Mexican drug cartels appear to have adopted two new techniques to avoid military raids and police checkpoints: Facebook and Twitter. And so now the Mexican government trying to crack down ... on the use of Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook has been on the radar of government officials who believe that it has been used to facilitate the abduction of the relatives of powerful businessmen and politicians, with kidnappers allegedly using the social networking site to discover the identities of a high-profile person's family members. Meanwhile, authorities, already peeved that ordinary citizens have been using Twitter to alert each other to the locations of drunk-driving, breathalyzer checkpoints via @antiaa_df, are now furious that drug dealers are using similar Twitter accounts to circumvent dragnets and to communicate with each other.(See How Twitter will change the way we live.)
"Twitter is a serious problem not only to Mexican law enforcement agencies but to any law or intelligence agencies all over the world, because criminals, drug cartels and terrorist cells are getting more sophisticated in their methods of communication," says Ghaleb Krame, a security expert at Mexico's Alliant International University. Krame says that criminal organizations are using Twitter or other social network platforms to communicate with each other through key words that mean something different to anyone outside of their circles. For example, drug cartels will post videos of drug corridos, ballads about the narco world, on YouTube with lyrics that can contain subtle clues as to the current hierarchy of the gang — as well as threats.(See the world of Twitter.)
Mexican drug cartels apparently use Twitter and Facebook not only to communicate with each other, but also to spread fear through local communities. Recently in the bloody border town of Reynosa, people associated with one cartel used tweets to terrorize the city by posting messages that created panic among residents and halted normal activities as the threats circulated through Twitter and Facebook. One tweet read: "The largest scheduled shootout in the history of Reynosa will be tomorrow or Sunday, send this message to people you trust that tomorrow a convoy of 60 trucks full of cartel hitmen from the Michoacan Family together with members of the Gulf Cartel are coming to take the city and take everyone out alive or dead!" Schools and shops closed that day.
A contingent of the liberal Revolutionary Democratic Party has now drafted a bill to closely monitor and regulate the use of Twitter and Facebook in Mexico. The bill would make sharing information that helps others break the law or avoid it a criminal act. (The social media companies themselves are not targets of the bill, just their Mexican users; Twitter and Facebook have warned their users to obey Mexican law.) The bill's sponsor, Norberto Nazario, says that he wants to create an online police force that would keep abreast of the ways drug cartels and kidnapping rings are using the Internet for crime. He adds that sharing information about the actions of the police should be illegal, especially during the country's fierce drug war.
The bill is partly modeled on a Spanish bill that would allow the government to close down websites that facilitate the breaking of copyright and other laws. Both the Spanish and Mexican bills are controversial. Mexican tweeters reacted with laughter and scorn when they heard about the bill, many saying that the proposed legislation was just an excuse for the government to act as "Big Brother." Instead on cracking down on Twitter and Facebook use, analysts argued that law enforcement and intelligence agencies should adapt to the new technology by creating fake identities on the social networking sites to track the criminals down instead of seeking to regulate the sites.
Krame argues that passing the bill would be the worst action the government could take in combating crime allegedly committed via Twitter and Facebook. Twitter, some observers argue, has allowed some citizens to become amateur journalists, thus fulfilling a huge need in Mexico, where many television and printed media have refrained from publishing some news stories because of the threat of retribution from the cartels. Four journalists have already been killed this year because of reporting on drug-related issues.
For now, Los Twitteros, as Twitter users are called in Mexico, will have to wait and see what happens when the bill comes up for a vote in the next few months.
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