Apparently, they're not above acquiring IT staff by kidnapping and forced labor. Like the Nextel techs described here, who are probably being forced into maintaining one cartel's private cell phone network:
> She says in 2009, a group of Nextel technicians who were repairing cell towers in Tamaulipas were abducted from their hotel.
Fascinating. You're fixing a tower in the morning and then you're forced to work for some crazy cartel boss for the rest of your life. These people are destroying honest families.
I'm going to guess low-tech. If I were running a dangerous, cutthroat business, I certainly wouldn't trust my profits, life, or freedom to anything I didn't understand completely. Having an IT department puts Chapo's sysadmin(s) in a position to stage a coup that he can't detect or address until it's too late.
> 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,"
That's interesting...I wonder if these ships are actually getting inspected now (since the article is from 2002) since they are a known transportation vessel.
> The mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining software.
> Most of the cartels' technology is American-made; many of the experts who run it are American-trained.
American-trained or Americans? I wonder if 'hackers' actually go to these countries to earn some big bucks while developing some "cutting-edge" technologies.
I remember reading an article (That I cannot seem to find at the moment) about US border agents stopping a Cartel submarine dead in its tracks. What they found is a minimalistic submarine, capable of transporting a small load of product to a destination. They've found other submarines that have sunk due to their bad quality.
I think we're confusing actual military submarines with a makeshift version.
