'Narcos' migrate to WhatsApp to evade intelligence service

Chivis Martinez Borderland Beat TY Neal  Milenio

To keep their communications secret and away from the access of government authorities, Mexican drug cartels have a secret weapon, 100 percent inviolable, which today has the security agencies of several countries in check.

It is an app available to everyone: “WhatsApp”.

Thanks to its high level of encryption, WhatsApp and other similar applications, have become the preferred tool for organized crime to coordinate sensitive communications, including murders and drug shipments, according to US Attorney General  William Barr.

 "We have seen how transnational drug cartels increasingly transfer their communications to these commercially available encrypted platforms designed to block legal access," he said last July.

Asked by MILLENIO about it, officials of the security cabinet in Mexico confirmed that such messages are practically impossible to penetrate, because they use encrypted information from one point to another, very different from what happens with a phone call or an SMS, which They can be monitored by different types of equipment. They detailed that they have detected that criminals prefer to make calls through the application and not through conventional cell phone, because in this way they feel more secure in the face of the possibility that their phones are intervened.

By using WhatsApp as their primary method of communication, drug traffickers prevent intelligence agencies from conducting telephone wiretaps authorized by a judge, which for years has been the main method of spying on their movements.

Last October, during the failed attempt to capture Ovidio Guzmán in Culiacán, the Sinaloa cartel made intensive use of WhatsApp, sending messages offering 200 pesos to those who joined the operation to free him.

Also through this network someone communicated the order to cease fire to the hitmen, after negotiating the release of the capo. Those messages, which were leaked by other users, could not theoretically be intercepted by the Mexican government in real time, giving the criminal organization the tactical advantage.

“In times past, when we had considerable success in the fight against similar cartels, the indispensable tool was communications intelligence. It is still the indispensable tool today,” Barr explained during a speech he gave last year. To illustrate the problem, the prosecutor used an example of a Mexican cartel, although he did not specify which one, and warned that through messages of the application, this organization has coordinated murders and drug shipments. "We discovered that the cartel had used WhatsApp for the specific purpose of coordinating the killings of police officers based in Mexico," he said about it at the International Cyber ​​Security Conference, held on July 23. According to the narration by Barr, the cartel, which only detailed that recently began to triangulate large amounts of fentanyl from Asia to Mexico and then to the United States - possibly Sinaloa - ended up ordering the murder of several police officers via chat.

"If we could have obtained legal access to chat in a timely manner, we could have saved these lives," he said. In that sense, Barr said that accessing this information would allow "locating fentanyl shipments and confiscating them at the border (...) if our law enforcement agencies do not recover the ability to obtain legal access to encrypted communications and platforms, The chances of successfully prosecuting the war on drugs by traditional means of law enforcement are scarce, "Barr concluded.

The term used by computer experts to describe the phenomenon of hiding communications outside the law is known as "going dark. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) describes the phenomenon with the following scenario: “law enforcement agencies, at all levels, have the legal authority to intercept and access communications and information in accordance with court orders, but it often lacks the technical capacity to carry out these orders due to a fundamental change in communications services and technologies.”

The fact that any user of these platforms can "go dark" has sparked an intense debate in the US and other parts of the world, from where the authorities have demanded that the industry giants like Facebook grant them a way to read the encrypted messages.