The surveillance tools used by the Mexican government

The hacking of the Guacamaya group into the computer systems of the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena) offered further evidence of a varied list of surveillance and espionage actions by the Mexican government, including during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Among the files leaked by the hacktivist group, the Network in Defense of Digital Rights, along with Article 19, Social TIC and the media Political Animal, Aristegui News y Process confirmed the existence of a document that proves the contracting of a remote information monitoring system by the Sedena in April 2019.

The links between institutions of the Mexican State and companies that offer surveillance technology are a constant that has been demonstrated on several occasions in recent years:

• Cellebrite UFED – Cellebrite:

According to an investigation by René Valencia and Karla Cejudo for e-consultation and CONNECTthe federal government spent at least 18.4 million pesos on devices for forensic analysis and extraction of brand information Cellebrite through the intermediary Nuga Sys SA de CV, between 2018 and 2021.

• Geomatrix – Rayzone Group:

In April 2021, the newspaper The country published that the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR), run by Alejandro Gertz Manero, spent 5.6 million dollars on software licenses Geomatrixa geolocation system that allows knowing the exact location of any cell phone device, between the years 2019 and 2020.

The software Pegasus it is among the most prolific considering the number of victims it has infected, or at least the most indiscreet. Simón Barquera, Alejandro Calvillo, Luis Encarnación, Sebastián Barragán, Carlos Loret de Mola, Daniel Lizárraga, Salvador Camarena, Carmen Aristegui and their son, three members of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Center and two from the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), Ricardo Anaya, members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), who visited Mexico to investigate the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, the lawyers in the so-called Narvarte case, in which five people were tortured and murdered in this neighborhood of the Mexican capital on July 31, 2015 and journalists from the Sinaloan weekly Río Doce, Andrés Villareal and Ismael Bojórquez, as well as Griselda Triana, widow of the founder of this weekly Javier Valdez, are among the civilians spied on by Pegasus during the Enrique Peña Nieto administration, to which during the López Obrador administration have been added at least three more people.

• Galileo / DaVinci – Hacking Team:

A violation of the Italian firm Hacking Team revealed in 2015 that the Mexican government was among the most frequent buyers of its remote control tool Galileo / Da Vinciwhich allows remote control of smartphones.

• FinFisher – Gamma International:

An investigation by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in 2013 revealed that spy software Fine fisherof the company Gamma International It had been detected in the networks of the telecommunications operators Iusacell and Uninet. the mexican newspaper Remodeling announced that the administration of former President Felipe Calderón acquired the software at a price of 109 million 327,680 pesos. ()

rodrigo.riquelme@eleconomista.mx

kg