The Sinaloa drug cartel, once headed by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, deployed high-tech surveillance in the area. They hunted down and assassinated the FBI’s snitches. This sad omen illustrates the lengths that organized crime will undertake to protect their bottom line. They will go to desperate lengths to root out and destroy these threats. This pattern has grown starkly clear since Guzmán was extradited to the United States in 2017. Since then, he has led the charge against organized crime.
As a recent report by The Guardian uncovered, the cartel used Mexico City’s network of over 10,000 cameras. They used it to spy on an FBI official. This meant tracing the official’s movements across the city and figuring out who each of the official’s interactions were with. These tactics serve to underscore the increasing worry about how technology is being used to advance organized crime’s goals.
The report further elaborates that the cartel aimed “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data,” which indicates a high level of technical sophistication. The ability to collect such sensitive information poses significant threats to those charged with enforcing the law and protecting national security. They do all this while combatting an ever-changing and sophisticated array of criminal threats.
The U.S. Justice Department expressed these same concerns in its findings. They highlighted how ubiquitous technical surveillance have become a weapon of choice for criminal organizations. They warned that recent advancements in technology “have made it easier than ever for less-sophisticated nations and criminal enterprises to identify and exploit vulnerabilities.” This change makes law enforcement’s job that much harder, and it opens up a larger debate about privacy versus public safety.
The consequences of these disclosures reach far beyond the immediate threats posed by the Sinaloa cartel. Harder truths Additionally, law enforcement agencies have been on the defensive from these new surveillance techniques. To do so, they need to change their playbook in order to successfully fight these changing threats.