Sinaloa cartel used phone data, CCTV to find FBI informants
WASHINGTON—A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday.
The incident was disclosed in a Justice Department Inspector General’s audit of the FBI’s efforts to mitigate the effects of “ubiquitous technical surveillance,” a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data.
The report said that the hacker worked for a cartel run by “El Chapo,” a reference to the Sinaloa drug cartel run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was extradited to the United States in 2017.
US legal attaché
The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.” The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with.”
The report said “the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”
The report did not identify the alleged hacker, attaché or victims.
