[FoxNews] Commercial data and surveillance cameras help identify sources and cooperating witnesses
A hacker working for the Sinaloa cartel identified an FBI assistant legal attaché in Mexico City. According to Reuters covering a Justice Department inspector general report released in June 2025, the hacker used the official's phone number to obtain call records and location data. The hacker then used Mexico City's camera network to follow the official around the capital and identify the people they met. The report says the cartel used that information to intimidate potential sources and cooperating witnesses and, in some cases, to kill them.
The deadly lesson was clear: our adversaries no longer need to physically surveil their targets. The commercial data economy does much of the work for them.
In an updated audit released last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General highlighted that this threat — ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS) — "continue[s] to affect the Department" and determined that "DOJ had no common definition of UTS and was not otherwise well-coordinated on the issue, few of the Department's components had taken action to mitigate the UTS threat, and UTS-specific training was lacking."
The conclusion should concern every Homeland Security and law enforcement official: "deficiencies identified in this audit place the Department and its employees, investigations, operations, sources, and witnesses at increased risk to UTS threats."
As a federal law enforcement and Homeland Security official for the past 25 years, I have seen how quickly technology can change the threat environment facing our personnel. The proliferation of inexpensive, commercially available information creates an unacceptable risk that requires a comprehensive solution.
As the acting director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, I saw these threats firsthand. My family and I know the dangers too well.
In October 2025, for example, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported that cartels had put bounties on ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers in Chicago. The reported figures were $2,000 for doxxing or gathering intelligence on agents and as much as $50,000 for killing high-ranking officials.
Especially for officers working cartel cases, the risk can follow them home.
[FOX] The legacy media have decided we are facing mankind’s doom. The phrase "AI apocalypse" crops up on numerous news sites, from Reuters to The Economist. Other outlets have gone with "AI doomsday" or other formulations that look like they come from Revelation.
Journalists aren’t entirely to blame, either. The problem is being spammed into our culture by a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) industry experts, conspiracy theorists, and Chinese-sponsored social media. Turn to CNN, and it asks, "Will AI really kill everyone? How, exactly?" Meanwhile, Axios writes, "Here's how AI could kill us all (if the worst fears come true)." Scared? That’s the goal.
Here’s a sentence from CNN that sums up pretty much every warning you can read anywhere: "‘It really is about literally everyone on the planet dying, like the last human drawing the last breath,’ said Nate Soares, the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the coauthor of ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.’"
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
BREAKING: Israel says pilot tried to hijack flydubai flight to Tel Aviv that diverted, landed in Saudi Arabia
