Mexico: Nuevo Laredo online says murdered man wasn't blogger or "social media" reporter, but scapegoat for terror

In Mexico, online local news site Nuevo Laredo Live is tweeting today that the man murdered yesterday in gruesome cartel-style killing was not, as widely reported, a blogger, forum moderator, or an affiliate of any kind with their site.

Translating loosely: "Negative, he was not our partner, he is confirmed to have been a scapegoat to scare others. The person executed is not a collaborator with our site, but this was without doubt an attempt to silence the voices of Nuevo Laredo."

Previous Boing Boing posts on the story here and here.

In September, an editor confirmed to have been an employee of the site was killed in similar fashion.

(thanks, SinkDeep)

• [Gary Flores]

  There is no TOR in Mexico?

  • [Liz Henry]

    That’s a pretty silly response to this. A person was tortured, murdered, beheaded, and dumped in a public street in order to scare people from using tip lines and reporting criminal activity and government/police corruption online.  Yes, some people use Tor in Mexico. What purpose does your snark serve here? 

    • [hymenopterid]

      Take a deep breath, its a valid question.  If they’re using TOR then how are they getting caught?  If they’re not using TOR then why not?

      Answers to these questions could save lives.

      • [Liz Henry]

        Hi there hymenopterid.

        I do a fair amount of Tor evangelism and think it’s great and quite useful. It’s also gotten way easier to install and use over the last couple of years. Very easy, in fact! I run a Tor relay node and I donate to help sponsor Noisetor  (http://tor.noisebridge.net/)  which is a good option for people who want to help make the Tor network faster and better, but don’t have the time or resources to run their own relay or exit nodes.    As to why I don’t think “they” are using Tor, some of “them” are but I don’t think it’s realistic to expect to connect to and manage the existing Nuevo Laredo En Vivo site using Tor because it would be dog-slow. Try… can you even get it to load? If you look at the site you’ll see various chat rooms meant for situation reporting run on a couple of different popular platforms, chatango and xat. Both not likely to be very secure.  But “too slow” is not the whole answer either.

        Reporters and human rights activists get a lot of information about Tor and internet anonymity and security. I would say that the general population doesn’t yet, in any country. I also think we need better tools in general for anonymity, and the crypto.is site  has some good starting points if you want to get involved with projects working on those tools.  A few weeks ago I was just at Hackmeet and 200 activists were in there asking how the hell to do stuff securely online, have meetings, send emails, and so on.

        My point is that the problem is more complicated than can be answered one off by acting snotty that more people should use Tor. Also… nothing so far that I know of has pointed to people being killed in Mexico because of *not* using Tor or because of being hacked in some way related to posting on net forums. We don’t know how NenaDLaredo was identified and we still don’t even know the identities of the other two people hung from the overpass who were said in the narcomensaje to be social media users.

• [the dude]

  Dear BoingBoing,

  Just as NPR needs to stop isolating discussion of world affairs to commentary, hosting and translations by U.S. and British white males,

  BoingBoing needs to be talking about the U.S. Bush Cartel’s War on Drugs in Mexico
  by letting Mexicans talk here.

  If “both sides” of the debate WITHIN the U.S. don’t know what the fuck is going on except the War as a growth industry

  How are any of you going to clue me in to any sides south of our (so proudly created and defended) frontera?

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    BoingBoing needs to be talking about the U.S. Bush Cartel’s War on Drugs in Mexico by letting Mexicans talk here.

    If you have a suggestion for a post, nobody’s preventing you from making it.  Did you want us to stop reporting on the issue in the meantime?

• [bibulb]

  So, this really ends up being the most horrific “The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves” EVER? 

• [Liz Henry]

  One more thing actually…. “use Tor” also is not going to help someone reporting info into a tip line that turns out to be run by the cartels or spied on by them.