Mexico to Boost Tapping of Phones and e-Mail with US Aid
MEXICO CITY - Mexico is expanding its ability to tap telephone calls and e-mail using money from the U.S. government, a move that underlines how the country’s conservative government is increasingly willing to cooperate with the United States on law enforcement.
The expansion comes as President Felipe Calderon is pushing to amend the Mexican Constitution to allow officials to tap phones without a judge’s approval in some cases. Calderon argues that the government needs the authority to combat drug gangs, which have killed hundreds of people this year. 
Mexican authorities for years have been able to wiretap most telephone conversations and tap into e-mail, but the new $3-million Communications Intercept System being installed by Mexico’s Federal Investigative Agency will expand their reach.
The system will allow authorities to track cellphone users as they travel, according to contract specifications. It includes extensive storage capacity and will allow authorities to identify callers by voice. The system, scheduled to begin operation this month, was paid for by the U.S. State Department and sold by Verint Systems Inc., a politically well-connected firm based in Melville, N.Y., that specializes in electronic surveillance.
Although information about the system is publicly available, the matter has drawn little attention so far in the United States or Mexico. The modernization program is described in U.S. government documents, including the contract specifications, reviewed by The Times.
They suggest that Washington could have access to information derived from the surveillance. Officials of both governments declined to comment on that possibility.
“It is a government of Mexico operation funded by the U.S.,” said Susan Pittman, of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Queries should be directed to the Mexican government, she said.
Calderon’s office declined to comment.
But the contract specifications say the system is designed to allow both governments to “disseminate timely and accurate, actionable information to each country’s respective federal, state, local, private and international partners.”
Calderon has been lobbying for more authority to use electronic surveillance against drug violence, which has threatened his ability to govern. Despite federal troops posted in nine Mexican states, the violence continues as rival smugglers fight over shipping routes to the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as for control of Mexican port cities and inland marijuana and poppy growing regions.
Nonetheless, the prospect of U.S. involvement in surveillance could be extremely sensitive in Mexico, where the United States historically has been viewed by many as a bullying and intrusive neighbor. U.S. government agents working in Mexico maintain a low profile to spare their government hosts any political fallout.
It’s unclear how broad a net the new surveillance system will cast: Mexicans speak regularly by phone, for example, with millions of relatives living in the U.S. Those conversations appear to be fair game for both governments.
Legal experts say that prosecutors with access to Mexican wiretaps could use the information in U.S. courts. U.S. Supreme Court decisions have held that 4th Amendment protections against illegal wiretaps do not apply outside the United States, particularly if the surveillance is conducted by another country, Georgetown University law professor David Cole said.
Mexico’s telecommunications monopoly, Telmex, controlled by Carlos Slim Helu, the world’s second-wealthiest individual, has not received official notice of the new system, which will intercept its electronic signals, a spokeswoman said this week.
“Telmex is a firm that always complies with laws and rules set by the Mexican government,” she said.
Calderon recently asked Mexico’s Congress to amend the country’s constitution and allow federal prosecutors free rein to conduct searches and secretly record conversations among people suspected of what the government defines as serious crimes.
His proposal would eliminate the current legal requirement that prosecutors gain approval from a judge before installing any wiretap, the vetting process that will for now govern use of the new system’s intercepts. Calderon says the legal changes are needed to turn the tide in the battle against the drug gangs.
“The purpose is to create swift investigative measures against organized crime,” Calderon wrote senators when introducing his proposed constitutional amendments in March. “At times, turning to judicial authorities hinders or makes investigations impossible.”
But others argued that the proposed changes would undermine constitutional protections and open the door to the type of domestic spying that has plagued many Latin American countries. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe last week ousted a dozen generals, including the head of intelligence, after police were found to be wiretapping public figures, including members of his government.
“Calderon’s proposal is limited to ‘urgent cases’ and organized crime, but the problem is that when the judiciary has been put out of the loop, the attorney general can basically decide these however he wants to,” said John Ackerman, a law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Without the intervention of a judge, the door swings wide open to widespread abuse of basic civil liberties.”
The proposal is being considered by a panel of the Mexican Senate. It is strongly opposed by members of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. Members of Calderon’s National Action Party have been lobbying senators from the former ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, for support.
Renato Sales, a former deputy prosecutor for Mexico City, said Calderon’s desire to expand federal policing powers to combat organized crime was parallel to the Bush administration’s use of a secret wiretapping program to fight terrorism.
“Suddenly anyone suspected of organized crime is presumed guilty and treated as someone without any constitutional rights,” said Sales, now a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “And who will determine who is an organized crime suspect? The state will.”
Federal lawmaker Cesar Octavio Camacho, president of the justice and human rights commission in the lower house of Congress, said he too worried about prosecutorial abuse.
“Although the proposal stems from the president’s noble intention of efficiently fighting organized crime,” he said, “the remedy seems worse than the problem.”
Carlos Martínez and Cecilia Sánchez of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau and Times staff writer Henry Weinstein in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
I think this is what in software jargon is referred to as a workaround–like the way we fund the war off budget,like the way we get other countries to do our torturing, like the way social security is being quietly destroyed, like the way Gonzales was going to by pass congress with his new appointments to the justice, like the way CO2 accounting is being done in Europe, and so on and so on…Fortunately for those doing the workarounds, they will be gone by the time accounts have to be reckoned.
jon
Connecting the dots: from human behaviors to ecosystem decline
http://StudentsForTheEarth.org
Another goofy scheme designed to keep the spurious “president” Calderon in power.
He has sent the army out to rampage all around the country–supposedly to combat narcotraficantes–but really to rape and pillage in the name of a war against organized crime.
What will he think of next?
The powers that be have been dismanteling the CIA for years. They want to privatize the CIA on the behalf of the wealthy in America to hid the facts that they use this nations National Security assets to enrich themselfs. The CIA is setting up a new CIA NSA listening post in Mexico under the illusion that Mexico is using a new wire tap system to catch drug dealers, to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, paid for by the United States tax payer. America’s private CIA based in Mexico will spy on America’s political system just like J E Hoover who blackmailed politicians for years. The corrupt mexican officials will work with the private american right wing CIA intelligence companies, who will be able to spy on any american with out a FISA warrant or government interference. Privatizing the CIA is pure evil. Putting our national security in the hands of vile men who have no regard for human life will b the death of this nations. Our advancement in sceince is being given away to want a be dictator, who’s long term goal is to enslave America by men, who think that they have a right to be above the law to save our freedom and our nation.
Gang leaders and other criminal bigwigs in prison are able to effectively communicate with their associates even when everything they do or write is subject to the closest scrutiny. Drug gangs spread across Mexico who can often rely on the aid and protection of corrupt authorities sure as hell aren’t going to have a problem communicating in ways that avoid electronic surveillance. Invasive surveillance measures are more effective at monitoring dissent then plucking criminal needles out of a haystack.
“Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration
of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)? I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that…. I’ve always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”
Lawrence Summers World Bank economist and Deputy Secretary of Treasury, in a 1991 internal memorandum
moonraven, quit whining. Your dinosaur wing ex-PRIista “legitimate president” is becoming more and more of a pathetic joke every day. And, the really sad thing, is that Calderon did not so much “win” as el legitimo lost by refusing to debate, refusing to meet with the Monterrey industrialists, dumping on the press, and generally acting like his Venezuelan paymaster. Even Madrazo would have been better, which is saying something.
Wiretapping for trade secrets not security.
Funny with all of the gov. intervention no one can stop the spam coming into my mailbox when somebody requests money or when they offer to give me a percentage of a transaction.
I think this is just a way to outsource more jobs. They are looking for tax evaders and small profiteers. They could care less about terrorism or they would have sealed the borders long ago.
About the spam-these people could very well be looking for money to sponsor terrorism. Yet it comes through with no restrictions.
JerryfromTijuana,
I never whine. And I did not support AMLO. I DO support Hugo Chavez–probably the only legitimately elected president in this hemisphere. And Chavez did not give any money to AMLO.
This is a progressive site–not a place for rightwing neanderthals like yourself to smear your propaganda. There are plenty of sites where you can do that.
When you are rotting in jail in TJ as a result of your civil rights being abrogated by this government, let me know–I will send you a postcard.
Jerry,
You didn’t offend me, but you are an annoying ankle-biter–and this is my last comment to you, as you are trying to convert this thread into an anti-AMLO rant. THAT strains the limits of my tolerance as his candicacy is not relevant to the topic of this article, and you are abusing your right to free speech here.
As a US citizen, I do not involve myself in Mexico’s poltical morass. Article 33 of the much-abused Consitution, remember? I have, however, direct experience of Murat’s style of governance in Oaxaca–and also his ridiculous auto-atentado when he was so high on booze and cocaine that he thought his reflection in the windshield was an assailant, and shot his SUV full of holes….
Chavez has been elected president 3 times and sustained in a referendum of his presidency–all 4 cases were declared clean elections by the EU, the OAS and the Carter Center–so that certainly gives him more legitimacy, legallly, than any other president in the hemisphere.
Forget trying to get me to take the bait on Fidel–his brain is worth 100 of yours.
Thus, the North American Union will be an absolute police state as all three regimes cooperate to set it up. Every step you take will be filmed, every word you speak will be processed and your media-conditioned mind filled up with commercial garbage. But if this is just too terrible to contemplate, don’t worry, ecocide is on its way to relieve us all of this insane society.
what about the spooks just flat-out blocking emails which are sent in efforts, say, to impeach public officials? does anyone have info on this?