Narcos Use “WhatsApp”

Borderland Beat posted by Bjeff material from EL Siglo Durango & Wired

Three decades ago, a Ukrainian teenager immigrated to the United States. He hardly spoke English. Along with his mother and grandmother they relied on a social program for help with their rent on a 2 bedroom apartment.

Jan Koum attended college, majoring in computer science. Five years ago, along with American Brian Acton, he invented WhatsApp.

 

The WhatsApp application to send text messages, photos, videos and audios, recently  sold to Facebook for 19 billion dollars It is estimated that each day 700 million photos and 100 million videos are sent by  the app.

Mexican drug traffickers, always using the latest technology to evade the authorities have started using WhatsApp as its new mode in communication. 

A few months ago, according to intelligence reports from the federal government, the fugitive Rafael Caro Quintero, a former leader of the Guadalajara cartel, used this application to send a video message to one of Mexico's most powerful kingpins: Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias-“El Mencho”- the visible head of the criminal organization known as the New Generation Jalisco Cartel. 

Caro Quintero was awarded his freedom from prison, after 28 years, and little fanfare he walked out the prison gates a free man. August 9, 2013.  

Later, the government “realized” their error, as he is a wanted man in the United States, and although he is again wanted for recapture, he is long gone. 

After his release,  he entered into communication with several senior members of the drug world as "The Mencho" and Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera, who was still was on the run. 

Communication with Mencho was using WhatsApp; with Chapo he used a more personal method.&

The message was the same for both: I do not want to get into the business, I want to live a quiet life in my old age, posing no threat to anyone and if possible if they could provide protection for him.

Caro Quintero is not the only drug lord taking advantage of the digital age.

Just weeks ago, the elite group that are looking for Servando Gómez Martínez, leader of the Knights Templar cartel, discovered a digital "memo" sent by "La Tuta" to Fernando Cruz Mendoza "Tena", who allegedly was his chief of assassins, who he is alienated, judging by intelligence reports. 

In the audio, he strongly supports confrontation with their rivals in the drug world,  AUC and the authorities. He suggests concrete actions of war in the region of Michoacán where he has influence, and organizational restructuring of the Templarios as  a "group of friends" looking after each area and proposes a new treatment for mining companies with shares of extortion lower than those charged them when they had complete control over Michoacán.

However…Now WhatsApp has implemented an end-to-end encryption making it nearly impossible to read  users messages

WhatsApp is following through on that anti-snooping promise at an unprecedented scale.

On Tuesday, WhatsApp announced that it’s implementing end-to-end encryption, an upgrade to its privacy protections that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to read users’ messages—even the company itself. 

WhatsApp will integrate the open-source software Textsecure, created by privacy-focused non-profit Open Whisper Systems, which scrambles messages with a cryptographic key that only the user can access and never leaves his or her device. The result is practically uncrackable encryption for hundreds of millions of phones and tablets that have WhatsApp installed—by some measures the world’s largest-ever implementation of this standard of encryption in a messaging service.

“Whatsapp is integrating Textsecure into the most popular messaging app in the world, where people exchange billions of messages a day,” says Moxie Marlinspike, Open Whisper System’s creator and a well known software developer in the cryptography community. “I do think this is the largest deployment of end-to-end encryption ever.”

Textsecure has actually already been quietly encrypting WhatsApp messages between Android devices for a week. The new encryption scheme means WhatsApp messages will now travel all the way to the recipients’ device before being decrypted, rather than merely being encrypted between the user’s device and Whatsapp’s server. 

The change is nearly invisible, though Marlinspike says WhatsApp will soon add a feature to allow users to verify each others’ identities based on their cryptographic key, a defense against man-in-the-middle attacks that intercept conversations. “Ordinary users won’t know the difference,” says Marlinspike. “It’s totally frictionless.”

“This is the largest deployment of end-to-end encryption ever.”

WhatsApp’s rollout of strong encryption to hundreds of millions of users may be an unpopular move among governments around the world, whose surveillance it could make far more difficult. WhatsApp’s user base is highly international, with large populations of users in Europe and India. 

But WhatsApp founder Jan Koum has been vocal about his opposition to cooperating with government snooping. 

“I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on,” he told Wired UK earlier this year. “Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state—the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech. Our goal is to protect it.”