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I disagree, this sounds _exactly_ like what the drug cartels have been doing in Mexico for years. They build their own network so they can bypass the government
by downrightmike 4y ago
I disagree, this sounds _exactly_ like what the drug cartels have been doing in Mexico for years. They build their own network so they can bypass the government. It makes more sense that they are connecting their operations further up north given the amount of security upgrades that the USA has been doing recently.
One Example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-specialreport/special-report-drug-cartel-narco-antennas-make-life-dangerous-for-mexicos-cell-tower-repairmen-idUSKCN24G1DN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-s...
"Crypto" is just a buzzword that people who don't understand tech jump to as a kneejerk reaction.
- mikeyouse 4y agoThere would be no reason for cartels to establish parallel cellular networks in Salt Lake City of all places.. and these devices don't sound remotely like what the cartels were doing - you need backhaul to have a cell site - these are remote mesh wifi devices. All of the cartel ones are 'parasitic' where they use the actual cell site's hardware to provide a standalone antenna.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoThe Mexican cartels use actual cell/mobile equipment, and have kidnapped engineers from South Texas to gain additional technical knowledge. Also, these areas surround SLC are not territory they're trying to control in the same way. What utility would there be in this network vs simply using encrypted communication over the internet? On the other hand, solar powered mining with just good enough radios to do C2 and send back any hashes found would be an exact match to this scale of equipment.
- Manuel_D 4y agoBut why not just install solar panels on your house? Or legally, in some remote property? On top of the mountain is probably one of the most expensive places to deploy infrastructure. The elevation is almost certainly to provide radio reception coverage.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoThere's networks like Helium that are based around LoraWAN mesh IoT miners. Assuming there's some financial advantage to having maximal connectivity to other miners, putting a few on the mountains above a major metro area seems like a very straightforward idea.
- boring_twenties 4y agoIt's not above a major metro area though, it's above Salt Lake City.
- RF_Enthusiast 4y agoThe Salt Lake City Metropolitan Statistical Area is #24 as ranked by population, so it depends what one would consider "major". To me, top 25 seems major, but to someone else top 20 would be major. I don't think "major" in the context of metro areas is an official term.
- Retric 4y agoI’ve heard major metro area as roughly being top 100 cities in the world which Salt Lake City is nowhere close to. If anything Salt Lake seems about average size for a city, it’s just located in the middle of nowhere which makes it seem more important. This is also why they need this kind of backup communication system so close to the city.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoYeah, let's just derail into a subthread bickering about what threshold counts as a major metro area, vs meaningfully engaging with the actual topic at hand. This place is cursed with the worst pointless nerd sniping behavior.
- Retric 4y ago
- flatline 4y agoWhy on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them? This seems like the kind of specialized knowledge you cannot meaningfully get out of someone with a $5 wrench, just how they hire lawyers and other professionals to work with existing modern infrastructure that you cannot just avoid.
- giantg2 4y agoWhy would they pay someone when they could kidnap them, like they've done to many others?
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoYou vastly underestimate how intense the cartels are. They want total control, not bribes. One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions. I don't want to go into the details of the torture because its bad stuff, involving cannibalism even. If you are morbidly curious there's a couple interviews with survivors you can find somewhere on youtube. And this is far from the only instance of this sort of thing. Sinaloa has been known to kidnap entire buses and make folks fight to the death, winner gets the dubious honor of becoming a member. These are people who assume every single person in their world is plotting to overthrow them in an instant, and leave nothing to chance vs that. They don't want to hope their bribe is enough to keep you loyal, they want to know you're loyal because you've seen them torture to death countless people. You don't get any agency in the matter.
- toephu2 4y agoHow do you know all this? Were you a former member?
- playingalong 4y agoI don't think organizations like this have any former members.
- metadat 4y agoThe drug angle doesn't make much sense in Utah. This State trends towards prescription drug abuse [0] [1], and aggressively prosecutes drug offenses to the max. How could antennas be relevant? [0] https://www.deseret.com/2008/1/31/20067144/happy-valley-delves-into-drug-abuse-in-utah https://www.deseret.com/2008/1/31/20067144/happy-valley-delv... [1] https://imdb.com/title/tt1263682/ https://imdb.com/title/tt1263682/
- iforgotpassword 4y agoWeren't they at least installing their stuff on existing towers etc to make it less obvious? Planting big solar panels into the landscape must be the stupidest attempt at creating a secret cell network...
- RF_Enthusiast 4y agoWhat you say sounds possible and plausible, although I would not immediately discount crypto, as the Helium map does show some cells in unpopulated areas in the hills surrounding the SLC metro. They should be able to eliminate Helium as the culprit if they're able to inspect what's in the box, as Helium needs a Helium-sanctioned box, from my understanding.
- Manuel_D 4y agoWhat does this provide that an encrypted cellphone messenger app does not? I'm sure they have the know how to acquire SIMs through intermediaries to remain anonymous. That's probably a lot less suspicious than setting up random radio towers, in fact this story is evidence of that. Presumably self-operated infrastructure could expand comms to remote areas that don't normally have cell service. They makes sense in stretches of the southern border. But right outside salt lake city is covered by cell access.
- mike_d 4y agoCell phones are basically locator beacons for the police. The cartels know this. It's not worth discussing the specifics in the open, but the investigative techniques have gotten good enough that even "anonymous" SIM cards don't buy you anything.
- Manuel_D 4y agoA radio is inherently a locator beacon. Radio direction finding has been a cornerstone of signals intelligence for over a century. A cell phone sending encrypted messages over Signal or WhatsApp is way less suspicious than a radio mysteriously appearing on a hill. Just get a patsy to buy a normal sim card - not an "anonymous sim card" - I'm sure cartels are easily able to do this.
- mike_d 4y agoSure but one is inherently more difficult (radio direction finding) than the other (having your phone constantly beacon to a dense network of towers). What I was alluding to is when you have full access to the cellular network, there are other indicators that can be used to task tracking other than just the SIM card. You don't need to know that phone X is person Y, you just need to know that phone X fits the criteria of how a drug mule operates.
- Manuel_D 4y ago> you just need to know that phone X fits the criteria of how a drug mule operates. And my point is that this is way, way harder than looking out the window and noticing a radio tower perched on a hilltop that wasn't there before. It's far more clandestine to obtain security through obscurity even if it means operating in a network controlled by the authorities. Encrypted traffic looks like any other encrypted traffic. There's little to make a drug dealer stand out from other cell phone traffic, unless they're communicating over cleartext.
- ricardo81 4y agoIf they keep popping up after these initial ones are taken down, I guess that's leads towards the idea of whoever is doing it has a big incentive to do it. Would think that crypto would have too long a payback esp if the equipment keeps disappearing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- runjake 4y agoThese units are far too small and low-powered to be cartel cell towers. The towers they're building in Mexico are more or less normal towers, supplemented by COW trailers (larger units with generator+solar). Cartels in CONUS are typically using regular cell and satellite phones. Ostensibly, the NSA and the various military "Activities" aren't paying attention to CONUS communications, unless it's near the border. There isn't enough information in the article to reasonably tell what they're designed for. If someone wants to post actual photos of the hardware, that would be swell.
- Kiro 4y ago> "Crypto" is just a buzzword that people who don't understand tech jump to as a kneejerk reaction. Very strange thing to say when the parent explained exactly why this could be crypto and why it's plausible. Do you know how Helium works? Do a Google Image Search on "helium crypto solar power" and you will see many devices that look like that.
- giantg2 4y agoI would think that if it was organized crime, the feds would be all over it already. Even stuff like pirate radio gets tracked and shutdown fairly quickly. I'd imagine the FBI still has significant sigint ops, even if they might be less extensive than during the cold war.
- HomeLine 4y agoWouldn’t their best course of action be to locate the towers, hack into them, and continue to allow them to operate?
- giantg2 4y agoYes, but if they were taking that action, they would have instructed the public land officials on a cover story, not allowing them to create a mystery out of and open those boxes.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoImagining movie style capers like this is emotionally engaging but pretty distant from the reality of these situations. Assuming you can put lightning into a bottle is extremely dangerous. Most police work involves a lot of methodical boring stuff, not a brilliant technical deception.
- giantg2 4y agoSo the "hack into them" part isn't quite right. But they certainly do intercept and analyze various signals. Which is generally the boring and tedious part. But right or wrong, it is sort of the standard play for the feds to let some criminal activity continue to gather additonal intel.
- bastawhiz 4y agoWhich drug cartels are operating out of public lands in Utah? How did they get there? How has nobody noticed them? Why do drug cartels have interest in the snowy peaks of the SLC foothills of all places? Why are they just in the foothills and not checks notes all the way through Arizona to Mexico?
- walrus01 4y agoA cartel land mobile radio or cellular setup would be considerably more power hungry than this.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoI may be stereotyping, but in my experience there is a strong ham community within the LDS Church. My first reaction was to assume something ham related, not drug cartel.
- geocrasher 4y agoProfiling isn't stereotyping, but cancel culture seems to think it is. I'm not LDS but I didn't think it offensive. I am an amateur radio operator however, and I think it likely if for no other reason than the fact that there's a disproportionally large crossover in demographics between the two groups. In fact, as a young adult I worked at a commercial and ham radio shop that was owned by LDS folks.
- twothamendment 4y agoHam radio doesn't need to litter the area with these little setups. The Wasatch front already has a bunch of strong mountain top repeaters, some can even be tied together. Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_Intertie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_Intertie
- kawfey 4y agoIME/O, hams and LDS alike tend to go above board when setting up infrastructure like this, and I feel they'd be quite public about their existence. Some ham radio repeaters atop high-rise buildings I know of are kind of sketchy (such as when someone in the local radio club makes friendly with building engineers/management so they don't have to pay commercial leasing fees or go through HOA baloney, and will sometimes keep the location a secret to avoid attention), but the vast majority are listed on publicly available databases like RepeaterBook, ARTSCIPUB, RFinder, ARRL Repeater Directory, and/or each state's repeater coordination directory, or the AREDN mesh directory, or other ham radio WAN sites. Since SLC is still totally clueless as to who put these up, it rules out LDS Hams for me.
- pinkcan 4y agomeh, you're writing comes of as defensive if you still have money tied up in crypto you can still try and sell it
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- patchorang 4y agoI don’t understand why the cartel would put these in such an obvious location. (But I also don’t understand why anyone would…) They seem to be in obvious, high traffic areas. The one mentioned in the video is a short hike from the Utah capitol building. If you hike at all and live in salt lake, this is where you go. Especially in the winter. It seems like they were asking to be found. It’s certainly less in the winter, but in the summer hundreds of people would hike or bike past this everyday.
- stickfigure 4y agoYou might be on to something. I hear the Utah drug cartels are responsible for all the beheadings plaguing Salt Lake City.
- kemotep 4y agoWhat beheadings have happen in Salt Lake City recently? All I can find is an incident that happened in Arches National Park but that one was an accident with a gate not an assault by someone involved in gang activity.
- Zigurd 4y agoYou cannot power more than a femtocell with a solar panel, and these are too far out in wilderness with no wired backhaul to be a plausible mobile mobile network. In parts of Mexico you can take over a house and a power source to put up a real cell site.