Mexico

Twitter Crackdown By Mexican Officials Over Police Checkpoint Alerts

To avoid military raids and police checkpoints; Mexicans cartels have adopted a new technique by using Facebook and Twitter. Government officials have had the social networking sites closely monitored as they believe it has been used to assist the abduction of the relatives of powerful businessmen and politicians. Kidnappers have allegedly identified the families of high profile individuals and monitored their daily activity by using the social networking sites.

Ordinary citizens have already angered the government by using twitter to alert one another of the locations of breathalyzer checkpoints via ‘@anitaa_df’ and now use of the site has expanded to drug dealers.

“Twitter is a serious problem not only to Mexican law-enforcement agencies but to any law or intelligence agencies all over the world, because criminals, drug cartels and terrorist cells are getting more sophisticated in their methods of communication.” says Ghaleb Krame, Mexican security expert.

Organised Crime has made use of Twitter and other social networks to communicate with one another through keywords that don’t mean anything to the general public. The cartels don’t just use the networks to communicate with each other but also spread fear amongst local communities. A recent incident involved the town of Reynosa being terrorized by members of a cartel spreading messages through the town which has been bloodied with drug gang activity. One such message read; “The largest scheduled shootout in the history of Reynosa will be tomorrow or Sunday, send this message to people you trust that tomorrow a convoy of 60 trucks full of cartel hit men from the Michoacan Family together with members of the Gulf Cartel are coming to take the city and take everyone out alive or dead!”

A bill has been drafted by the government to closely regulate and monitor the use of social networking in Mexico. The bill would make sharing information that helps others break the law or avoid it a criminal act. The bill will not target the social media companies themselves only the users of the networks. The bill has been controversial in Mexico and many users have slammed the legislation as an excuse to act as Big Brother.

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Tags: arrest, cocaine, court, crime, drugs, facebook, internet, legal, Mexico, social networking, twitter