions about whether she took actions to preserve copies of her old work-related emails, as required by the Federal Records Act. A Clinton spokesman, Nick Merrill, told the newspaper that Clinton complied with the letter and spirit of the law because her advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails to decide which ones to turn over to the State Department after the agency asked for them.
So, not only can you not read, you allow the "Clinton advisers" to now be the arbiters of Federal law.
what about Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice?
and then they skin you and your family alive. Unless you destroy the organization on the way out, their famous for snitches get stitches.
I had interviewed and been offered his job after he went missing.. When i found out why the position was open i just hit that big NOPE!! button..
and didn't see the big rock on the road.
Well, at least someone picked up some decent ideas from the CIA.
I think what she did was wrong. But it's not like there isn't precedent for it at this point. Between the Bush Admin doing the exact same thing including major staffers (I remember it being 3 key staff) using private email completely to "losing" the entire email server and all backups right before he left office including the total loss of all communication in the run up to the Iraq war. And it runs on down the chain to governors and others that violate these rules all over the country. It's actually quite common behavior.
Yes it should be stopped and they should follow the damn law, but there is a little hypocrisy in the people railing on Hillary and making this huge attack out of it when they were defending Bush for doing the same damn thing. Pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical about your outrage being entirely partisan and engaged as propaganda.
Bring them up on federal charges, bring them all up on charges.
Why does this have to be a partisan issue? They broke federal laws, and should go to federal prison. Ever single one of them should go to prison to stop this carelessness of the law that has started in politicians. Politicians should hold themselves up to more scrutiny than the average person, not less and less.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
more likely scenarios include, stumbling across any cartel operation and getting killed, or being told, hey we're going to make you this offer, you'll get paid a ton, but you have to disappear, say no, and yer dead. or as a poster below says.. aliens
Thinking that's the most likely outcome from my POV as well.
After all, if you're pressed into service as a "hacker", it wouldn't take much to discreetly slip information to the authorities, considering that most cartel types don't strike me as being technically uber-literate. Sure it would be a massive risk, but totally doable depending on the environment.
There are enough other hackers under duress willing to snitch on you for trying to send a mayday, plus they are probably operating under the stance of "do what we say and we will kill you, don't do what we say and we will kill your family". On top of that your mayday is likely to end up in the hands of police or military on the narcos payroll.
Part of the Radio Narco objective is to monitor communications of crime fighting orgs. If you did get a mayday sent to the right people, you and the rest of the captives are as good as dead as soon as they start planning the rescue team, and if they do find out it was you who sent the mayday your family is probably going to disappear too. It's a supremely shitty situation all around.
It's actually quite common behavior.
But Obama campaigned on changing every aspect of such things, and said that he would guarantee the most transparent administration in history. And here we have a person that he trusts enough to put in the line of succession to his office (Secretary of State) that - on being nominated - didn't just flub her way through a crappy email backup system (a la the career IT people in the WH during Bush, which were not appointees - these are permanent staffers, which you do understand, right?), but rather she immediately went about setting up a system to prevent her communications from being part of the official record.
... no, the completely planned in advance absence of any records except those that Clinton decided, later, should be present. Today we see reports that the IT people in the State Department warned her that her not having an official State mailbox was going to endanger compliance with record keeping laws, but that her completely casual personal mail server was a huge, huge security risk. So we have not only premeditated law breaking to avoid transparency and accountability, but we also have horrible incompetence in understanding the risks of conducting top-level international diplomacy via a mail server set up by some guy with a fictitious name, paid in cash. One really can't make this stuff up.
Then she went around the world doing things like posing with giant plastic "reset" buttons to make everything wonderful with Russia and whatnot, even as she was soliciting millions in donations from foreign governments for use by her personal family foundation. But we'll never know what those emails looked like, and how such things might have been tied to or tangled up with her official duties, because she shielded all of those messages from FOIA requests by never having an official box. And when pressed, she had her own loyalists go through some of the message, and pass along those that SHE considered appropriate for the public archive.
Completely pre-meditated obfuscation of her communications as a senior official. No Sarah-Palin-style cluelessness about using her Yahoo account, no career IT people in the White House having a lame backup system
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Which laws did she break? Apparently she did turn over the relevant emails, if a little late, and I don't know what the law says on that.
If she was acting so nefariously, why have previous Secretaries of State done the exact same things? Have they all been nefarious? Including Colin Powell?
I would think that one way the law matters here is whether she actually broke it. The fact that she did something that would be illegal if she did it now is irrelevant.
If you want me to believe that Clinton was sleazy, instead of ScentCone, please give me some actual reasons why standard practices that were legal were sleazy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Before we get out the firing squads, I'd like to know which federal laws they broke. So far, nobody has pointed out any to me.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Apparently she did turn over the relevant emails
No, she eventually turned over only those emails that she and her personal advisors decided to hand over. Because she chose to conduct her official government business off a badly secured server in her own house and without any IT governance from her agency, we actually have no idea whatsoever what she's decided to leave out. If she'd been actually using the system that her own underlings told her she should use in order to secure and archive her communications, FOIA requests could tell us the story. But instead, we have to trust a person who - the day she was sworn in - immediately set up a system to keep her official communication off the record.
The fact that she did something that would be illegal if she did it now is irrelevant.
It was illegal before, too. It's just illegal on more than one front, now.
And of course we have congressional subpoenas looking for exactly this sort of communication now because they're now aware it exists, despite earlier investigations concluding that there was no email like this at all, and she and her staff - who knew exactly what they were looking for - didn't say a peep about the existence of tens of thousands of them.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Le pagastes y prendiste?
RIP TRICERATOPS, YOU NEVER EXISTED
why not send her to the prison so that she can enjoy some big hungry guys doing terrible things to her? Would this qualify as wellness or just punishment?
I suppose all these other foreign ministers that she was talking to, should have made a documentary donation to US congress too or else get bombed into stone age as it should be, or?
shooting the bastards outright is waste of ammunition - hang them!
I suppose all these other foreign ministers that she was talking to, should have made a documentary donation to US congress too or else get bombed into stone age as it should be, or?
What ARE you talking about?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
why not send her to the prison so that she can enjoy some big hungry guys doing terrible things to her? Would this qualify as wellness or just punishment?
How about her party finally just acknowledge that she's not to be trusted, and stop presuming she's the next POTUS.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...for Hillary Clinton?
Since she handed over a large number of emails, there's no reason to conclude she didn't hand over all the ones she was required to hand over. Your assumption of illegality seems to be based on your belief that Clinton was a criminal, which is similar to what judges refer to as novel legal reasoning.
You're also invited to say what Clinton did differently from her predecessors. We know Kerry is doing things differently, due to a change in the law.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The antennas look like UHF gear, not cell phone gear. Same with the handi talkies.
Since she handed over a large number of emails, there's no reason to conclude she didn't hand over all the ones she was required to hand over.
No. The fact that she set up a home-brew system to avoid the State Department's record keeping in the first place, and the fact she's been stonewalling requests for official mail for years, and is her own gatekeeper on the message she decides State should be allowed to see - combine that with her long history of obfuscation, ethics problems, and working with her husband's supporters to engage in seriously sleazy tactics - the burden is very much on you to explain why you think her private stash has been delivered in whole and intact to State when everything in her history and everything about this entire scenario screams the exact opposite.
In fact, to plow through her "official" mail (you know, the stuff she couldn't be troubled to mirror in her department's archiving system the way that the 2009 regulation required her to do), she used employees of her family's business - and that operation is funded in large part by big contributions from foreign governments and other entities from which she solicited money while she was wandering the world as Secretary of State.
We know Kerry is doing things differently, due to a change in the law.
Both Kerry and Clinton were subject to 2009's regulation. But you already know that.
It is hilarious, though, to play back her nagging lectures about other people using private email at all, and to know that, for example, an ambassador from her department was given the axe for using private email.
The fact that you seem to anxious to write off her behavior as completely reasonable says nothing about her, but a whole lot about your very strange world view.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why don't they just come over to the U.S and grab some of our 457 visa workers? Most of them have 10+ years in any technology you can name and don't mind being abused or working for peanuts anyway.
If you look up the line of this very thread, you will find me linking to the federal records retention laws.
http://www.archives.gov/about/...
The federal archives are the ones who store these records, even classified ones. They are also the ones who release records when the classification is no longer valid, for instance the records of the Roswell crash that were recently released.
I have no idea however what the penalty is for breaking 44 U.S.C. Chapter 31. My opinion would be a ban from elected service, but that is me.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I haven't been following this in detail myself, so what is that 2009 regulation you refer to? I know of the Presidential Records Act and its 2014 amendments, and that she did not violate those laws.
I also know that you're prejudiced against her, since your arguments are largely based on her personality and your suspicions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
so what is that 2009 regulation you refer to
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)'s 2009 requirements include Section 1236.22: "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."
Clinton did not do this. Congressional investigations (run by Democrats) into affairs like the Benghazi mess concluded - after interviews with her office, among others - that they'd reviewed all records at State that might bear on the matter. They didn't know, and Clinton completely avoided mentioning that all of her email at the time was conducted from a private server in her own house, and that the State Department had none of those records, since she hadn't disclosed their existence, or passed them along. She didn't hand over any email until she was told do, as fallout from the congress finding out about her secret, non-archived system.
And now we find that there are large date-range gaps in what she provided to State. Including, of course dates that included her travel to Libya, during which she's famously pictured hammering away on her Blackberry. Shocking, huh.
I also know that you're prejudiced against her, since your arguments are largely based on her personality and your suspicions.
No, she has earned my distrust by her well-documented conduct during years of public life. Stonewalling for years on the provision of subpoenaed records from her Rose law firm ... only to have those records mysteriously materialize in a tidy stack in the White House residence much later. Her getting fired from her job during the Watergate investigation, specifically because of her unethical behavior. Her atrocious conduct during the "travelgate" mess in her husband's administration, and her refusal to disclose who was involved, on the public dime, in her husband's empowering of her to come up with a (catastrophically foolish, and of course completely spurned) replacement for the nation's health care system. It goes on and on. She has a well-documented track record of secrecy even as she preached transparency. This is just another incredible example of her terrible judgement and duplicitous behavior in her quest for power.
The question isn't whether I'm biased, the question is how on earth you're not feeling the same way? What made you such a fan that you're willing to overlook all of that - was it her incredibly shrewd "reset" program with Russia, complete with cheesy button prop? Russians are probably still laughing themselves silly over that one. Or perhaps it was some other accomplishment? Please, name a few!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The poor guy's full name is Felipe de Jesús Pérez García, which is usually shortened to Felipe Pérez. TFS butchered both by calling him Felipe del Jesús Peréz García and Felipe García.
There are three errors in TFS's version. First: Felipe de Jesús means Philip of Jesus. The incorrect version, Felipe del Jesús means Philip of the Jesus and sounds even more absurd in Spanish than it does in English.
Second: It's not Peréz, it's Pérez. That means that the main emphasis is on the first syllable, not on the last one (regardless of how Perez Hilton pronounces his made-up name). Again, in Spanish the wrong version sounds... horribly wrong.
Finally: The complete surname of the guy is Pérez García. He got Pérez from his dad, just like people usually do in English, and he passed it to his own kids. García is his mother's maiden name. If you are going to contract the name, you drop the maternal surname, never the paternal one.