Online hackers threaten to expose cartel's secrets

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Online-hackers-threaten-to-expose-cartel-s-secrets-2242068.php

by kaybe • 15 years ago

171 40 15 years ago

stfu• 15 years ago

"Anonymous draws its roots from an online forum dedicated to bringing sensitive government documents and other material to light."

Making Moot sound like a legitimate candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

wgx• 15 years ago

Heh. Strangest description of 4chan yet.

pyre• 15 years ago

Sounds like they are associating Anonymous as having been spawned by Wikileaks.org, which is a fallacy.

moxiemk12• 15 years ago

I think it's highly detrimental to peace to equate "bringing sensitive government documents and other material to light" with making the world a better place.

I agree that it very often is, but if we make this equation, then yet another term, "peace" will have zero meaning, co-opted by those who will push their own agenda by making it sound like that of others.

barry-cotter• 15 years ago

Sunlight is the best disinfectant[0]

Your second paragraph is so lacking in cynicism I can barely parse it. Three[1] people have received the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush, and you think "peace" can be an apolitical concept?

[0]Belief that members or agents of the government are more corrupt than average not included.

[1]Carter, Gore, Obama

andresmh• 15 years ago

Apparently they published the first one: http://neglectedwar.com/blog/archives/8516

pessimizer• 15 years ago

This will be a good thing for the world, because a lot of this stuff is common knowledge yet not published because journalists don't want to be beheaded along with their families, but it will be bad for the kidnapped kid, who will likely end up slowly tortured to death and mutilated.

So I have mixed feelings.

forensic• 15 years ago

Stratfor says that most of Anon's information is on people who are being extorted by a cartel, and when the info is released, these poor people will be murdered by competing cartels.

Basically it's not the cartel bosses and soldiers who are going to die when Anon releases this information. It's the people they extort like Taxi drivers and business owners.

viraptor6• 15 years ago

Doesn't it also mean that every person who has been extorted rather than is a part of the group will fear for their life? Doesn't that make them more likely to talk to law enforcement and tell everything they know in exchange for protection, knowing they can get killed if they're outed and are free?

46Bit• 15 years ago

Interesting if brutal way of looking at things. However, when you can't trust the Police, protection is something of a wooly construct.

drivingmenuts• 15 years ago

And just who do you talk to when the people out to kill you are the ones you'd normally talk to about this sort of thing?

toyg• 15 years ago

It's still a widespread constituency that the cartel has to listen to -- they are in many ways their paying customers, and if all their paying customers run to competing cartels, they have a problem. I'm sure they will be reminded of this every time they "collect"; in very soft tones of course, but still.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

So we have this one extra-legal, transnational group dedicated to running drugs.

They pick up a guy who is a member of another extra-legal, transnational group in order to hold him hostage.

In retaliation, the second group breaks into the drug-runners' computers, find all the people they have blackmailed and paid-off. They threaten to publish this list unless their guy is released. Most observers say this would result in dozens of deaths.

Is it just me, or does this have a distinctly "Mad Max" feel to it? Will this trend continue -- groups self-identifying and taking public actions on the net that result in dozens of deaths because all the people in that group feel that it is the right thing to do? If so, this might be a good time for us all to start looking for our own groups. (That sounds hyperbolic, I know, but the nature of the story lends itself to this kind of observation.)

viraptor6• 15 years ago

Isn't this just an impossible situation in general? What else is there to do? If people are getting kidnapped now, staying quiet is not going to stop it. If not staying quiet and trying to expose the responsible (or indirectly responsible) is going to result in some deaths, then not only this is not a better solution, but also shows that there is no higher force that can stop this from happening at any time in the (edit: near) future anyway.

So affected people are screwed one way or another and people who should help them cannot or don't want to. What exactly is there to do? If anyone has a real, longterm solution they can prove, I'm sure they can find some people who would help them execute it. Saying this action is either right or wrong is... well, a bit pointless.

euroclydon• 15 years ago

The world has always been like this: unfair, often without justice, dangerous. One option is to invest more of your time, money and energy on personal security. Of course knowledge is the best way to stay safe -- knowing which people and places to avoid.

WildUtah• 15 years ago

>>>What else is there to do? If people are getting kidnapped now, staying quiet is not going to stop it....So affected people are screwed one way or another and people who should help them cannot or don't want to. What exactly is there to do?<<<<

Well, we could start by not living in armed camps right on the edge of killing each other. Then a few disruptions won't have us escalating to death.

In Hobbes' state of nature life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. We can stay away from that by living peacefully and cooperatively and respecting the rights of others. Social pressure, a reasonable set of laws with clear and reliable enforcement, and a code of polite consideration often suffices.

What is going on with the cartels is that organized crime has broken the delicate balance and the state of nature is returning. Organized crime isn't the only thing that can break the balance; famine or war are just as effective.

In this case, western society is suffering from a self-imposed wound. Those cartels are thriving on revenue from supplying people who want mostly benign consciousness-modifying substances. Usually that's a modestly profitable business (tobacco and beer companies make nice money) but not profitable enough to run a worldwide crime network.

Prohibition is a violation of the balance of peaceful society. A few people in society are demanding to control the mind and mental state of the rest by controlling chemicals. When they control the legal apparatus, the users of those chemicals need to buy them from a guerilla army that can evade the police. Prices rise enough to support a guerilla army of organized crime.

What exactly is there to do? Simple. Stop trying to control what substances people use to manage their consciousness.

Then we can end the violence, kidnapping, extorsion, and other side effects of guerilla conflict easily and move far away from the state of nature.

jseliger• 15 years ago

What else is there to do?

Legalize drugs. Without drug money and the extra-normal profits enabled by drug dealing, a large chunk of the problem would go away, with the added benefit tax revenue benefit.

See further the New Yorker's article on Portugal's drug decriminalization experiment: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_... . It's behind a paywall but worth reading if you can get to it.

zdw• 15 years ago

The scarier outcome would be if one of the groups reached the point of de facto legitimacy among normal people, and then decided to use it's clout and skills as a weapon.

Beyond spreading false rumors, why not go the next step to plant evidence on their opponents (arrange drug drops at their houses or kiddie porn on their computers)?

That's the nightmare scenario, IMO.

jhancock2• 15 years ago

Are you certain this sort of behavior doesn't already occur directly or inderectly through "legitimate" groups such the CIA, News Corp, the RNC, DNC, etc? Perhaps these newer groups are a response to a feeling that we are already at war and have been for quite some time. Perhaps we're already in the nightmare. diclaimer: I don't think I know anyone in such groups (incluing the so called legitimate ones). I'm just projecting based on the various public info that passes by.

shazow• 15 years ago

I'd argue that Anonymous by nature cannot gain de facto legitimacy because it is not one persistent entity. Anonymous is a mask that anyone can present themselves behind. The very targets that Anonymous is attacking could claim to be Anonymous, too. I understand that the idea behind Anonymous is exactly to shed the idea of labels and reputation and to treat individual actions on their own merit.

On the other hand, you made a great point about mixing fake data with real data, whether intentional or not. A random innocent "civilian" mixed within an expose of criminals could cause disastrous collateral damage.

jhancock2• 15 years ago

It certainly feels the world's more stable cultures are becoming unstable.

syedkarim• 15 years ago

Could you provide examples of these companies and how they are (or feel) less stable than they were a couple of generations ago?

Cushman• 15 years ago

There is a literal war being fought right across our southern border. This isn't an Internet thing, that's just why we're hearing about it.

jbooth• 15 years ago

1) It's fairly likely that this is bluster by anonymous. It's not like Zeta has a poorly secured messageboard at zeta.co.mx with all of their members' phone numbers in it.

2) "Most observers say this would result in dozens of deaths", well, according to the article, one dude at a think tank in Austin said it would result in dozens of deaths. Whenever I read one guy's opinion quoted for a whole paragraph as fact, my BS detector starts beeping. Sexier article with the threat of death though, and journalists are already conditioned to equate "internet activism" == "people getting killed", because of the 0 people who were killed due to wikileaks' actions.

3) I fail to see how this is more concerning than the fact that we have a bunch of idiots in DC trying to manage this situation presently. I mean, at the absolute worst it continues to be mismanaged, right?

malbs• 15 years ago

Press an enter key, end random people's lives in a country you may or may not have visited. It should sound insane, but it's real =\

I wonder how many people would be brave/stupid enough to press the enter key, trusting in the methods they have used to hide their own identity, because if you haven't done it properly, the cartels have a long reach

sudonim• 15 years ago

The video on Chron.com is in spanish. Here's a translated version:

http://neglectedwar.com/blog/archives/8590

shareme• 15 years ago

Look at this way..the odds of the person being released by Zeta alive given past Zeta actions is at zero.

Anonymous is playing a zero sum game here folks..surprised that not one of you picked that up yet..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero%E2%80%93sum_game

Since both Zeta and Anonymous cannot be made to suffer the same gains or losses together its zero sum instead of nonzero sum.

anonymous is minimizing the maximum loss by releasing all information on cartel's activities including not only pay offs to law officers and others but also information on their families as it is a non zero game between more than two players with the third player being zeta's competition.

Translation, Zeta got played and schooled.

If there turns out to be more things or issues involved than it becomes a nonzero sum game with the same nonzero sum equations and n+1 being the profit or loss. In other words if the US or Mexican government decides to get involved on a side than it leans towards a non zero game with more than 4 participants as the loose collections of actors representing either government than becomes non-cohesive collection of more than one actor in the equations.

steve8918• 15 years ago

Wow, this is getting real, very quickly. This is a very, very different enemy than taking on a corrupt government, who still needs to stick by some sort of rules.

Assuming that this really is an Anonymous-supported act, I'm not sure if this is an enemy they want to engage. If they do end up taking on a drug cartel, do they really know what the consequences of this will be? I think Anonymous really needs to think deeply about the consequences of releasing names that would most certainly result in the loss of life.

tsellon• 15 years ago

Keep in mind that Anonymous isn't a single entity with formal leadership making decisions. Anonymous is a loose collective, and anyone can operate under their mantle if they can convince others to go along with a plan. This means that different groups operating under the name of Anonymous may have wildly different interests, goals, and membership.

paolomaffei• 15 years ago

I fell like I lack a lot of broad context, even after reading all the comments.

Can anyone point me to resources explaining what is going on?

scintill76• 15 years ago

"We demand his release," says the Anonymous spokesman, who is wearing a mask like the one worn by the shadowy revolutionary character in the movie V for Vendetta, which came out in 2006. "If anything happens to him, you sons of (expletive) will always remember this upcoming November 5."

Particularly in light of the reference to November 5, V for Vendetta has nothing to do with this in context. Why do we care that it's the same mask and that the movie came out in 2006?

Online hackers threaten to expose cartel's secrets

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