Business 2.0 - The Technology

Business 2.0 - The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc.: (via Slashdot)

"Colombian cartels have spent billions of dollars to build one of the world's most sophisticated IT infrastructures. [...] A high-level DEA official would go only this far: "It is very reasonable to assume that people were killed as a result of this capability. Potential sources of information were compromised by the system. [...] The drug lords have deployed advanced communications encryption technologies that, law enforcement officials concede, are all but unbreakable. They use the Web to camouflage the movement of dirty money. They track the radar sweeps of drug surveillance planes to map out gaps in coverage. 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," says John Hensley, former head of enforcement for the U.S. Customs Service. Most of the cartels' technology is American-made; many of the experts who run it are American-trained.High-tech has become the drug lords' most effective counter-weapon in the war on drugs"

Colombian Cartels built (10 years ago) an advanced data mining application that was used to sniff out traitors.