A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official's phone records and use Mexico City's surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency's informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday. The incident was disclosed in a Justice Department Inspector General's audit, opens new tab of the FBI's efforts to mitigate the effects of "ubiquitous technical surveillance," a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data.   https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/sinaloa-cartel-hacked-phones-surveillance-cameras-find-fbi-informants-doj-says-2025-06-27/   via   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407029   from comments at HN link:     RRWagner 4 hours ago | next [–]   >The most important take-away of the story is that if the government has the power to gather all available data of people, sooner or later the same information will be in the hands of criminals targeting those same people. reply   Arubis 3 hours ago | parent | next [–]   >And oftentimes the government and the criminals will be the same people—if not at the beginning then by convergence. reply   OutOfHere 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–]   >Furthermore, the government is complicit in the intentional insecurity of the phone networks, protocols, and operating systems.