International global drug cartels have ploughed millions of dollars into a secret system letting key players keep in touch.
Last night one insider with knowledge of the network claimed underworld bosses running a $40 billion criminal empire recruited experts to design a special hi-tech kit that can’t be bugged, tracked or decoded. The secret system is being used in Colombia, West Africa, Spain, the Middle East and Britain to seal drugs and arms deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The ground breaking devices are disguised to look like everyday household items. Faced with the threat of PRISM, a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining program known to have been operated by the United States National Security Agency and GCHQ. DTOs at the very highest level of the criminal underworld are playing spies at their own game.
The narcos new technology will make it “almost impossible” to track major drug deals around the world. The confidential source said: “Imagine having a piece of equipment that is bug-proof and completely secure through which numbers, dates, times and places are detailed. It’s a piece of equipment so cleverly disguised you would not have a clue it was being used for something else.
The Los Zetas Cartel already operate a vast telecommunications network involving two-way radios, encrypted, secure radio networks, computers and burner cell phones. The original Zetas experience in the military lead to a number of innovative techniques in the Zetas operations including successfully using existing networks securely and building their own radio systems.
“A piece of equipment that cannot be decoded or tracked – that is what is now in place.
“There’s no longer any need for face-to-face meetings, so no more getting caught by surveillance.
“No longer is there a need for pay-as-you-go phones you can throw away or ‘chatting’ on PlayStation forums. A few weeks ago police raided a house in which this form of COM system was being used.
“Organised crime has moved on, the communication idea was bankrolled at the top level and IT and encryption specialist unconnected to the cartels were brought in to devise a suitable plan and implement a system.
“I would say tens of millions have been spent on securing a network that enables people to do business in a safe and risk-free way.”
He said the system was being used by all the major players in the drugs trade, including in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, The Caribbean,West Africa and Spain.
It faces“rife corruption” in West Africa where our insider accused some governments of sending out military ships to target traffickers smuggling tons of cocaine through international waters.
Once escorted to shore, he said drug runners are ordered to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars before the shipments are handed back.
“The Government gets brownie points for the big drug bust and pockets a nice backhander too.
“The cocaine isn't destroyed – it’s simply sent to its destination via a different route. Latin American cocaine traffickersmay also be using submarines to move the Europe-bound drugs across the Atlantic Ocean, cocaine seizures have gone down throughout the region, at the same time that consumption in West Africa is going up. A United Nations report showed that the illicit flow of cocaine through the region boomed, surpassing even the GDP of some of the countries through which the drugs were trafficked.
Trying To Avoid PRISM
Scalability to support surveillance of large, complex IP networks (such as the Internet).
High-speed packet processing performance, which enables it to sift through the vast quantities of information that travel over the Internet. Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviours in real-time. That is it can track individual users, monitor which applications they are using (e.g., web browsers, instant messaging applications, e-mail) and what they are doing with those applications (e.g., which web sites they have visited, what they have written in their emails/IM conversations), and see how users' activities are connected to each other (e.g., compiling lists of people who visit a certain type of web site or use certain words or phrases in their e-mail messages. High reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis. Its functionality can be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.
The intercepted data flows in to a Intercept Suite. This data is stored and analysed for surveillance and forensic analysis. Other capabilities include playback of streaming media, rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyse the payload/ attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Other software, such as Pen-Link, offer the ability to quickly analyse information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules.
A single terminal can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 256k DSL lines or 195,000 56k telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of just one installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.
Intercept Suite (NIS) is a network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and reconstruction of web-mail traffic... including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail". However, currently most web-mail traffic can be HTTPS encrypted, so the content of messages can only be monitored with the consent of service providers.
The system can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening, in other words analyse the content, meaning, structure and significance of traffic in real time. The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are being monitored.
Strange Bed Fellows
Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel are using Atlantic Ocean drug routes to West Africa and perhaps working together on logistics to deliver shipments to Europe to achieve a shared common goal. If the Saudis and Israelis can find common ground working together why not the two competing cartels.
Once organized crime groups have smuggled the narcotics – cocaine, marijuana, heroin and synthetic drugs – into West Africa, they transport them, often in vehicles or small air planes, to Europe. Other transnational criminal organizations based in other parts of Latin America also are trafficking drugs to Europe through West Africa, authorities said.
Among the criminal groups which are sending greater amounts of drugs to Europe through West Africa include the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian Norte del Valle cartel. Latin American drug traffickers are using two basic methods to transport drugs to Africa and Europe, authorities said:
By sea, transnational criminal organizations hide drugs in large ships that travel from Latin America to Africa and Europe. Drug traffickers set up fake export operations and hide their drugs in the cargo of the phony export businesses, authorities said. Once the large ships have reached their ports, organized crime operatives often use smaller “fast boats” to transport the drugs from the ship to land;
By air, organized crime groups hire travellers who are known as“drug mules,” to hide drugs in their luggage, clothes or even inside their bodies.
Once the drugs have reached West Africa, drug traffickers often load the drugs into land vehicles, such as SUVs, and transport them to their distribution points in Europe.
Security forces in Latin America and the United States have succeeded in recent years in slowing the amount of drugs smuggled north to the U.S. and Mexico by transnational criminal organizations.
This success has made the Atlantic drug routes to Africa and Europe more important to narco-traffickers, said security analyst Alfredo Rangel Suárez, the director of the Democracy and Security Centre at Colombia’s Sergio Arboleda University.
“The fight against crime and the closing of border crossings by authorities in countries where cocaine is directly introduced have forced the FARC, Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel to look for new routes to satisfy demand in the European drug market, which means ports in Western Africa,” Rangel Suárez said.
For Colombian narco-traffickers, “the Atlantic route is becoming more important than the Pacific one,” according to the World Drug Report 2013 of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Many Brazilian drug traffickers ultimately transport their drugs to Portugal in part because they speak Portuguese, making communication easier, according to the UNODC report.
Entry points
Sixteen African countries comprise the main points of entry for Latin American drug traffickers, according to a report by the American Police Community (AMERIPOL), a continental police organization of 18 countries in the Americas, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala,Haiti, Nicaragua, and the United States.
The African countries commonly used as entry ports are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea,Guinea Bissau,Liberia,Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria,Senegal,Togo and Sierra Leone.
Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel
Two Mexican transnational criminal organizations, Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel, smuggle cocaine from Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil into Sierra Leone and then to Europe, according to Rangel Suárez. Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel, which is led by fugitive kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, often collaborate with other Latin American organized crime groups.
For example, Guzmán has formed alliances with Colombian organized crime groups, such as the Oliver Solarte cartel. Once in Europe, DTOs traffic cocaine using local gangs. According to Europol, El Chapo has presence in Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the Czech Republic. As for Los Zetas, they created an alliance with the Ndrangheta in Italy. From Italy, the Ndrangheta is responsible for distributing cocaine in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, France, Belgium, Spain, Bulgaria, and Albania.
“This alliance is beneficial for both criminal groups. Los Zetas transports the drugs to and within Europe while ‘Ndrangheta guarantees secure distribution points,” the report stated.
In 2011, Italian police arrested 45 individuals linked to an unspecified Mexican cartel (most likely Los Zetas). In addition to drug trafficking, Los Zetas are involved in human trafficking between Europe and Mexico.
The FARC
The FARC is responsible for many of the drugs that are transported to West Africa and then to Europe, Rangel Suárez said.
“The FARC is the biggest cocaine smuggler in the world,” he added. “In Colombia, more than half of the drugs produced and exported to other countries are marketed by the FARC.”
Three other Colombian organized crime groups – the Popular Revolutionary Anti-Subversive Army of Colombia (ERPAC), Los Urabeños and Los Rastrojos – also transport drugs to West Africa and on to Europe.
Last night one insider with knowledge of the network claimed underworld bosses running a $40 billion criminal empire recruited experts to design a special hi-tech kit that can’t be bugged, tracked or decoded. The secret system is being used in Colombia, West Africa, Spain, the Middle East and Britain to seal drugs and arms deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The ground breaking devices are disguised to look like everyday household items. Faced with the threat of PRISM, a clandestine mass electronic surveillance data mining program known to have been operated by the United States National Security Agency and GCHQ. DTOs at the very highest level of the criminal underworld are playing spies at their own game.
The narcos new technology will make it “almost impossible” to track major drug deals around the world. The confidential source said: “Imagine having a piece of equipment that is bug-proof and completely secure through which numbers, dates, times and places are detailed. It’s a piece of equipment so cleverly disguised you would not have a clue it was being used for something else.
The Los Zetas Cartel already operate a vast telecommunications network involving two-way radios, encrypted, secure radio networks, computers and burner cell phones. The original Zetas experience in the military lead to a number of innovative techniques in the Zetas operations including successfully using existing networks securely and building their own radio systems.
“There’s no longer any need for face-to-face meetings, so no more getting caught by surveillance.
“No longer is there a need for pay-as-you-go phones you can throw away or ‘chatting’ on PlayStation forums. A few weeks ago police raided a house in which this form of COM system was being used.
“Organised crime has moved on, the communication idea was bankrolled at the top level and IT and encryption specialist unconnected to the cartels were brought in to devise a suitable plan and implement a system.
“I would say tens of millions have been spent on securing a network that enables people to do business in a safe and risk-free way.”
He said the system was being used by all the major players in the drugs trade, including in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, The Caribbean,West Africa and Spain.
It faces“rife corruption” in West Africa where our insider accused some governments of sending out military ships to target traffickers smuggling tons of cocaine through international waters.
Once escorted to shore, he said drug runners are ordered to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars before the shipments are handed back.
“The Government gets brownie points for the big drug bust and pockets a nice backhander too.
“The cocaine isn't destroyed – it’s simply sent to its destination via a different route. Latin American cocaine traffickersmay also be using submarines to move the Europe-bound drugs across the Atlantic Ocean, cocaine seizures have gone down throughout the region, at the same time that consumption in West Africa is going up. A United Nations report showed that the illicit flow of cocaine through the region boomed, surpassing even the GDP of some of the countries through which the drugs were trafficked.
Trying To Avoid PRISM
Scalability to support surveillance of large, complex IP networks (such as the Internet).
High-speed packet processing performance, which enables it to sift through the vast quantities of information that travel over the Internet. Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviours in real-time. That is it can track individual users, monitor which applications they are using (e.g., web browsers, instant messaging applications, e-mail) and what they are doing with those applications (e.g., which web sites they have visited, what they have written in their emails/IM conversations), and see how users' activities are connected to each other (e.g., compiling lists of people who visit a certain type of web site or use certain words or phrases in their e-mail messages. High reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis. Its functionality can be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.
The intercepted data flows in to a Intercept Suite. This data is stored and analysed for surveillance and forensic analysis. Other capabilities include playback of streaming media, rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyse the payload/ attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Other software, such as Pen-Link, offer the ability to quickly analyse information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules.
A single terminal can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 256k DSL lines or 195,000 56k telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of just one installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.
Intercept Suite (NIS) is a network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and reconstruction of web-mail traffic... including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail". However, currently most web-mail traffic can be HTTPS encrypted, so the content of messages can only be monitored with the consent of service providers.
The system can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening, in other words analyse the content, meaning, structure and significance of traffic in real time. The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are being monitored.
Strange Bed Fellows
Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel are using Atlantic Ocean drug routes to West Africa and perhaps working together on logistics to deliver shipments to Europe to achieve a shared common goal. If the Saudis and Israelis can find common ground working together why not the two competing cartels.
Once organized crime groups have smuggled the narcotics – cocaine, marijuana, heroin and synthetic drugs – into West Africa, they transport them, often in vehicles or small air planes, to Europe. Other transnational criminal organizations based in other parts of Latin America also are trafficking drugs to Europe through West Africa, authorities said.
Among the criminal groups which are sending greater amounts of drugs to Europe through West Africa include the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian Norte del Valle cartel. Latin American drug traffickers are using two basic methods to transport drugs to Africa and Europe, authorities said:
By sea, transnational criminal organizations hide drugs in large ships that travel from Latin America to Africa and Europe. Drug traffickers set up fake export operations and hide their drugs in the cargo of the phony export businesses, authorities said. Once the large ships have reached their ports, organized crime operatives often use smaller “fast boats” to transport the drugs from the ship to land;
By air, organized crime groups hire travellers who are known as“drug mules,” to hide drugs in their luggage, clothes or even inside their bodies.
Once the drugs have reached West Africa, drug traffickers often load the drugs into land vehicles, such as SUVs, and transport them to their distribution points in Europe.
Security forces in Latin America and the United States have succeeded in recent years in slowing the amount of drugs smuggled north to the U.S. and Mexico by transnational criminal organizations.
This success has made the Atlantic drug routes to Africa and Europe more important to narco-traffickers, said security analyst Alfredo Rangel Suárez, the director of the Democracy and Security Centre at Colombia’s Sergio Arboleda University.
“The fight against crime and the closing of border crossings by authorities in countries where cocaine is directly introduced have forced the FARC, Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel to look for new routes to satisfy demand in the European drug market, which means ports in Western Africa,” Rangel Suárez said.
For Colombian narco-traffickers, “the Atlantic route is becoming more important than the Pacific one,” according to the World Drug Report 2013 of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Many Brazilian drug traffickers ultimately transport their drugs to Portugal in part because they speak Portuguese, making communication easier, according to the UNODC report.
Entry points
Sixteen African countries comprise the main points of entry for Latin American drug traffickers, according to a report by the American Police Community (AMERIPOL), a continental police organization of 18 countries in the Americas, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala,Haiti, Nicaragua, and the United States.
The African countries commonly used as entry ports are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea,Guinea Bissau,Liberia,Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria,Senegal,Togo and Sierra Leone.
Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel
Two Mexican transnational criminal organizations, Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel, smuggle cocaine from Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil into Sierra Leone and then to Europe, according to Rangel Suárez. Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel, which is led by fugitive kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, often collaborate with other Latin American organized crime groups.
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| Faces of The FARC |
“This alliance is beneficial for both criminal groups. Los Zetas transports the drugs to and within Europe while ‘Ndrangheta guarantees secure distribution points,” the report stated.
In 2011, Italian police arrested 45 individuals linked to an unspecified Mexican cartel (most likely Los Zetas). In addition to drug trafficking, Los Zetas are involved in human trafficking between Europe and Mexico.
The FARC is responsible for many of the drugs that are transported to West Africa and then to Europe, Rangel Suárez said.
“The FARC is the biggest cocaine smuggler in the world,” he added. “In Colombia, more than half of the drugs produced and exported to other countries are marketed by the FARC.”
Three other Colombian organized crime groups – the Popular Revolutionary Anti-Subversive Army of Colombia (ERPAC), Los Urabeños and Los Rastrojos – also transport drugs to West Africa and on to Europe.