I disagree, this sounds _exactly_ like what the drug cartels have been doing in Mexico for years. They build their own network so they can bypass the government. It makes more sense that they are connecting their operations further up north given the amount of security upgrades that the USA has been doing recently. One Example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-s...

"Crypto" is just a buzzword that people who don't understand tech jump to as a kneejerk reaction.

The Mexican cartels use actual cell/mobile equipment, and have kidnapped engineers from South Texas to gain additional technical knowledge. Also, these areas surround SLC are not territory they're trying to control in the same way. What utility would there be in this network vs simply using encrypted communication over the internet?

On the other hand, solar powered mining with just good enough radios to do C2 and send back any hashes found would be an exact match to this scale of equipment.

But why not just install solar panels on your house? Or legally, in some remote property? On top of the mountain is probably one of the most expensive places to deploy infrastructure. The elevation is almost certainly to provide radio reception coverage.

There's networks like Helium that are based around LoraWAN mesh IoT minders. Assuming there's some financial advantage to having maximal connectivity to other miners, putting a few on the mountains above a major metro area seems like a very straightforward idea.

It's not above a major metro area though, it's above Salt Lake City.

The Salt Lake City Metropolitan Statistical Area is #24 as ranked by population, so it depends what one would consider "major".

To me, top 25 seems major, but to someone else top 20 would be major. I don't think "major" in the context of metro areas is an official term.

I’ve heard major metro area as roughly being top 100 cities in the world which Salt Lake City is nowhere close to.

If anything Salt Lake seems about average size for a city.

Yeah, let's just derail into a subthread bickering about what threshold counts as a major metro area, vs meaningfully engaging with the actual topic at hand.

This place is cursed with the worst pointless nerd sniping behavior.

Talking about metro size is actually relevant because if it was a major metro area like say LA they could actually use the cellphone network that would blanket the area. Instead it’s a modest city in basically the middle of nowhere thus the problem.

Complaining, on the other hand is a complete waste of everyone’s time.

This conversation is indeed a distraction, but for posterity and those curious the population for the SLC area is slightly confusing because of the population proportion of the central city itself with the legal name "Salt Lake City" is small relative to all the adjoining municipalities that basically blend together into one city (even including street addresses, grid system, public transit), and the way the metro areas for Provo, SLC, and Ogden are reported in the census separately even though people commute between them in the same way people travel between SF and San Jose.

The numbers are more like: 1) Salt Lake City: 200K people 2) Salt Lake City Metro Area (MSA): 1.25-1.3 million 3) Salt Lake-Ogden-Provo Combined Statistical Area (CSA): ~2.7 Million. FYI this region is also called the "Wasatch Front"

To understand these levels of breakdown the equivalent for Bay Area naming would be: 1) San Francisco itself (the 49 square miles): ~800K people 2) San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley MSA: ~4.6 million 3) San Jose-SF-Oakland CSA (think the whole "Bay Area"): ~9.5 Million

It's the Combined Statistical Area of SLC (the "Wasatch Front") which is now ~22nd-24th in the nation, not the MSA itself.

It's similar in size to Charlotte or Sacramento, and larger than the respective CSAs of eg Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Kansas City, Nashville, or Las Vegas

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area)

That’s true enough, but missing the major difference. Salt Lake City’s metropolitan area is effectively in the middle of nowhere surrounded by desert not rings of exurbs that blend into new cities the way you normally see around major cities.

Which is why it isn’t surrounded by a great cellphone network, and thus why they are setting up a independent radio network.

The I-80 and I-15 both intersect in SLC and are major routes. Cell coverage is just fine until it gets a little sketchy up by Idaho but still (close enough to) 100%.

Good enough where you wouldn’t need to set up your own system. Or be stupid enough to make them noticeable and have the Forest Service confiscate them. I mean, come on, a little black paint and a cryptic “Property of US Government” sticker would go a long way.

Or, if you want to be super sneaky just throw them up on a telephone pole because it’s well known that the companies only mess with their own equipment so you can hide stuff in plain sight.

That’s not really useful if you want to make use of the other 90+% of land in the area such as by having people fly over it in paragliders and possibly make an emergency landings.

Sure, but the argument was cartels building a shadow cell network because the existing one was too iffy for them.

And these seem to be right outside SLC proper.

That was one idea tossed out, but there isn’t a cellphone network coverage in most areas covered by this network.

Suggesting it’s useful in places that overlapped ignores the utility in areas where it would be the only option. I doubt drug dealers are meeting up in the desert outside of cellphone range with their suppliers, but it isn’t a crazy idea.

Having lived there 2016-2022, it certainly does not feel anything like a major metro to me.

1.2 million people. And probably geographically the closest metro area to the people who did this; I assume whoever did it lives in or around Utah.

Why on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them? This seems like the kind of specialized knowledge you cannot meaningfully get out of someone with a $5 wrench, just how they hire lawyers and other professionals to work with existing modern infrastructure that you cannot just avoid.

You vastly underestimate how intense the cartels are.

They want total control, not bribes.

One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.

I don't want to go into the details of the torture because its bad stuff, involving cannibalism even. If you are morbidly curious there's a couple interviews with survivors you can find somewhere on youtube.

And this is far from the only instance of this sort of thing. Sinaloa has been known to kidnap entire buses and make folks fight to the death, winner gets the dubious honor of becoming a member.

These are people who assume every single person in their world is plotting to overthrow them in an instant, and leave nothing to chance vs that. They don't want to hope their bribe is enough to keep you loyal, they want to know you're loyal because you've seen them torture to death countless people. You don't get any agency in the matter.

How do you know all this? Were you a former member?

There's a number of brave journalists that cover this stuff locally, but a lot of what I'm talking about has been covered in national media in the US, it just doesn't get much traction.

I have friends that live in Mexico so we talk about it fairly often as well. One of my friends in particular is a wireless business owner with customers near Brownsville/Matamoros, where those telcom engineer kidnappings happened, so he's acutely aware of things.

>One of my friends in particular is a wireless business owner with customers near Brownsville/Matamoros, where those telcom engineer kidnappings happened, so he's acutely aware of things.

...and you just doxxed him?

I clearly did not.

Can you try to put more effort into participating here? This is actually a material conversation to me so I don't in the slightest appreciate some rando on the internet is trying to say I'm risking my friends life with sharing very innocuous general information as a zero effort rhetorical dunk.

Worth it for the upvotes tho

I don't think organizations like this have any former members.

they do, they just might be... in a non-talkative mood ;-)

Adding to this, they are growing fast [1] and rumor has it they are moving into Texas. Curious what the U.S. will do to try to stop them. Military perhaps?

[1] - https://es.insightcrime.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mexic...

Username is factual with references like RNCResearch, how meta of you. I would recommend a more appropriate audience a for your content, Twitter.

I mean what they are setting up is entirely legal systems it may not be legal to set them up in certain places but nothing illegal. They don't have to kidnap anyone to achieve this goal unless they are too poor to pay someone to help them. However drugs that is bad, mmm kay?

>One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.

This sounds like:

1. Just a rehash of the original Hashashin tale.

2. A spooky story cartel members might tell.

HNews never fails to be the place where people who know not even the basics of a topic are confidently contrarian.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxP-TMArlV0

This is far from the only source you can find that supports what I'm saying. Search for CJNG to find more about them. They're sort of the Phoenix that rose from the infamous Los Zetas.

Why would they pay someone when they could kidnap them, like they've done to many others?

> Why on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them?

Why would an engineer willfully take a cartel job, when there is a high risk of them killing you instead of paying you, and killing you by cutting off your face just because they were bored and disturbed? If a cartel even offered me a job, I'd fear for my life.

I have no interest of watching it myself, but there's an infamous video that's been talked about so much I'm reasonably confident it is more or less as described, and yes, it involves skinning someone's face off while they're alive, and using amphetamine injection to ensure they don't pass out.

These people really are as bad as it gets. You don't want to be anywhere close to involved with them.

Yeah, that's the one I'm thinking of. I've only seen the first second of it before turning it off. Truly awful.

The video is often re-posted on 4chan and is not the worst of their behavior.

Man I came in here curious about some solar-powered antennas and shit just escalated bigtime. Wow. :(

Yeah torture description is not appropriate for HN IMO.

Why then is so much HN discussion centered around installing and running Windows 11?

That is why I left it out. I would not even begin to describe their activities. I merely pointed out it is not even permitted on the other site.

These units are far too small and low-powered to be cartel cell towers. The towers they're building in Mexico are more or less normal towers, supplemented by COW trailers (larger units with generator+solar).

Cartels in CONUS are typically using regular cell and satellite phones. Ostensibly, the NSA and the various military "Activities" aren't paying attention to CONUS communications, unless it's near the border.

There isn't enough information in the article to reasonably tell what they're designed for. If someone wants to post actual photos of the hardware, that would be swell.

What you say sounds possible and plausible, although I would not immediately discount crypto, as the Helium map does show some cells in unpopulated areas in the hills surrounding the SLC metro.

They should be able to eliminate Helium as the culprit if they're able to inspect what's in the box, as Helium needs a Helium-sanctioned box, from my understanding.

What does this provide that an encrypted cellphone messenger app does not? I'm sure they have the know how to acquire SIMs through intermediaries to remain anonymous. That's probably a lot less suspicious than setting up random radio towers, in fact this story is evidence of that.

Presumably self-operated infrastructure could expand comms to remote areas that don't normally have cell service. They makes sense in stretches of the southern border. But right outside salt lake city is covered by cell access.

Cell phones are basically locator beacons for the police. The cartels know this.

It's not worth discussing the specifics in the open, but the investigative techniques have gotten good enough that even "anonymous" SIM cards don't buy you anything.

A radio is inherently a locator beacon. Radio direction finding has been a cornerstone of signals intelligence for over a century. A cell phone sending encrypted messages over Signal or WhatsApp is way less suspicious than a radio mysteriously appearing on a hill. Just get a patsy to buy a normal sim card - not an "anonymous sim card" - I'm sure cartels are easily able to do this.

Sure but one is inherently more difficult (radio direction finding) than the other (having your phone constantly beacon to a dense network of towers).

What I was alluding to is when you have full access to the cellular network, there are other indicators that can be used to task tracking other than just the SIM card. You don't need to know that phone X is person Y, you just need to know that phone X fits the criteria of how a drug mule operates.

> you just need to know that phone X fits the criteria of how a drug mule operates.

And my point is that this is way, way harder than looking out the window and noticing a radio tower perched on a hilltop that wasn't there before. It's far more clandestine to obtain security through obscurity even if it means operating in a network controlled by the authorities. Encrypted traffic looks like any other encrypted traffic. There's little to make a drug dealer stand out from other cell phone traffic, unless they're communicating over cleartext.

> And my point is that this is way, way harder

That is the point I am trying to get to without giving away specifics. The reason you see homegrown communications networks in Mexico is because it is trivial for the DEA to identify members of smuggling operations by way of cell phone TTPs. DEA obtains both explicit and unauthorized access to cellular networks in foreign countries. At that point it is a pretty trivial pattern matching problem which allows you to identify persons of interest and track them going forward.

They do use large scale "direction finding" to identify radios used by smuggling operations, but that is primarily targeted at boats with higher power transmitters.

As I stated earlier, it does make sense to deploy shadow comm infrastructure along the southern border (and northern border of Mexico). Detecting a bunch of cell phone traffic in a completely remote area nowhere near any official border crossings is indeed hugely suspicious. And the cartels do indeed set up their own infrastructure there.

What doesn't make sense is deploying infra in the vicinity of major cities. There's plenty of benign cell phone traffic there, and this kind of pattern matching is not viable.

Source?

You do not have any secret knowledge dangerous to share on this issue, I guarantee that, so drop the pretense and just say what you think clearly.

I would think that if it was organized crime, the feds would be all over it already. Even stuff like pirate radio gets tracked and shutdown fairly quickly. I'd imagine the FBI still has significant sigint ops, even if they might be less extensive than during the cold war.

Wouldn’t their best course of action be to locate the towers, hack into them, and continue to allow them to operate?

Yes, but if they were taking that action, they would have instructed the public land officials on a cover story, not allowing them to create a mystery out of and open those boxes.

Imagining movie style capers like this is emotionally engaging but pretty distant from the reality of these situations. Assuming you can put lightning into a bottle is extremely dangerous. Most police work involves a lot of methodical boring stuff, not a brilliant technical deception.

So the "hack into them" part isn't quite right. But they certainly do intercept and analyze various signals. Which is generally the boring and tedious part. But right or wrong, it is sort of the standard play for the feds to let some criminal activity continue to gather additonal intel.

If they keep popping up after these initial ones are taken down, I guess that's leads towards the idea of whoever is doing it has a big incentive to do it.

Would think that crypto would have too long a payback esp if the equipment keeps disappearing.

Weren't they at least installing their stuff on existing towers etc to make it less obvious? Planting big solar panels into the landscape must be the stupidest attempt at creating a secret cell network...

> "Crypto" is just a buzzword that people who don't understand tech jump to as a kneejerk reaction.

Very strange thing to say when the parent explained exactly why this could be crypto and why it's plausible. Do you know how Helium works?

Do a Google Image Search on "helium crypto solar power" and you will see many devices that look like that.

There would be no reason for cartels to establish parallel cellular networks in Salt Lake City of all places.. and these devices don't sound remotely like what the cartels were doing - you need backhaul to have a cell site - these are remote mesh wifi devices. All of the cartel ones are 'parasitic' where they use the actual cell site's hardware to provide a standalone antenna.

The drug angle doesn't make much sense in Utah. This State trends towards prescription drug abuse [0] [1], and aggressively prosecutes drug offenses to the max. How could antennas be relevant?

[0] https://www.deseret.com/2008/1/31/20067144/happy-valley-delv...

[1] https://imdb.com/title/tt1263682/

Which drug cartels are operating out of public lands in Utah? How did they get there? How has nobody noticed them? Why do drug cartels have interest in the snowy peaks of the SLC foothills of all places? Why are they just in the foothills and not checks notes all the way through Arizona to Mexico?

A cartel land mobile radio or cellular setup would be considerably more power hungry than this.

I may be stereotyping, but in my experience there is a strong ham community within the LDS Church. My first reaction was to assume something ham related, not drug cartel.

Profiling isn't stereotyping, but cancel culture seems to think it is. I'm not LDS but I didn't think it offensive. I am an amateur radio operator however, and I think it likely if for no other reason than the fact that there's a disproportionally large crossover in demographics between the two groups. In fact, as a young adult I worked at a commercial and ham radio shop that was owned by LDS folks.

Ham radio doesn't need to litter the area with these little setups. The Wasatch front already has a bunch of strong mountain top repeaters, some can even be tied together. Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_Intertie

IME/O, hams and LDS alike tend to go above board when setting up infrastructure like this, and I feel they'd be quite public about their existence.

Some ham radio repeaters atop high-rise buildings I know of are kind of sketchy (such as when someone in the local radio club makes friendly with building engineers/management so they don't have to pay commercial leasing fees or go through HOA baloney, and will sometimes keep the location a secret to avoid attention), but the vast majority are listed on publicly available databases like RepeaterBook, ARTSCIPUB, RFinder, ARRL Repeater Directory, and/or each state's repeater coordination directory, or the AREDN mesh directory, or other ham radio WAN sites.

Since SLC is still totally clueless as to who put these up, it rules out LDS Hams for me.

meh, you're writing comes of as defensive

if you still have money tied up in crypto you can still try and sell it

I don’t understand why the cartel would put these in such an obvious location. (But I also don’t understand why anyone would…)

They seem to be in obvious, high traffic areas. The one mentioned in the video is a short hike from the Utah capitol building. If you hike at all and live in salt lake, this is where you go. Especially in the winter. It seems like they were asking to be found.

It’s certainly less in the winter, but in the summer hundreds of people would hike or bike past this everyday.

You might be on to something. I hear the Utah drug cartels are responsible for all the beheadings plaguing Salt Lake City.

What beheadings have happen in Salt Lake City recently? All I can find is an incident that happened in Arches National Park but that one was an accident with a gate not an assault by someone involved in gang activity.

You cannot power more than a femtocell with a solar panel, and these are too far out in wilderness with no wired backhaul to be a plausible mobile mobile network. In parts of Mexico you can take over a house and a power source to put up a real cell site.

Or a new kind of crypto based on Proof of Solar energy collection?

Proof of received and delivered packets.

Which would be Helium (LoRa IoT) or Althea (WiFimesh and 5G cellular) for example.

I believe Helium does require internet access rather than just working as an offline relay. How's the 4G in those locations? The video shows only one antenna too.

You can do either. Non-internet Helium installs are less profitable though, if I understand their structure.

It is almost definitely this. Plenty of discussion about exactly this thing if you look into the Helium subreddits/discord etc.

Anecdotally, rooftop telecom site operators, tower owners and WISPs have been approached by "helium" miner people for several years now, they're almost universally laughed at as a non plausible business plan and revenue source.

Somewhere in there is a gem of a good idea. Incentivize operators of a mesh network where you can buy credits to get data on the mesh. Like I can see the concept and in it's raw form it's exciting.

Helium though got way overpriced and insane with the crypto bubble.

Maybe they can rectify it and turn sane? I'd love a world where all this deployed helium hardware isn't trash.

LoRA as a method to implement serial bridges over very narrow channels and low RSL/CINR rates in radio is fine. LoRAWAN and similar are fine. Lots of possible applications. The crypto part is what's truly bizarre.

I don't know how anyone who has spent any time researching bulk-data-service plans for embedded multi-band cat1 LTE radios (a few bucks a month from Verizon or Tmobile per radio) would think that a less reliable, vastly less-covered-area "helium" thing would be something you could rely on for actual traffic to/from your equipment.

They looked at The Things Network and figured that they could do better by paying node operators in their own funbux as an incentive to host nodes. It worked, just that the customers did not materialize.

I, as an airbnb owner, was approached by someone wanting to give me a "router to put in my window for IoT sensors."

Didn't take me long to figure out it was Helium.

How much did they offer?

zero. Just looking for "volunteers" to help "grow IoT sensor networks."

Is Helium still alive? I've seen a _lot_ of their used equipment pop up for sale on ebay.

I have the same question. Seems like the crash hit them hard and last I heard they were rebasing (n.b., not using this in a technical meaning) on top of Solana.

I also heard a lot of rumors it was a pump/dump or pyramid type scheme, but I haven’t seen proof of that, only if premining (which is awfully scammy to be fair).

Anyone have better details?

A good first approximation with anything using cryptocurrencies is that it is a scam.

There apparently never really ware that many paying customers using Helium's network, so the payouts ware comming from people paying the data credit fees to have their miner listed and accepted to the network. The moment the network stops expanding, the demand for HNT to pay for datacredits will be gone.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/critique-on-helium-s-6-5k-mon...

And now that seems to have happened.

In theory it sounds like a reasonable explanation, but Helium is underperforming so much, that I doubt anyone would make the investment at this point.

They may be legacy nodes, from when Helium was worth a lot.

It's almost comical that, in this context, the term "legacy" is applicable for 1-year old nodes. Things change fast in the crypto world I guess!

Also, Helium payouts seem to be based on amount of clients in a zone, which would make this pretty pointless.

Helium hype really makes it difficult for other real IoT networks to operate also, like The Things Network, the operators of which do it for free (including myself). Why does everything have to be a moneymaker?

> Why does everything have to be a moneymaker?

Translation: "Why does everything need to be sustainable? Can't we just keep grifting off of people providing a service for free?"

I always see comments here about open source projects needing better funding mechanisms. Crypto solves this but everyone scoffs at it because crypto has become some boogey man word that gets shunned mostly because of Bitcoin being first with no utility and wasteful energy and ignores any progress made in the space.

How does cryptocurrency solve any of the funding issues in open source, in ways that could not be achieved with traditional currency?

The problem is that it’s actually less motivating to get paid a small amount than it is to get paid nothing. So it probably feels bad to put up a node that’s rarely used even though, when it does get used, it’s especially appreciated.

(Bad ideas in this space: GRCoin which pays you for folding@home but can never actually pay the power costs, Payver which supposedly paid for capturing road images while driving but ended up giving like $2/year.)

Those are issues with poor tokenomics and lack of traction. Some businesses fail, but that doesn't mean all do, or that it's impossible to create a good business.