Drug War - Social Media: Facts Blur as Anonymous and Zeta Cartel’s Feud Ends in a Draw

The latest--but is it the last--installment in the Anonymous vs. the Zetas story.

NYTimes.com: " Some bloggers and Twitter users claiming to be part of the hacker movement Anonymous now say they have abandoned plans to expose collaborators working with the Zetas crime syndicate because the friend they say the gang kidnapped has been released. Other self-identified Anonymous hackers say they will eventually undermine the country’s drug cartels by exposing corrupt officials, but that threats from the Zetas, along with the friend’s release, have pushed them to declare that the current project — OpCartel — is dead.

Some outside critics, meanwhile, wonder if the whole story was a sham. Was anyone kidnapped, they ask. Where is the evidence? Did Anonymous really have the goods on corrupt officials that it claimed to have? “We don’t have enough facts to draw any conclusion at this point,” said Fred Burton, an analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence firm that was one of the first to scrutinize OpCartel. “It’s amazing to me, this whole set of circumstances.”" read more