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Here’s all the high-tech gear cartels use to sneak drugs into the US
There's some seriously, complex tech behind sneaking drugs across the border.
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From stealth submarines to drones, cartels are becoming tech savvy to avoid detection.
Scroll down for a closer look.
In 2011, the police discovered that the Zeta drug cartel installed antennas and repeaters all over Mexico to communicate privately, Marc Goodman, the global security advisor and chair for Policy and Law at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, mentioned in his TED Talk. The radio network allowed the cartel to communicate over an encrypted line so the police couldn't listen in on the calls.
And it was a very sophisticated system: Zeta hid radio antennas and signal relay stations in hard-to-reach terrain and connected them to solar panels, Wired reported at the time. The facilities were then linked to radio-receiving cellphones and Nextel devices. Zeta actually kidnapped engineers to get the job done.
"Narcos are early adopters of robotics," Goodman, who is also the author of "Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World," told Tech Insider. "Narco subs were, for many years, carrying tons of tons of kilos of cocaine and landing on the shores of Mexico."
According to a US Foreign Military Studies Office report, 80% of the drugs smuggled into the US from Mexico were done via a maritime route, 30% of which coming on narco submarines. Submarines have been caught carrying as much as 7.5 tons of cocaine. The one you see above is a semi-submersible submarine that had 7 tons of cocaine when caught in 2009.
The submarines are fairly sophisticated, also. Cartels will build them with lead so they can't be detected using infrared, and because they sit below the water it's difficult to spot them with radar or sonar.
"Those will go autonomous, so of course they'll have autonomous underwater vehicles to transport narcotics," Goodman said.
No one has discovered a submarine transporting drugs autonomously, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And if it doesn't exist, it will soon, Goodman said.
This is something that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has seen and will continue to see as drone tech improves, Goodman said.
There have been many instances of drones getting caught attempting to smuggle drugs across the border, like the one that was caught carrying 28 pounds of heroine in August 2015. Border patrol said in April that they've seen a growing number of drones carrying drugs across the border, Fox News reported.
A 2014 California Attorney General Report describe the aircrafts as three-wheeled vehicles that use hang-gliders and single-propeller engines to fly. They can fly over 70 miles per hour. The report said there were 200 incidents involving ultralight aircraft and drug smuggling since 2008, when the first eight sightings were reported.
Cartels are spoofing the drones Homeland Security is using, meaning that they are able to counterfeit the GPS signal used to navigate the drones. Cartels are also doing something called jamming, which is when they jam the GPS signal. This makes it so drones can't figure out their own location and altitude causing them to eventually crash.
The Gulf Cartel set up 39 cameras recording 59 different vantage points for that very purpose, Fusion reported. The cameras were controlled via WiFi and had a modem, video data encoder and memory card.
Mexican drug cartels are known to use rocket launchers for defense. When a Mexican SWAT team stopped a car belonging to a cartel in 2012, they found three Soviet-made antitank rockets complete and an RPG-7 shoulder-fired launcher, Time reported.
Cartels have done everything from retrofitting dump trucks with steel to make tanks to building tanks with armored turrets and weapon bays on the side. Some are even equipped with battery rams to plow through traffic.
"They could use crude autonomous vehicles where they would auto rig a car to drive a few 100 yards with a bomb embedded in it," he said.
As driverless technology improves, it only makes sense that it would cartels might try to use it as well.
"We’ve wired the world but failed to secure it," Goodman added.
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