Anonymous Cancels Drug-Ring Attack

snydeq writes "Anonymous supporters have backed off threats to expose Zeta drug gang collaborators, an operation launched in early October as a retaliation for an alleged kidnapping of an Anonymous follower by the Mexico-based drug gang. Members of Anonymous had posted a video claiming the group could identify journalists, police officers, and taxi drivers who collaborate with the Zeta crime syndicate. Zeta has not shied away from targeting its online critics. In September the crime group hung two people from an overpass warning bloggers and 'online snitches' to beware. The decapitated body of another social-media reporter was found later with a similar warning. Worried about the impact on both misidentified people and Anonymous followers, other supporters of the Anonymous movement worked to dismantle the operation over the weekend. In effect, the group canceled the attack, according to online news site Milenio."

Re:Where's Wikileaks when you need them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, right. He's too busy begging for money ever since he made his organization a pariah by raping two chicks and haphazardly giving up the secrets of the good guys.

I hope you're trolling. The accusation that it was rape was retracted immediately by a senior prosecutor. The facts have surfaced that it turns out to be regarding a condom that broke, a matter which was politically labeled rape by a feminist police officer who was a personal friend of the accuser and also member of the same socialist party. Sweden has previosly bent over for US interestes, even violating their own constitution by allowing CIA "rendition" flights to send Swedish citizens to Egypt for torture. The Julian Assange case is another case of US information warfare.

Re:Tough guys

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Jose Padeilla would see things differently.

And although not directly the FBI, I am sure there are many other the US has disappeared to black sites, Abu Ghraib and Bagram who would support the claims that there isn't a whole lot of difference between tactics of the cartels and the US government.

Re:I'm glad they didn't

[Hatta]

We are past the point of standing up to the Zetas with blog posts and words, the only way to deal with them is with military force

Or legalizing drugs in the US, removing the lions share of funding for the Mexican cartels.

Re:I'm glad they didn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Attacking them with military force is exactly what sparked the current bloodbath. Felipe Calderon campaigned for the presidency of Mexico with a promise to go to war against the drug cartels, while his predecessor, Vicente Fox, suggested that drug legalization would cut off their source of funding and limit their power and influence. Drug cartel violence was a problem when Fox was president, but the situation was at least under control before 2006. When Calderon launched his military campaign, he found out very quickly that he was out-gunned by the cartels, and saw that he could actually lose his war on drugs. It didn't help when we found out that many of the guns the cartels have at their disposal were provided by the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF). The ONLY way to fight back against these gangsters is to remove the source of their wealth. Legalizing drugs is the solution Fox suggested, but the legislature was too corrupted by bribery and intimidation to follow through with Fox's bold initiaitive. All you have to do is look at how the violence in Columbia has been curtailed by the government changing their drug policies. It really is a no brainer.

Re:And just as anonymous was starting to make a di

[Mr. Freeman]

I think that more likely the cartels called anonymous' bluff and they backed down once they realized that this was actually real. Anonymous is made up of a few thousand members that do nothing but talk a lot of shit, make threats, etc. and a small handful of skilled hackers. In the past what has happened is that one or two of the hackers have broken into something (i.e. sony) and released a lot of data while the rest of the group takes all the credit. But even the skill of these few hackers is questionable. The servers they broke into had known security vulnerabilities that were unpatched due to incompetent administrators, one guy actually gave out the password to his server after some social engineering. The recent "child porn bust" was some "genius" who managed to write a script to return a list of names and other information that was publicly available in the first place.

I suspect what happened here is that a lot of members said "we're going to take down the cartels", the cartels didn't like that and responded by killing people. So now you're left with a bunch of shit-talking idiots and a few good hackers. The hackers aren't exactly useful here because I'm pretty sure the drug cartels don't go around storing details of their crimes on insecure servers. MAYBE some cartel member has an email account that might be of some use, but good luck hacking into a gmail account that you don't have any prior knowledge of. The rest of the anonymous members decided that maybe they should stop poking a hornet nest and tried to play it off as "well, we don't want anyone else to get hurt" rather than "we threatened some bad people, couldn't back it up, and got someone killed so we're not doing that anymore".