Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

That is to say, the spyware Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman installed on his own wife and girlfriends’ phones.

The story in Twitter form:

The texts are mind-boggling.
One moment, the couple is cooing over how cute their twin daughters are and talking about Emma's enchiladas, the next their talking about whether Chapo's soldiers were slaughtered in a gunfight.

— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019

Having left everything behind in the panicked escape, Chapo then asks Emma to send him what he needs: sweats, underwear, some shirts & shoes, shampoo, after shave–and, yes, black mustache dye.

— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019

But there's more.
Chapo wasn't only spying on Emma's phone. He had two side chicks (who look exactly like her by the way) and he was spying on their phones too.
So guess what the FBI got their hands on?
That's where we're headed after this quick break, it seems.

— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019

Oh forgot to mention:
Emma, the wife, was so knee deep in Chapo's business that she would often hand her phone to her father who was one of Chapo's lieutenants.
Chapo and the father used Emma's phones to plan major-league drug deals.
Un. Be. Lievable.

— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019

Agustina is clearly shrewd. She knows Chapo's spying on her & complains about it to her friends. She tells one friend she "doesn't trust" the BlackBerries he's given her "because the bastard can locate them." She refers to him as an idiot.
"I'm way smarter than him," she writes.

— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019

It bears repeating:
Chapo ran what seems to be a substantial amount of his international drug business through the women he was involved with.
We know this because he was spying on them and the FBI was able to leverage his paranoia into devastating evidence.

— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) January 9, 2019

How freaking stupid a drug lord do you have to be to doing drug deals through your mistresses?

But El Chapo violated a whole lot of “Crime Boss 101” rules:

Never discuss criminal activity over the phone ever, and even if you have to, use prearranged codewords. Did he never watch Goodfellas or The Wire?

If you do business over the phone, use disposable burner phones and break them up and switch them out on a frequent basis.

Compartmentalize your professional and personal lives. If your wife doesn’t know jack about what you do, she can’t roll on you.

If you keep a mistress, keep her pampered and in the dark.

Never outsource your IT infrastructure. Hire smart, hungry kids, pay them super-well, and know where their families live to prevent them ever thinking of rolling on you.

Never record your own conversations.

Finally, to misquote Nietzsche: “Gaze not into the spyware, for the spyware also gazes into you.”

Tags: Columbia, Crime, data security, drug lords, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Mexico, Sinaloa Cartel

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2019 at 6:00 AM and is filed under Crime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.