Cops drill into chat apps, sink plot to smuggle tonnes of coke into Europe Efforts by cops to seize and shut down encrypted messaging apps favored by criminals, and then mine their conversations for evidence, appear to have led to more arrests — plus the seizure of about 2.7 tonnes of cocaine. Europol on Friday celebrated its "dismantling of a large drug-trafficking organization," following an …
The counter for this is that these are special channels wet up for criminal use. Targetting these is one thing, and a successful one, targetting those used by the bulk of the population is quite another. It overturns the presumption of innocence which is there to protect the public from wrongful attention of the state.
If a government had cracked something like Signal or Telegram they would be very unlikely to publicize the fact since it would yield far more useful intelligence than breaking a special app used by a few thousand criminals. That's the sort of thing the US government (and other leading world governments) protect as "sources and methods" so even some rather trivial information could be classified TS/SCI because they cannot risk it getting out they knew that trivial bit of info that they could only know via unfettered access to a supposedly impenetrable chat app.
If the app you use has been cracked/compromised if you ever find out at all it will be a decade after they have been collecting info off it.
If they find out information about a drug ring using that access, MAYBE they will see if they can replicate that information in another way and pass it on to the appropriate authorities. But if not they will simply let the drug dealers (or child traffickers) go about their business, on the belief that in the grand scheme of things stopping a few small time criminals isn't worth the risk of losing something that could prove far more valuable to national security. They would only risk losing that access for something major like another 9/11 style attack.
This is all a result of the government's "War against Drugs" ... back in 1970, drugs were not common everywhere or even expensive, mostly people just shared whatever they were enjoying before Nixon declared his Drug war (and inspired so many other right wingers) which has increased the money and the amount of drugs everywhere. Nixon (defined by the icon) thought he was was only setting up an environment where black voters enjoying a puff of grass could be jailed to reduce people Nixon saw as voting against him.
The 50 year Drug War has been a complete disaster ... this story is normal these days, but these event levels never happened before the Drug War.
Each down vote is an illustration of "Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan. My experience years ago, and since then additionally seen by others, was that you could always buy drugs from police officers after their day at work. I haven't smoked or snorted illegal drugs for more than forty years now but I'm still a drinker and a caffeine addict.
A calm thoughtful response and a critical analysis of known, hard facts isn't what's wanted here.
We want screaming at the gates and pitchforks. We want angry and stressed people with only alcohol as a balm. We want our coke prices pushed up so that junkies are forced to steal ever more expensive goods. We want more money going to shady Serbs and Columbians and not into the budget for hospitals and schools and roads.
Get with the programme.
like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves
Not true. Eunuchs can get erections and have sex. They just can't have children. All the sultans who owned the harems really cared about was that all the children were theirs.
>Nixon (defined by the icon) thought he was was only setting up an environment where black voters enjoying a puff of grass could be jailed to reduce people Nixon saw as voting against him.
That's not entirely true. He also wanted to attack white anti-establishment hippies and support central American dictators in their war against the communists cartels.
Getting rednecks in poor states to die from Oxycontin because "only hippies and N**** take drugs. I'm neither so what I take aren't drugs" was a bonus saving on welfare.
drugs were not common everywhere or even expensive
1. I don't know where you lived where "drugs were not common" back then.
2. Among other effects, the War on Drugs has served to act as a price support for the drug cartels. ("Ooh, big drug busts, it's hard to smuggle stuff in, we're taking losses on captured shipments, so a dime bag no longer gets you as much product as it used to." Or something like that.)
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If you have access to all the drug smuggler's comms, here's what you do. You 'domesticate' them: Arrest the ones who commit murders, Arrest the ones who cut their drugs in dangerous ways. Weed out the ones linked to terrorism. Let the 'nicer' ones keep plying their trade. Leverage existing interceptions to increase surveillance. Avoid revealing that you're watching them
What you don't do: Tell everyone you *were* watching the smugglers and arrest a bunch of the older ones so a new younger generation can take over easily
In other news: Cocaine on course for real terms price falls in London and Barcelona again this year
If you have access to all the drug smuggler's comms, here's what you do. You 'domesticate' them: Arrest the ones who commit murders, Arrest the ones who cut their drugs in dangerous ways. Weed out the ones linked to terrorism. Let the 'nicer' ones keep plying their trade.
Strongly disagree, and it also highlights why I think there is a need for tightly regulated lawful interception. The take from this operation will probably keep investigators and prosecutors busy for quite some time. But this is just one shipment and can get treated much like shoplifting does in any retail trade. Unlike traditional retailing, the consequences are probably going to be much more severe. Retailers who've ordered and paid in advance might have a few supply-chain issues now, customers wanting their money back and those customers aren't exactly going to use civil recovery. So I guess to an extent it'll become self-policing and positively Darwinian.
Bigger problem is this is just one shipment. How many more are getting through? And the 'Balkans Route' has been around for centuries, and is used to smuggle drugs, weapons, people, counterfeit stuff and all sorts of nasties. Also why Odessa's a bit of a hot topic because if you control that port, it's easier to feed the pipeline.
The only real alternative is probably to legalise it. Stuff like cocaine if anything seems to have become normalised and a social drug of choice amongst otherwise intelligent people.. Even though addiction can cause huge damage.
Yes legalisation would be a better option. It's ironic that one of the strongest arguments against cocaine use now is "Think of all the crime-fuelled violence it took to smuggle this powder to your rich, cozy party". But politically we're nowhere close to coke being acceptable, so a third way of law enforcement turning a blind eye to the less violent parts of the trade seems attractive. They can be kept under surveillance justifiably because they're breaking the law, right? (There are some issues around collateral breaches of privacy for law abiding people they associate with I guess). Currently it's like law enforcement weed out the weakest parts of the smuggling networks, creating a survival of the fittest dynamic, and probably do motivate a fair bit of violence linked to missing shipments, ratting paranoia, and so on.
Bigger problem is this is just one shipment. How many more are getting through?
The estimates seem to range from 1% to 15% seized shipments getting into Europe. But that's not even really the issue. The stuff is cheap at source so even 80% loss rate in transit would probably be acceptable. The profits are huge so the odd few million dollars going missing here and there are not an issue either. And there are plenty of people willing to take the risk, believing they'll get away with it, so arrests and long sentences demonstrably don't help much. If you want to make money smuggling drugs your biggest headache is probably dealing with existing operators, not law enforcement. Existing operators who've been locked up in record numbers in the last couple years.
Crack was a huge driver of US city violent crime and death in the 80's. Prostitutes looking like human skeletons turning a trick for the price of their next hit. The crack houses were run by crime militias armed to the teeth with high powered automatic weapons. The cops knew where they were but only had rifles, so it wouldn't have been a fair fight. Not to mention, civilian bystander casualties.
They are all linked to terror inducing crimes and that money filters up.
> there is a need for tightly regulated lawful interception.
" Serbian-led police effort included help from Brazil, Croatia, France, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Slovenia." and the drugs were presumably headed for London and Berlin so the UK and German authorities should be involved. And they will be crossing Eu borders so all other Eu countries, and Ukrainians should be included.
So we just need tightly "regulated lawful interception" limited to the local, regional and national police, customs agencies, civil intelligence agencies, sigint agencies and 'special' crimes agencies etc of 30+ countries to have access to all your data
Of course you didn't know these nationalities were involved until you caught them so probably need to open it up to the agencies of any country that might have citizens involved in drug smuggling.
And they will be crossing Eu borders so all other Eu countries, and Ukrainians should be included.
Yep. LEAs, LEOs and all the security & intelligence types know this, and there's a bunch of other agencies like Interpol that exist to co-ordinate internation crimes. They also know where to focus their efforts, ie in the US the Mafia controlled the docks, which also allowed some control over what got inspected and passed through. Where there's high corruption, it's easier to smuggle stuff in and onward.
So we just need tightly "regulated lawful interception" limited to the local, regional and national police, customs agencies, civil intelligence agencies, sigint agencies and 'special' crimes agencies etc of 30+ countries to have access to all your data
Yep. But the key point is 'tightly regulated'. So I happily flirt with my partner over WhatsApp by text, voice and video and that often gets pretty personal. Technology can be amazing at bringing people together, even when they're far apart. I don't like the idea of having to grant FaceMelta permissions to access that data so they can try and flog me stuff I don't want. I would be very unhappy if videos leaked. But it is what it is.
What I don't understand is why LEAs or national SigInt agencies like GCHQ can't have access to the same data Big Tech helps themselves to with far less regulation and safeguarding. There's already plenty of pron on the 'net so I'm pretty confident they're not watching mine, or giving themselves free access to OnlyFans content. They have better things to be doing, and pretty sure they'd get fired and potentially jailed for watching my gf and I*. There's a collossal amount of data flowing around the 'net and not enough eyeballs to look at everything. Maybe some we do or say could trip an 'AI' if one of us mentions 'coke', and maybe that might trigger a context check and find one of us saying 'I'm thirsty', but I'll probably never know and don't really care. But this is also part of regulation, ie I don't think it's currently lawful to go fish in the UK, and access to the petabytes of data that may or may not be hoovered up needs justification before people can look at it.
*I guess we could be open to sponsorship deals. You have my contact details if you'd like to discuss..
The piles and piles of dead bodies that have been laid in the ground to keep it from them.
I'm.. not sure what you mean, or what you think you mean? Do you mean all the bodies locked up as a result as a result of the recent US insurrection, and the worst attack on the US since Pearl Harbor? Or how the Pearl Harbor attack might have had fewer casualties, if SigInt had been shared, or acted upon? Or do you mean the piles of dead bodies, or still living bodies as a result of work by Bletchley Park during WW2?
Or do you think there should be piles of dead bodies as a result of drug overdoses and unregulated commercial activities? LEAs should not be allowed to monitor criminal's activities, prevent crimes and save lives because monitoring private communications is now the exclusive domain of the FANGS, and their selected commercial partners?
It's one of those wicked problems. Sure, we should be entitled to privacy, but that privacy is steadily being eroded by Big Tech who want to exploit our personal information for private gain. Meanwhile, criminals who enable serious crimes, including dead bodies should be given privacy? Or do you agree with the EU (and other nations) efforts to crack down on 'misinformation', which can't be achieved without some form of surveillance and privacy invasion? Should I be jailed for pointing out that this 'article'-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66509180
Is utter bollocks and a classic case of projection and propaganda that features the key architects reponsible for the piles and piles of dead bodies that have been building up in Ukraine? But it's really back to regulating. I think law enforcement and security services are a necessary evil, and do need the ability to monitor communications and help prevent crimes. That's pretty much been the case since postal services and Black Rooms were created. It's one of those wicked problems though. The problems and dangers aren't really the agencies that collect our data, but the politcians who decide that private communications or data are now evidence of new crimes. So I get jailed for pointing out that the UK's state broadcaster is also arguably the UK's largest spewer of misinformaton.
Or the ones turned into bodies because the tightly regulated authorities got the data that the person was Jewish/Gay/Communist/Catholic/etc
I blame the goverment. Germany has, or had strict data protection laws for that very reason. Now, it's important to calculate the social credit of anyone who might mock the State policy or organs, especially if they spread misinformation. So Bbc again, on what will probably be spun as a 'climate' story instead of high comedy-
But this year there had been worries about the weather and tickets were changing hands on the secondary market at below market rate.
But the Bbc has always had a unique view wrt economics, probably thanks to it's massive subsidy. Weather? It's rained at Burning Man in previous El Nino seasons. The market rate is the price people are prepared to pay. But that's the thing with events like that. It started with people who understood the challenges, it's ending with people who can afford the ticket price and have no clue.
Clearly they mean the market rate back in April before direct ticket sales ceased because Burning Man sold out. For other events they might use the term 'face value' but I think the complexities of BM ticket pricing make that a bit inappropriate. It is a market rate because the organisation is free to set prices based on expected demand, their aims of selling out well before weather events like this become too visible, and value each ticket holder brings to the event.
There's definitely no mention of climate change in that article, I checked. Nor in most of the countless other articles on muddy festivals the Beeb and others have enthusiastically written over the decades. Brits love a good weather story. But if you're in the Black Rock Desert and it's in fact not muddy feel free to call it misinformation.
AP News reports that Ecuador, which does not grow cocaine, is having cocaine from neighboring countries stuffed in its large banana shipments.
"Security in Ecuador has come undone as drug cartels exploit the banana industry to ship cocaine"
"The port city of Guayaquil sees thousands of shipments of fruit pass through daily. The country’s geography makes it the perfect place to grow bananas - situated along the Equator, it is temperate all year round. But drug cartels are exploiting this trade - packing cocaine in with legitimate shipments of bananas which pass undetected through ports which are poorly supervised. (August 4)"
"Drug traffickers’ infiltration of the industry that is responsible for about 30% of the world’s bananas has contributed to unprecedented violence across this once-peaceful nation."
https://apnews.com/article/ecuador-bananas-cocaine-europe-drug-trafficking-6d6529e2b1d8f3cbd16aea74ade0b93d
Yeah, Ecuador has really struggled with drug cartels getting huge influence in recent years.
Used to be one of the safest S. American countries to visit, but it's getting progressively more risky now.
Some wildlife I want to see there on my "bucket list" - and due to continually worsening situation there I have brought forward my planned trip by several years as it was originally going to be a "big birthday" present, but now moved it forward whilst risks are still at what I regard as an acceptable level* (coupled with loss of habitat, which despite a few recent wins in reserves, a lot of forest still getting converted to agriculture e.g. this wildlife site needed a funding drive to keep it going ( https://www.gofundme.com/f/save-the-antpitta ) - as original owner died and the 2 brothers who wanted to keep it running as a wildlife friendly area had to raise cash to buy out other relatives who wanted to farm it extensively).
* No S.America links - just with it being "bucket list" destination have been monitoring news situation there for quite a while
"August 24 led to 15 house searches, six arrests, and the seizure of 2.7 tonnes of charlie along with two high-end cars, luxury watches, and around €550,000 ($593,000) in cash"
That's quite an achievement for those police, recovering €450,000 of cash. Although what they're going to do with that €350,000 is anyone's guess. €250,000 is a lot of money, and I'm sure that €150,000 is going to go a long way towards providing value: €50,000 buys a fair amount of policing.
What cocaine?
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