Now I'm not saying that it was impossible for this citizen journalist to hide her identity, but the comments strike me as having a similar tone. People are simply assuming that her capture and death was preventable, because it is psychologically difficult to face the alternative. Namely, that only by accepting personal risk, was this woman able to stand up to the cartels. Even if the technology to protect her identity existed, maybe a person in this woman's situation would be very unlikely to know about it.

Of constructive suggestions are great, although I'm not qualified to judge their technical merit.

If I was in her place I would have fled to a different city taking a few days off from work or simply given up the activism to reduce it to a level where the mob would not have bothered that much.

Note: Those who think that she could have managed to conceal her identity, why dont you take her work forward ? Whatever she did you too could do it from safety of USA. (Rhetorical challenge of course).

The violence here is strikingly close to us. I live in Texas and the violence is really not that far away. The cartels have their tentacles all over the US.

"There's a woman at my work who often uses that same turn of phrase. Wonder if it's her? $50k would really help me."

It's difficult to read a story a soul-crushingly horrible as this and just wallow in the hopeless unjustness of it all. Coping mechanisms kick in. To preserve the comforting world view that people are in charge of their destiny, tragedy is avoidable and the world makes some sense it becomes necessary to demonstrate that the outcome was predictable and avoidable. That the victim failed themselves.

With HNs user base that manifests as a critique of information security practices.

Please elaborate on this.

>just-world fallacy

I don't see how anyone here is subscribing to this fallacy. No one thinks the victim's actions warranted her fate.

>hammers and nails

Crypto would clearly have been more useful in this situation. Sometimes you really do have to hammer in some nails.

There were few if any comments here blaming the victim at the time you posted, so I must assume it is the comments discussing proper operational security for one in her position that you are misidentifying as blaming the victim.

It's important that security failures like this be discussed and analyzed so that others who may find themselves in a similar situation can learn from them so as to be able to fight the bad guys without getting killed.

> If you seriously think that lack of cybersecurity is the problem then at least use this to highlight the lack of good easy to use security software

Security software, or lack thereof, is probably not the most important thing in this kind of operation. Physical security is more important, namely making sure the bad guys do not get access to the computer you conduct your social media operations from or that you use for communications with your fellow activists.

Doing any of your activism from your cell phone, such as accessing your social media from it, is very risky. It means that if the bad guys have some reason to detain you unrelated to your activism they might find out your secret.

In many ways, the anti-cartel activists are in a position similar to that of those who are in an underground resistance in a conquered nation, such as the French resistance in WWII. Success in that situation generally involves maintaining a dual life, with the public side being something innocuous and non-threatening to the bad guys, and the private, resistance side kept very separate.

The drug cartels do not currently threaten or terrorize other countries, just the people living in Mexico, so arguments about national security (valid or not) also do not apply.

Besides, as terrible as things are right now, does anyone believe having an armed occupation force from another country would be better for the average person living in Mexico? Has that ever turned out well in recent memory? It would just be: 'hey, you know how you get shootings, executions and beheadings? Have some of them drone strikes as well!".

I am not saying international pressure cannot be used to help (there is some pressure coming from the European Union, rather the USA, and it has arguably had some impact in the actions of the Mexican government, at least when coupled with internal pressures). Sending an army, however, is probably the last kind of help Mexico needs right now...

PEMEX became the classic example of am inefficient, corrupt and bureaucratic government company which has already extracted all the "easy" oil and sees that this is unsustainable on long term, many of the large remaining oil reserves is now not easy to extract which due to bad management and lack of long term thinking is economically not convenient for PEMEX to try to extract it on its own.

So the government pushed those reforms to allow foreign companies with more advanced technical know-how and more willingness to risk, to invest and at least get some money in terms of taxes and permits.

Yes - UN peacekeepers do have a positive effect. They just don't hit the news much because they're not dramatically beating their chests about it and bragging about how big their guns are. They're not perfect, but they're certainly better than just leaving things be.

Have a poke around here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_Nations_peac...

In general I think just having independent media and investigators from outside the country can be helpful, since they can be perceived as not part of the system of internal corruption. I think it gets a lot more complicated when you have international actors as supposed to observers and/or pressure. Not saying it can't work, but it is far from simple to predict... (there are, of course, people who know great many orders of magnitude more about the issues involved than I do, both within and without Mexico, so maybe someone is looking into whether or not that sort of intervention would help).

Yugoslavia was an ugly war, the 'coalition' made plenty of grave mistakes but in the end it did stop a conflict that would have most likely ended much worse.

I have friends on just about all sides in that particular war and it is absolutely incredible how explosive Yugoslavia was under Tito and how vicious a conflict buried for decades flared up right after he died, it was really only a matter of time and even today I feel that it would possibly re-ignite if not for some dire threats.

UN actions (ie. the arms embargo) made the conflict unbalanced - giving the advantage to one side, which then proceeded to run amok. Then, the UN repeatedly failed to protect civilian populations from this aggression. The current 'stability' in many places is an artificial equilibrium, maintained by outside forces and those 'dire threats'.

The conflict should reignite - for justice, but just as importantly, for lasting stability.

That said, violence spiked significantly after the Mexican government decided to use the army to combat the drug cartels (10 or so years ago). So maybe if drugs were legal within Mexico and we completely refused to have any part on policing their traffic across the border, we might have a more peaceful situation, albeit still one in which organized crime has a huge influence in politics in most or all of the country's territory. Then again, at this point the cat might be out of the bag regarding the violence... a lot of it involves cartels fighting each other for control of different regions or routes at this point.

What does it take for the Mexican government to prohibit the oil export? It does seem that Mexico is some sort of energy/resource-extraction site for the US and for that drug cartels are looked upon as collateral damage. Can it learn from Brazil which doesn't export oil as much? Or is it the case of pseudo democratic government held hostage by a handful of multinational corporations?

That said, a lot of the revenue for the federal government comes from oil exports. This further means that very little of PEMEX revenue gets re-invested into PEMEX, since it mostly goes to pay for what would otherwise be a huge federal deficit every year. It is also widely believed that there are strong political pressures from the U.S. not to reduce oil exports. So, in general, it's not easy for Mexico to prohibit oil exports without creating a huge crisis and/or majorly affecting trade relations.

The above becomes even more complicated when you add things like corruption, shared/disputed territorial water reserves (the Gulf of Mexico has large areas which fall under the territorial waters of the U.S., Mexico and Cuba, but access to oil deposits in those areas is not necessarily equal...) or contraband of "stolen" oil by drug cartels. But at a large scale, the main issue is: the federal government depends on oil exports and trade with the U.S. which might be partially conditioned on oil exports.

(Disclaimer: I am going to add to my posts that all this comes from the perspective of someone who was born and lived most of his life in Mexico and follows what I believe to be reasonable news sources. I am not a subject expert on: organized crime, Mexican law, Mexican trade relations, etc... you get the idea.)

Though if the activities themselves were legal, then a cartel that did not itself engage in violence would have recourse to the state, which is probably also cheaper for the cartel than engaging in violence themselves.

For example, this lady made what (I think is) a reasonable assumption that a pseudonym was a good enough way of protecting her identity. It wasn't a bad assumption, but because of what happened to her, we should discuss additional precautions so that people like her might fare better in future.

Another thing to consider in this discussion is that sometimes people like this lady know that they are taking a big risk, may end up murdered, but bravely proceed to take their actions anyway.

Ok that doesn't make sense to me. Her murderers weren't Cyber-security experts who tracked her down. They were a group of thugs who kidnapped her, along with other medical personnel. Only after they had her in their clutches did they realize who they had. She was probably going to die anyway, this way the cartel knew who they were killing.

So using tor or whatever would only have the minimal effect on her situation

Is lack of cyber security 'the' problem? No, it's one problem of many for people taking on cartels. Another is lack of resources for the Mexican government. Do I think the the Mexican government not having enough resources is the cause of the issue? Obviously not.

Nobody is saying those things are the cause of the issue, and you're probably smart enough to know that - instead, you've gone on to attack people for attention instead. Flagged.

I'm quite unfamiliar with the specifics of the whole Mexican cartel situation, but has there been any international aid or effort to help eradicate this?

The time to legalize was before it was possible for drug producers to purchase an entire country and impose tyranny upon its citizens. Those already in control will now do anything possible to maintain their profit streams.

I am tired of this sentiment. It is not necessarily incorrect to ascribe partial blame to someone just because they got the short end of the stick in some situation.

Being a victim does not automatically preclude one from being at fault. For example, if I jump off a cliff without a parachute, it is clearly reasonable to blame me despite the fact that I am definitively a victim of the situation.

In this case, it would be reasonable to ascribe some level of blame to both parties; we ascribe blame to the cartel for murdering people (and clearly most of the blame falls on them), and we also ascribe some measure of blame to the victim for failing to take proper precautions. This is not an affront to the victim's character or a trivialization of their death; it is a recognition of the fact that, with some more preparation, the situation could have turned out much better for the victim. It is important to address these failures so that we might learn from them in the future.

Edit: Downvoters, please comment. I am curious what you think about this. In particular, I am curious why it is never appropriate to ascribe blame to a victim of any sort.

How do you figure?

Someone who can prevent their own misfortune by taking known steps yet doesn't take them is exhibiting behavior deserving of criticism. Finding someone else to blame doesn't change that, so what point are you trying to make by finding even more people to blame?

It is infuriating to me that you would suggest that it is this woman's fault for being murdered. So she's supposed to have a working knowledge of crypto despite being a working woman (in a non-computer related field) in a 2nd world country OR just shut up about rampant murder and kidnapping in her country?

I have no idea what to say to you, or how to express my horror that mind-blind opinions like these are stated on the regular on this news site.

Every time something like this happens, someone posts a comment to the effect of "should have used Tor" and then someone else posts a comment criticizing that comment as victim blaming.

Now suppose we listen to the latter group and everyone stops making the first comment. The idea that victims can protect themselves, and the mentioning of specific methods by which they can do so, disappears from the discourse. Anyone reading this article because they're in a similar situation to the subject never discovers that information. In what kind of world is that a good thing?

You are putting words in his mouth. He simply said that there are things she could have feasibly done differently that would have prevented her death. He is not saying it's "her fault".