Slopcraft: How FBI Killed Own Informants in Mexico

A newly released FBI audit reveals shocking operational security failures that should make Cold War veterans cringe if not cry.

In 2018, during the “El Chapo” investigation, the FBI made mistakes so elementary they belong in a what not to do textbook—and many people were tortured and killed.

The Mexico City Disaster

The June 2025 OIG report describes a catastrophic breach where privately funded hackers systematically identified and tracked FBI personnel:

“In 2018, while the FBI was working on the ‘El Chapo’ drug cartel case, an individual connected to the cartel contacted an FBI case agent. This individual said that the cartel had hired a ‘hacker’ who offered a menu of services related to exploiting mobile phones and other electronic devices. According to the individual, the hacker had observed people going in and out of the United States Embassy in Mexico City and identified ‘people of interest’ for the cartel, including the FBI Assistant Legal Attache (ALAT), and then was able to use the ALAT’s mobile phone number to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data, associated with the ALAT’s phone.”

And it gets worse:

“According to the FBI, the hacker also used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the ALAT through the city and identify people the ALAT met with. According to the case agent, the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

I am reminded of an investigation in 2000 when my flight to Russia was cancelled last minute. My supervisor blocked the work, related to the fact that coordination with the embassy there may have leaked to Russian technology firm executives who would order a hit. I did everything I could to go, but the leaks were considered too dangerous, and I still wonder to this day if I could have made it out alive. That was 25 years ago.

How Could This Happen Now?

This wasn’t some sophisticated hack, and it wasn’t even an exploit. This was a failure of basic tradecraft that any intelligence professional should have known since the early 1980s:

  • Never assume embassy visitors aren’t being watched
  • Never trust electronic devices in hostile environments
  • Never use predictable patterns or meeting locations
  • Never underestimate local corruption and surveillance capabilities

The FBI’s own assessment admits this threat has been around for dog years:

“Although the risks posed by UTS to the FBI’s criminal and national security operations have been longstanding, recent advances in commercially available technologies have made it easier than ever for less-sophisticated nations and criminal enterprises to identify and exploit vulnerabilities created by UTS.”

The Real Problem: American Hubris

What makes this even more inexcusable is that the FBI knew about these vulnerabilities. The Counterintelligence Division had conducted an extensive analysis called “Anatomy of a Case” that identified these exact risks. But when the FBI formed a “Red Team” to address the problem, they essentially ignored those findings:

“Although CD presented the results of its findings to the Red Team, we were not provided with evidence that the Red Team incorporated or even considered many of the specific vulnerabilities identified in CD’s analysis. In fact, we were told during the audit that the Red Team opted to keep its gap analysis at a high level with an emphasis on generalized UTS policy and training gaps.”

Mexico: a Comms Storm Obvious From Million Miles Away

Operating in Mexico should have triggered maximum paranoia. Consider the environment:

  • Corruption: Wealthy elites have infiltrated government, telecommunications, and security services at every level
  • Technical capability: Elites employ sophisticated hackers and have access to commercial surveillance tools
  • Stakes: Billions of dollars in private wealth at stake make intelligence gathering worth massive investment
  • Ruthlessness: Wealthy elites (e.g. monarchs, cartels, power/transit execs) are known to routinely torture and murder suspected informants

Somehow the FBI thought they would sloppily operate in hostile corrupted foreign environments using the same casual approach they might have thought sufficient in corrupted Texas.

“Existential” Threat

The audit notes that officials from both the FBI and CIA described these technological surveillance threats as “existential.” Yet the FBI’s response was described as:

“disjointed and inconsistent”

The audit found that despite multiple divisions working on the problem, there was no enterprise-wide coordination. Different units were duplicating efforts while leaving massive gaps unaddressed.

Global Pattern of Failure

The Mexico case wasn’t isolated. The audit describes multiple examples of technological surveillance being used against FBI operations:

“The leader of an organized crime family suspected an employee of being an FBI informant. To confirm this suspicion, the leader went through the call logs for the suspected employee’s cell phone looking for phone numbers that may be connected to law enforcement.”

What the FBI refused to admit, despite loss of life, is how dramatically the surveillance landscape has changed. Commercial data brokers, facial recognition systems, cell phone tracking, and financial transaction monitoring have created an environment where:

  1. Every electronic device can be compromised
  2. Every transaction means a trail
  3. Camera systems everywhere: installed, accessed or corrupted
  4. Every communications channel may be monitored

In Mexico specifically, where threats have billions to spend and government corruption is endemic (arguably not unlike America under Trump), assuming any electronic security is foolish.

The Human Cost

The audit’s clinical language obscures the human tragedy. When it says the cartel used the information to “intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses,” it’s describing torture and murder of people who trusted the FBI to protect them.

These weren’t abstract security failures—they were death sentences handed out through institutionalized safety anti-patterns of incompetence or willful disregard.

Basic Lessons Ignored

The most damning aspect is that this wasn’t a learning experience. The audit, conducted years later, found the FBI still struggling with basic coordination and still making elementary mistakes. As one section notes:

“we do not believe that the initial effort of the Red Team to identify the specific, enterprise-wide risks was adequate, potentially leaving several UTS-related threats unmitigated.”

Basic operational security in Mexico should have included:

  • Assuming all electronic devices are compromised
  • Using air-gapped, disposable communications
  • Meeting sources far from official facilities
  • Employing multiple cutouts and intermediaries
  • Rotating personnel and patterns constantly
  • Treating every interaction as potentially monitored

Instead, the FBI walked sources into obvious embassy surveillance zones while carrying trackable phones as if waving a huge flag that said “target here”.

Broad Implications for American National Securiry

This isn’t just about the FBI. Every law enforcement and intelligence agency faces these same technological threats. The difference is competent agencies adapt tradecraft, which should have been decades ago.

The FBI’s failures in Mexico reveal an institution that was:

  • Overconfident
  • Underestimating
  • Failing to coordinate
  • Ignoring internal assessments
  • Causing fatal risks through negligence and willful disregard

The Mexico City case represents more than operational security failure—it’s institutional hubris with deadly consequences.

When billion-dollar private entities (e.g. Facebook, Palantir, Anduril) can employ sophisticated hackers and have corrupted entire government systems, operating with pre-WWI tradecraft isn’t just stupid, it’s criminal negligence.

The fact that people died because FBI personnel couldn’t grasp basic concepts that any Cold War operative would have understood should be a career-ending scandal for everyone involved in the operational chain.

Instead, it took years of auditing to even acknowledge the problem, and the FBI’s response has been to form committees and write strategic plans while continuing to make the same fundamental mistakes.

In an environment where wealthy elites pay hackers to compromise the entire foundation of public communications, there is no excuse for this level of operational incompetence.

None.

Sunflower Supremacy: When an Art Historian Should Van Gogh F*ck Himself

I grew up around the pleasant sunflower. Perhaps I took it for granted, but Native American art presented thousands of years of expressing the variations of sunflower respect.

Never, ever did I consider any European impressions of a sunflower anything more than a footnote by late movers who never really quite understood or captured the proper context of the natural power flowing over endless prairie hills, which a sunflower could survive. You want to see strength? Crawl out of a tornado bunker after torrential rains to find a sunflower being baked by a blazing sun.

Sunflowers after a deadly EF-4 tornado went through Barnsdall, Oklahoma. Source: News on 6

The BBC thus has just achieved something remarkable by throwing away all basic history and instead publishing a tone-deaf article about a sunflower having symbolism that only begins in… 1568.

Unlike many other symbols in art history, the sunflower is relatively new. They are native to the Americas and were only introduced to the “Old World” following Columbus’s explorations and European colonisation in the 16th Century. When they were successfully cultivated and propagated in Europe, the fact that immature sunflowers move their faces to follow the sun (a phenomenon known as heliotropism) became the plants’ most compelling feature, which fundamentally shaped its symbolic meanings. In 1568, the botanist Giacomo Antonio Cortuso, linked the flower to an ancient mythological character…

What? It’s like reading a treatise on the law of gravity that says it didn’t exist before Galileo started playing with his balls. The structure of the short-sighted BBC argument is that “the history of sunflower symbolism” only started when the violence of European foreign extraction decided to pay attention to one of their imports. Next the BBC will opine how water wasn’t wet until King Charles decided to tax people for inland ships and someone complained any boat that doesn’t float isn’t a boat.

Oh British writers, where would we all be if we didn’t get to ready your peculiar form of intellectual provincialism whereby your own ignorance is presented and undeniable universal absence. Van Gogh’s paintings are as revolutionary as the English laying claim to have found tea, conveniently blind to traditions developing forever before him. This represents a category error of impressive scope. The conflation of “European discovery” with anything actually having a “beginning” produces the same logical fallacy as claiming that fire was invented when the first Tesla rolled off the assembly line and crashed into a tree burning everyone inside to death. Before that? Not a real fire, not expressionist enough.

What the BBC presents us is the disgusting “colonial solipsism” that should have been made illegal around the same time slavery was banned—the systematic inability to conceive that knowledge might exist independently of a particular race claiming the first observation. It is philosophy of the most impoverished sort: the mistake of one’s own limitations for the limits of reality itself. The inability to wonder. The cultural bankruptcy of the BBC article is to deny a thousand years of indigenous sunflower iconography from being acknowledged. Who knows why this can still happen in 2025? Is it too much to ask for the modest effort of learning something not already pre-masticated by self-congratulatory institutions of white superiority?

The BBC’s history isn’t just wrong; it’s a continuation of racist colonial scaffolding that undermines knowledge and should have been dismantled generations ago.

Tesla Robotaxi Crime Stopped by Driver, to Prevent Crash Into BIG Brown Truck

Tesla Robotaxis have been in multiple dangerous incidents and harrowing near misses, in the first hours of “launching” just 10 of them with human oversight. Here’s another example.

On the right side of this screenshot you see the human oversight. Let’s be honest, it’s a driver in the wrong seat.

Tesla Robotaxis put their driver in the wrong seat and give them an unreliable touchscreen to prevent crashes

There are a million reasons NOT to put the driver in the wrong seat. And the only reason to put them there is… propaganda.

The driver in this case is putting their hand on the console because they are trying to stop their Tesla from crashing into the back of a BIG brown truck.

Perhaps most notably you can see the human driver recognize the problem and begin moving towards taking control for five very long seconds (count them out 1…2…3…4…5…) before punching the emergency touchscreen.

Now imagine the touchscreen doesn’t respond or fails.

Even a very slow moving disaster in the most obvious location on the clearest day with bright markings is still far too much for Tesla engineers to handle.

And when you listen to the tone-deaf dialogue, the Tesla driver pushes into a known dangerous blind spot of the BIG truck and says “UPS car is very close to us” instead of admitting cause:

The Tesla Robotaxi algorithm strongly displays reckless driving charges under Section 545.401, which prohibits “willful or wanton disregard for safety.”

Key evidence:

  1. 5-second observation period – proves awareness of the backing truck
  2. Deliberate swerving to the right into path of truck – shows conscious choice to disregard obvious risk
  3. Interference with backing vehicle – violates right-of-way requirements

I am told this is a $200 fine and 30 days in jail for reckless driving, plus additional charges for failure to yield.

Arguably having ten of these dangerous Tesla on the road with the same criminal software suggests a multiple. Could Texas impose $2,000 and 300 days in jail since all the cars have the same flaw?

Civil Liability Analysis

Texas uses comparative negligence with a 51% bar rule. The UPS truck fulfilled a duty to back safely, so the Tesla driver would likely bear majority fault (70-80%):

  1. Extended five second observation period proving awareness
  2. Deliberate interference with properly signaled backing maneuver
  3. Violation of general duty to maintain safe following distance, as admitted by the Tesla “too close” comment

Responsibilities

UPS Truck duties Ensure backing can be completed safely, maintain proper signals, yield right-of-way to through traffic when necessary
Tesla duties Maintain assured clear distance, exercise reasonable care, yield to vehicles already occupying parking spaces

It is that excruciatingly long five second observation period that is crucial evidence that transforms this from a typical backing accident into potential criminal conduct by Tesla.

While backing vehicles bear a primary responsibility under Texas law, the Tesla algorithm making a deliberate swerve into a truck’s path after observing the truck creates both criminal reckless driving liability and substantial civil fault.

Tesla should thus face criminal charges and majority civil liability, because of how it behaved after clearly observing a UPS truck fulfilling it’s technical duty to back up safely.