In a report titled “Results of Air Intelligence,” dated September 2020, SEDENA stated that “organized crime uses the airport infrastructure and the national airspace, taking advantage of the vacuum of authority due to the lack of capabilities of some agencies, lack of a legal framework and inefficient administrative processes”.
Observers expect that a lot of key findings will come out in the following weeks, as the leaks continue to reveal how the government has been spying on citizens, journalists, activists, and politicians. Mexican digital rights organization R3D, or Red en La Defensa de Los Derechos Digitales, has identified Pegasus infections against journalists and human rights defenders taking place between 2019 and 2021. The cases occurred after the Mexican president assured the public that the government no longer used the spyware and that there would be no further abuses.
The leaks also reveal that SEDENA made confidential reports of governors, mayors, local and federal legislators, as well as prosecutors in the states, in addition to lists with the data of the different candidates who participated in the last elections.
There are also reports about corruption and weaknesses in customs and how that facilitates the trafficking of drugs and products through the country’s entry and exit points. Politicians have sought out the armed forces themselves to connect contractors and service companies in the many important infrastructure projects they control. Among them is the Felipe Ángeles International Airport and the Mayan Train.
The former director of the Center for Investigation and National Security recently wrote in a Mexican publication that the leaks harm the Mexican state due to the government’s inability to protect the security infrastructure required by certain strategic areas.
In his article for Letras Libres, a Mexican magazine, Guillermo Valdés wrote, “The combination of these two evils, the absence of a national security policy and the scarcity of resources for the basic operation of security agencies, is behind the ineffective cybersecurity strategy of the Mexican State. A high-ranking official from the national security cabinet resigned a few months ago, fed up with the utter futility of his three-year efforts to push the cybersecurity strategy in government.”
Unlike Mexico’s president, Hope said the leaks are very damaging and concerning.
“These days, we have learned of the existence of arms trafficking networks fed from inside military camps, of corruption and money laundering in the contracting by the SEDENA of works and services, of openly illegal telephone interventions, carried out without judicial review. But we have also discovered that, in many cases, military personnel know and do not act, they are aware of possible homicides and do little or nothing to prevent them, they accumulate intelligence information on possible links between political actors and organized crime gangs and nothing is derived from that knowledge” he said.
Source: AP
