Inside Job: How a Hacker Helped Cocaine Traffickers Infiltrate Europe's Ports
occrp.org
occrp.org
Not that long in Belgium, in the port of Antwerp ("Anvers" in french), non-corrupt employees found a container with cocaine.
Before the authorities came to seize the shipment, corrupt cops tried to bribe the port custom employees to gain temporary access to the container (basically to steal part of the shipment before it'd be officially weighted).
I pity these people: when shipment go undetected, it's their fault. Then criminals try to bribe them. Then corrupt cops try to bribe them.
It's a sad state of affair.
Whether cocaine should be legal or not is another topic but it's not legal and there are killings related to cocaine traffic in Europe: consumers of cocaine have their share of responsibility too.
consumers of any product. consumers of chocolate are responsible for... consumers of electronics are responsible for... consumers of cotton are responsible for...
there's only so many options consumers really have. there are somethings you cannot vote with your wallet. blaming addicts teeters precariously towards victim blaming.
So the best is to minimize consumption, and obviously things like drugs, travel, and many things are not essential products
If legalized, the cost of distribution would crater to that of other products, just a few dollars per kg.
it's like saying: "it doesn't cost pollution to buy those avocadoes grown in another continent since they're already there", it's true immediately (above all if very ripe), but in the mid-long term, reducing consumption reduces production & pollution (at all level of the chain)
You can industrialize its production and get close to sugar level production pricing and distribution. Sugar sourced from Brazil hits my Toronto supermarket shelf bagged at CAD$1.50/kg at 99.9% purity, including retailer markup. Which is like 1/50000th the retail price of cocaine.
Even if it costs 10x as much due to lower volume/weaker extracts/slower growth/additional processing, you're talking a 99.9something% reduction in resource expenditure per dose.
Price of something is a good representation of the resources destroyed ("costs") in its production.
You can chew out the sugar or cocaine if you like.
(I think coca needs an acid base extraction to get a crystalline form, but that’s straightforward chemistry at scale)
If crude juice is extracted in Brazil and refined in Canada, I’m surprised that it is viewed as cost-effective to transport so much unneeded liquid by sea.
Sea transit is cheap, sugarcane grows better in the tropics than beets in cooler places. Harder to harvest below-ground stuff.
Canada used to subsidize/protect sugar beet producers (to keep them competitive), but largely got out of it.
Maybe that’s why we still refine it: because the plants still exist.
Nope it's not possible and it's more than obvious way.
The cocaine content in coca leaves is 0.23% to 0.96%. Sugarcane has a magnitude or so higher sugar content.
Cocaine is not a synthetic drug. Been around long before any human was walking around.
Yeah, have fun with that. I'm going to enjoy my life!
The choise is yours. I personally would go with (2) option, but its just me.
Before anyone hit the downvote button, think about it in math. You only have limited amount of resources and energy. How you distribute it, is up to you.
They are not victims and even the addicts are not absolved of responsibility for their actions.
If an alcoholic drives drunk and kills someone, they don’t get an exemption.
If you buy cocaine from dealers known to be violent, you don’t get an exemption either. More generally, if you buy cocaine that comes from a violent cartel (most of it), you’re supporting the cartel.
It’s a party drug, you have a choice. Check yourself into rehab if you don’t.
Friends of mine worked at customs both for the Belgian authorities and the US ones.
Antwerp did have a reputation for corruption. There’s too much money involved.
almost like those two are related
The forces who are, let's call it "not happy" with any form of security (access control, logging, monitoring, malware, RATs etc.) is insane.
At times I felt nearly half of all involved parties were corrupt. Top to bottom. Commercial and governmental.
Sold absolutely zero solutions and decided to never again deal with the whole industry.
Edit: for completeness I should add that many did not want any additional security measures since this might leave the traffickers no other choice but to get more physical.
How? It should be THE topic. Fucking stop all this bullshit waste of time and money and lives trying to police what fucking adults consume in their own home. How can anyone with a brain look at all the inane war on drugs and come to any other conclusion than all drugs should be legalized?
Let them buy it in a legal, controlled, licensed, tax paying store, like the adults they are.
Absolutely childish and the one of the biggest most consistently stupid thing we as a society do is prohibition of drugs. How many people will die, how many billions will we waste on the "war on drugs" (read, war on minorities and the poor) before we wisen the fuck up? It is actually insane that we continue to play this ridiculous game and pretend we can't ALL see what the solution is.
I have a hard time believing this story to be honest, most police corruption here would probably be a lot more covert, e.g. in the form of providing information or turning a blind eye at the right time.
Someone else already asked for a source and it’s yet to show up.
Link please.
> consumers of cocaine have their share of responsibility too
Arguably the gov't does also for creating the market by outlawing the stuff. But that's never discussed by anti-drugs people (BTW I'm not pro-drugs, before you assume)
Legalize drugs and the violence will end
Also unnecessary/avoidable deaths are only an issue if they are an outcome of violence or government restrictions if I understand correctly?
Technically we already have that with cigarettes and alcohol, so maybe it's time to drop the double-standards?
Uh, how many years of smoking or after how many years the cancer appears on average?
10? 20? 30?
Other drugs like cocaine/heroin will destroy your life way, way faster than that.
25+ for hard drugs, daily limits, mandate taxes go to facilities for treatment and rehabilitation. Take the hundreds of billions from the global black market for drugs and the tens of billions we spend impotently pretending to stop drug dealers with idiotic agencies like the DEA and all of the sudden we turn a GIGANTIC minus in our budget in to a GIGANTIC increase in funding.
So we can start with prescription drugs I assume? Unlimited access to OxyContin for everyone 25+. It's much safer than any illegally consumed opioids after all so what could go wrong? Oh wait..
> GIGANTIC increase in funding.
That's a silly claim unless you tax them to such an extent that black marker drugs become more competitive.
Not at all. First off, all the money we spend on the dea and other drug enforcement could be instantly recouped. Billions for those d.a.r.e clowns ALONE. Plus, I'd wager to say cost of legal production would be a lot lower than illegal production + illicit shipment to end users. That leaves plenty of room to make a decent buck on taxes. But yeah a big portion of money would come from all the idiotic shit we no longer would have to do with drugs legal.
No. That can't happen unless the tax are extremely high which makes black market drugs more competitive. Also it should be perfectly obvious that full legalization would also significantly decrease costs for illegal producers as well.
> But yeah a big portion of money would come from all the idiotic shit we no longer would have to do with drugs legal.
Hard to believe since you don't actually have any figures to show.
>unlimited access to oxycontin
Did you even read what you quoted? Who said Unlimited?
It's not uncommon for people to "grow out" of a supposed "addiction"
Which is a problem created by the stupid “war on drugs”. If you make it impossible for parties to access the legal system to resolve any disputes, you’re forcing them to resolve them via extrajudicial means.
You don’t generally hear about killings within the traffic of any other commodity such as vegetables or IT goods. In fact we don’t even call it “traffic” but just trade.
Of course you do, especially if you’re in Mexico where the cartels have now expanded beyond drugs. A web search for "mexican cartels avocados" might do you well.
Another example is vanilla in Madagascar, where dozens of murders have occurred. Beyond local turf fights, Russian and Chinese organized crime has been involved in Madagascar’s spice and hardwood sectors for many years now.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spanish-police-seize-74....
If you're into 'real crime' and all this cocaine smuggling and all the accompanying banditry is of interest to you, I can recommend some channels on Youtube. Just search for 'Holland Crime Boulevard' or 'mocro mafia', etc.
There has been an ongoing feud since 2012 over a missing shipment of 200kg cocaine with a lot of murders. Even murders of the family of a crown witness, lawyer and a famous crime journalist. Pretty recently there was a discovery of underground containers setup to torture people. Ridouan Taghi and his organisation worked together with Italian and Irish mobsters. Well, I wasn't there, but that's what the media portrays. Also, this is probably not one group, but there were all kinds of groups working together once in a while.
They all have a mutual benefit of clear division of responsibilities in the journey - and thus will reduce the inter-group feuds from trying to branch out.
The underground market can be incredibly efficient.
> The large number of port and transport personnel who are able to view these reference numbers — in some cases up to 10,000 people in a single shipping company — provides traffickers with many targets.
This is equivalent to storing passwords in plaintext. A code that is needed to actually access the goods (i.e. used as a password) should be stored as a cryptographic hash or signature, and then only the right parties can verify that signature, with middle men having no access to it.
No, it won't solve all forms of corruption, but it will take thousands of people out of the "bribable" (or worse, "intimidatable", as the article explains) category.
For example, in a perfectly-secure system, how hard would it be to delegate access to someone (we assume the reason for delegation is legitimate)? If it's harder than writing down the access code and/or texting them then it's a downgrade. Is there a contingency process to keep working if your (obviously outsourced) SSO provider is down, or your machine is applying updates, or your browser is pestering you to leave feedback and trying to convince you to switch to their search engine before it'll let you access the system's access control page? Etc.
> breaking into the encrypted chat platform SkyECC
Psychical access to a device or something more technical…
"About a billion messages were intercepted, about half of which had been decrypted by April 2021—further avenues of inquiry were expected to open as decryption progressed"
They also suddenly claim all the users that got intercepted were using "elaborate fake" SkyECC apps and services, yet oddly those same "fake" apps could talk with actual SkyECC users, so, y'know. Grains of salt.
It is unclear how the decryption was made, but it talks about how the servers were tapped into including RAM access!
Teasing! I wonder how.
Thanks for sharing.
On Linux, there’s for example Lime if you have root.
On windows there’s various other tools, some commercial, some open source. All require admin privs.
If you have access to the hypervisor it’s even easier - just direct the hypervisor to dump the VM’s RAM to a file. Most hypervisor tools have a utility for this.
If you have only physical access it’s a bit trickier, but if there’s an available PCIe slot and you are very careful it’s possible to dump RAM that way on a live system :)
Or be too bad to get any other job. This in turn breeds a terrible environment of mediocrity which immediately extinguishes any promising talent that may (accidentally) join.