Paralegal with U.S. Attorney's Office accused of tipping off Mexican drug cartel | Hacker News Reader

Paralegal with U.S. Attorney's Office accused of tipping off Mexican drug cartel

news4sanantonio.com

Make $50k government salary or make $200k tipping off the outlaws with information? Probably a lot of people choose the latter, in all sorts of industries...

Why would we be surprised that illegal organizations will be very interested in having moles at the higher places??

Government is not an invulnerable entity, akin to a magical/mystical creature that would be superior to the private sector in every case. It is just concentrated power with a legal monopoly on violence.

If anything, this concentration of power makes it a more appealing target -- see also regulatory capture.

Also, I'm surprised this doesn't happen more frequently. One person was caught, for how many that will never even be suspected??

Perhaps the US Attorneys Office should do a better job of vetting persons who have access to sensitive investigatory information.

This should be a must-read for engineers designing systems requiring security. Once you wrap your head around the sheer volume of vulnerabilities from the human angle, a lot of the "Zero trust" methods enshrined as best practices start to make a lot more sense.

Acquisitions like this one: https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/facebook-buys-secure-serve... early on were, in part, in online forums i was a part of at the time, ridiculed for being tinfoil-hat. Fast forward a few years and that would be laughable.

The history of Computer Science has been full of open collaboration and trusted, tight groups. We're now in a different world.

Outrageous. I hope it's just not true.

Such crimes could put lives in danger, fan flames of racism, etc. Horrible.

Side note, San Antonio is a wonderful city. Friendly people, good food, nice downtown.

I hope our downtown and food culture can survive the shutdown.

Off topic on HN.

The discussion of electronic surveillance in the complaint may be of interest to the HN community. See, e.g., paragraphs 17-20, which discuss records of the defendant accessing various documents that were outside her work duties.

https://www.scribd.com/document/461304335/Jennifer-Loya

However, it seems that her involvement was not discovered by any sophisticated surveillance, but by Cooperating Defendant #3, who told DEA officers about her. (Paragraph 14).

If it's interesting, it's on topic. HN is not just tech or startup. Here's the guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

It’s a stretch to call it interesting in that way, even if it ends up receiving a lot of upvotes and few flags. Is there anything that gratified your intellectual curiosity in the body of the article?

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