taken from http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,41206,00.html
Colombian cartels have spent billions of dollars to build one of the world's most sophisticated IT infrastructures. It's helping them smuggle more dope than ever before.
Colombian cartels have spent billions of dollars to build one of the world's most sophisticated IT infrastructures. It's helping them smuggle more dope than ever before.
On a rainy night eight years ago in the Colombian city of Cali, crack counter-narcotics troops swarmed over the first floor of a low-rise condominium complex in an upscale neighborhood. They found no drugs or guns. But what they did find sent shudders through law enforcement and intelligence circles around the world.
The building was owned by a front man for Cali cocaine cartel leader José Santacruz Londono. Inside was a computer center, manned in shifts around the clock by four to six technicians. The central feature of the facility was a $1.5 million IBM AS400 mainframe, the kind once used by banks, networked with half a dozen terminals and monitors. The next day, Colombia's attorney general secretly granted permission for U.S. agents to fly the mainframe immediately back to the United States, where it was subjected to an exhaustive analysis by experts from the Drug Enforcement Administration and various intelligence agencies. The so-called Santacruz computer was never returned to Colombian authorities, and the DEA's report about it is highly classified. But Business 2.0 has ferreted out many of its details. They make it clear why the U.S. government wants the Santacruz case kept quiet.
According to former and current DEA, military, and State Department officials, the cartel had assembled a database that contained both the office and residential telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in Colombia, along with the entire call log for the phone company in Cali, which was leaked by employees of the utility. The mainframe was loaded with custom- written data-mining software. It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange's traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials. The computer was essentially conducting a perpetual internal mole-hunt of the cartel's organizational chart. "They could correlate phone numbers, personalities, locations -- any way you want to cut it," says the former director of a law enforcement agency. "Santacruz could see if any of his lieutenants were spilling the beans."
They were. A top Colombian narcotics security adviser says the system fingered at least a dozen informants - - and that they were swiftly assassinated by the cartel. A high- level DEA official would go only this far: "It is very reasonable to assume that people were killed as a result of this capability. Potential sources of information were compromised by the system."
The discovery of the Santacruz computer gave law enforcement officials a chilling glimpse into the cartels' rapidly evolving technological sophistication. But here's what is truly frightening: Since the discovery of the Santacruz system in 1994, the cartels' technological mastery has only grown. And it is enabling them to smuggle more dope than ever before.
The drug lords have deployed advanced communications encryption technologies that, law enforcement officials concede, are all but unbreakable. They use the Web to camouflage the movement of dirty money. They track the radar sweeps of drug surveillance planes to map out gaps in coverage. They even use a fleet of submarines, mini-subs, and semisubmersibles to ferry drugs -- sometimes, ingeniously, to larger ships hauling cargoes of hazardous waste, in which the insulated bales of cocaine are stashed. "Those ships never get a close inspection, no matter what country you're in," says John Hensley, former head of enforcement for the U.S. Customs Service. Most of the cartels' technology is American-made; many of the experts who run it are American-trained. High-tech has become the drug lords' most effective counter-weapon in the war on drugs -- and is a major reason that cocaine shipments to the United States from Colombia hit an estimated 450 tons last year, almost twice the level of 1998, according to the Colombian navy.
In a sense, the cartels are putting their own dark twist on the same productivity-enhancing strategies that other multinational businesses have seized on in the Internet age. Indeed, the $80 billion-a-year cocaine business poses some unique challenges: The supply chain is immense and global, competition is literally cutthroat, and regulatory pressure is intense. The traffickers have the advantages of unlimited funds and no scruples, and they've invested billions of dollars to create a technological infrastructure that would be the envy of any Fortune 500 company -- and of the law enforcement officials charged with going after the drug barons. "I spent this morning working on the budget," the head of DEA intelligence, Steve Casteel, said recently. "Do you think they have to worry about that? If they want it, they buy it." That's an especially troubling thought just now, as the Bush administration pressures Congress to expand the $1.3 billion anti-narcotics plan for Colombia and to allow the U.S. military to take a more forceful role in the savage fighting between Colombia's left-wing rebels, right-wing paramilitary units, and the drug-trafficker allies of both.
Archangel Henao is the man whom authorities credit with much of the drug runners' recent technological progress. According to Colombian and U.S. narcotics officials, Henao heads the North Valley Cartel, the largest and most feared criminal organization to emerge from the chaos that gripped Colombia's underworld after the old Medellín and Cali cartels were broken up in the 1990s by the country's military -- with extensive U.S. help. Officials say that Henao, a heavyset 47-year-old born with a withered left arm, controls Buenaventura, the principal port on a stretch of the Pacific coast that is the launching point for most of the cocaine and heroin smuggled into North America from Colombia. His North Valley Cartel foot soldiers are known for dismembering the bodies of their enemies with chain saws and dumping them into the Cauca River. The U.S. Treasury Department has banned Henao from doing business with U.S. companies because he is a "drug kingpin," and the DEA publicly calls him one of Colombia's biggest traffickers. He has never been convicted of a drug-related offense, although a DEA official says the agency is "trying to build an indictment" against him.
Henao's cartel is a champion of decentralization, outsourcing, and pooled risk, along with technological innovations to enhance the secrecy of it all. For instance, to scrub his profits, he and fellow money launderers use a private, password-protected website that daily updates an inventory of U.S. currency available from cartel distributors across North America, says a veteran Treasury Department investigator. Kind of like a business-to-business exchange, the site allows black-market money brokers to bid on the dirty dollars, which cartel financial chiefs want to convert to Colombian pesos to use for their operations at home. "A trafficker can bid on different rates -- 'I'll sell $1 million in cash in Miami,'" says the agent. "And he'll take the equivalent of $800,000 in pesos for it in Colombia." The investigator estimates the online bazaar's annual turnover at as much as $3 billion.
Henao and other cartel leaders recruit IT talent from many sources, intelligence officials say. The traffickers lure some specialists from legitimate local businesses, offering scads of cash. They also contract with Israeli, U.S., and other mercenaries who are former electronic warfare experts from military special ops units. Cartel leaders have sent members of their own families to top U.S. engineering and aeronautical schools; when the kids come home, some serve as trusted heads of technical operations. Most of the high-end gear the cartels deploy comes from household-name multinational companies, many of them American; typically, front companies purchase equipment from sales offices in Colombia or through a series of intermediaries operating in the United States.
The talent and tools are among the best that money can buy, and it shows. For instance, Henao's communications have become so advanced that they have never been intercepted, Colombian intelligence sources say. The last clear view inside the organization's technical operations was provided in 1998, when a small army of Colombian police arrested Henao's top IT consultant, Nelson Urrego. That bust soon led to the discovery of an elaborate communications network that allowed Urrego to coordinate fleets of North Valley Cartel planes and ships that were smuggling 10 to 15 tons of cocaine each month.
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nice story
