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With US Funding, Mexico Tracks Communication
By Sam Enriquez
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 25 May 2007
Mexico City - Mexico is expanding its ability to tap telephone calls and e-mail
using money from the U.S. government, a move that underlines how the country's
conservative government is increasingly willing to cooperate with United States
on law enforcement.
The expansion comes as President Felipe Calderon is pushing to amend Mexico's
constitution to allow officials to tap phones without a judge's approval in
some cases.
Mexican authorities for years have been able to wiretap most telephone conversations
and tap into e-mail, but the new $3 million Communications Intercept System
being installed by Mexico's Federal Investigative Agency would expand its reach.
The system would allow authorities to track cell-phone users as they travel,
according to the contract specifications. It would include extensive storage
capacity and allow authorities to identify callers by voice. The system, scheduled
to begin operation within the next month, was paid for by the U.S. State Department
and sold by Verint Systems Inc., a politically connected company based in Melville,
N.Y., that specializes in electronic surveillance.
Documents describing the upgrade suggest that the U.S. government could have
access to information derived from the surveillance. Officials of both governments
declined to comment on that possibility.
"It is a government of Mexico operation, funded by the U.S.," said
Susan Pittman, of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics
and Law Enforcement Affairs. Questions over its use should be directed to Mexico,
she said.
Calderon's office declined comment.
But the U.S. government's contract specifications say the system is designed
to allow both governments to "disseminate timely and accurate, actionable
information to each country's respective federal, state, local, private and
international partners."
Calderon has been lobbying for more authority to use electronic surveillance
against drug smuggling. Already this year, drug wars have cost hundreds of lives
and threatened Calderon's ability to govern.
Despite federal troops posted in nine Mexican states, the violence continues
as smugglers fight over shipping routes to the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as
for control of Mexican port cities and marijuana- and poppy-growing regions
inland.
It's unclear how broad a net the new surveillance system would cast: Mexicans
speak regularly by phone, for example, with millions of relatives living in
the U.S. Those conversations appear to be fair game for both governments.
Within the United States, legal experts say that if prosecutors have access
to Mexican wiretaps, they could use the information in U.S. courts. Supreme
Court decisions have held that Fourth Amendment protections against illegal
wiretaps do not apply outside the United States, particularly if the surveillance
is conducted by another country, said Georgetown University law professor David
Cole.
Mexico's telecommunications monopoly, Telmex, controlled by Carlos Slim, the
world's second wealthiest individual, has not received official notice of the
new system that will intercept its electronic signals, a spokeswoman said this
week.
"Telmex is a firm that always complies with laws and rules set by the
Mexican government," she said.
Calderon recently asked Mexico's Congress to amend the country's constitution
and allow federal prosecutors to conduct searches and secretly record conversations
among people suspected of what the government defines as serious crimes.
His proposal would eliminate the current requirement that prosecutors gain
approval from a judge before installing any wiretap. Calderon says the legal
changes are needed in the battle against the drug gangs.
"The purpose is to create swift investigative measures against organized
crime," Calderon wrote senators when introducing his proposed amendments
in March. "At times, turning to judicial authorities hinders or makes investigations
impossible."
But others argued the proposal undermined constitutional protections and opened
the door to the type of domestic spying that has plagued many Latin American
countries. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe last week ousted a dozen generals,
including the head of intelligence, after police were found wiretapping public
figures, including members of his government.
"Calderon's proposal is limited to 'urgent cases' and organized crime,
but the problem is that when the judiciary has been put out of the loop, the
attorney general can basically decide these however he wants to," said
John Ackerman, a law professor at the Autonomous National University of Mexico.
"Without the intervention of a judge, the door swings wide open to widespread
abuse of basic civil liberties."
The proposal is being considered by a panel of the Mexican Senate. It is strongly
opposed by members of the leftist PRD party. Members of Calderon's National
Action Party have been lobbying senators from the former ruling party, the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, for support.
Renato Sales, former deputy prosecutor for Mexico City, said Calderon's desire
to expand federal policing powers to combat organized crime is parallel to the
Bush administration's use of a secret wiretapping program to fight terrorism.
"Suddenly, anyone suspected of organized crime is presumed guilty and
treated as someone without any constitutional rights," said Sales, a law
professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. "And who
will determine who is an organized crime suspect? The state will."
Federal lawmaker Cesar Octavio Camacho, president of the justice and human
rights commission in the lower house of Congress, said he too worried about
prosecutorial abuse.
"Although the proposal stems from the President's noble intention of efficiently
fighting organized crime," he said, "the remedy seems worse than the
problem."
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Carlos Martinez and Cecilia Sanchez in the Times' Mexico City bureau
and Times staff writer Henry Weinstein in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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