Below is a detailed map from GPSJAM.org (a tool which allows you to look at active GPS jamming in real time) showing high GPS interference in August of 2024 ranging from Piedras Negras, Mexico to the greater San Antonio, TX area. Piedras Negras is about 120 miles southwest of San Antonio, and less than 5 miles from Eagle Pass, TX.
The story that this map has to tell is complex. The Department of Homeland Security first reported that cartels were using signal jammers to disorient unmanned aircraft surveilling the US-Mexico border in 2015. According to a report by the Robert Lansing Institute from 2020, Russian security services are also actively working with Mexican drug cartels.
OffGridWeb and Grey Dynamics both report that Russia pioneered the kind of GPS Spoofing and GPS Jamming technology mentioned above, eventually using it to interfere with low-altitude U.S. surveillance drones during the Syrian conflict in 2018, and that there have also been reports of Russia using the same technology on its border to disrupt Latvia's phone and GPS systems. Satellite navigation problems in the Black Sea in 2017 were attributed to a new “Russian cyberweapon” that will be “available to everyone from rogue nation states to petty criminals.”
GPS spoofing is distinct from GPS jamming; to spoof is to mimic something legitimate, in this case Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals, in order to manipulate navigational data. Jamming blocks signal entirely by using radio waves as interference.
This technology is a serious threat across multiple criminal domains. Car keyfobs, transmissions from wireless doorbell cameras, GPS, cell phones and credit cards are all at risk from variations on this technology.
A 2022 report by the non profit C4Ads derived from an analysis conducted with the help of Palantir Foundry AI, Above Us Only Stars: Exposing GPS Spoofing in Russia and Syria, states that Russian GPS spoofing is “a capability scarcely reported in the public domain.”
In September of 2024, NBC News reported that Russian intelligence services are building up their presence in Mexico for operations targeting the United States. John Sipher, who worked in the CIA’s clandestine service for 28 years, told NBC that Russia has always used Mexico has a hub for espionage.
“The environment for Russian intelligence in the U.S. is difficult,” Sipher said.
The Russian consulate in Seattle was closed by the US government in 2018. The consulate in San Francisco was closed in 2017. In both cases, at least in part, the closures were due to intelligence operations being conducted out of the embassies. Russian diplomats based out of both consulates were reportedly mapping where underground nodes connected to the national fiber-optic communications network.
In October of 2024, the Director General of MI5, Ken McCallum, warned that intelligence services from both Russia and Iran are on a “sustained mission to generate mayhem” in Europe, and the WSJ published a report that Russia pays criminals to destabilize target countries through acts including arson, sabotage, and other forms of criminal mischief. Russia denied these claims.
The DEA’s latest assessment found major Mexican cartels operating coast to coast in at least 60 American cities. Back in June 2021, a cartel in Jalisco, Mexico, known by the acronym CJNG (Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación or Jalisco New Generation Cartel), shared a video showing some members of its "elite group" equipped with jammers. There are reports that they’ve begun using spoofing, too, and the potential impact is not limited to drug or people smuggling.
CJNG is known for criminal activities ranging from drug and arms trafficking to human trafficking and people smuggling, kidnapping, torture, sex trafficking, murder, extortion, assault, money laundering, and potentially even terrorism.
On December 2, 2018, two grenades were thrown onto the grounds of the United States Consulate in Jalisco, in Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara. One of the explosions created a hole in the wall of the building over a foot in diameter. At the time of the bombing, the consulate was closed and no injuries were reported.
There is speculation that the attack may have been carried out by the CJNG; two weeks before the attack, the cartel allegedly posted a video on the darkweb in which it threatened to attack the consulate. The FBI offered a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of those responsible.
Interestingly, on February 22, 2018, Dalibor Jauković, a Serbian veteran of the Kosovo war who served in the Yugoslav army, threw a grenade inside the embassy of the United States in Podgorica, Montenegro. He then blew himself up outside of the embassy grounds. These attacks have never been connected publicly, despite their similarities. Russian authorities denied any involvement in the Montenegro attack; the United States State Department said that Jauković was opposed to Montenegro's NATO membership.
Russia was also against it. In 2016, two alleged Russian intelligence agents, Eduard Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov, were implicated in an attempted coup d'état in Montenegro. Popov and Shishmakov were a small part of what Montenegro's special prosecutor for organised crime and corruption called "a powerful organisation" of about 500 people from Russia, Serbia and Montenegro.
In February 2017, officials from Montenegro accused Russian “state structures” of being behind the attempted coup. Russian officials denied any involvement in this, too, but the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies was mentioned by name as being involved in the coup. In April of 2017, Montenegro's parliament voted 46–0 to join NATO, and a few months later, Leonid P. Reshetnikov, a highly ranked veteran officer of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, was fired as the director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies.
In 2022, the United States Department of Justice announced that German authorities had helped dismantle Hydra Market, then the world’s largest and longest-running darknet market, a Russian language site which operated on the TOR network out of Russia beginning in 2015.
In March 2023, the DOJ announced actions taken against ChipMixer for laundering more than $3 billion worth of virtual assets. As alleged in the complaint, ChipMixer processed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin connected to or associated with customers of Hydra Market and Russian intelligence services.
In addition to money laundering services and the sale of illicit drugs like fentanyl, Hydra Market vendors sold bespoke false identification documents, including American passports and driver’s licenses, and also sold hacking tools and hacking services.
These services included ransomware tied to a Russian hacking group called Wizard Spider, which evidence suggests is connected to Russian intelligence services, and other hacking groups like Cozy Bear, which is believed to be an internal unit of the Russian intelligence services.
Cozy Bear has been implicated in a hacking spree that began in 2008 and includes an attempted breach of the Pentagon email system, a breach of systems belonging to the Democratic National Committee, a breach of systems belonging to the Republican National Committee, attempts to breach Dutch and Norwegian government systems, attempts to steal COVID vaccine data, and an attack on supply chain software SolarWinds Orion in 2020.
Wizard Spider was reportedly dissolved following the leak of said evidence in February of 2022, but in May 2022, the United States government offered a reward of up to $15 million for information on Wizard Spider: $10 million for the identity or location of its leaders, and $5 million for information leading to the arrest of anyone conspiring with it.
The proceeds of the ransomware tied to Wizard Spider were laundered through Hydra Market, which processed over $5 billion USD in cryptocurrency during its operation. Among its most active users?
Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, also known as el Mencho. CJNG splintered off from the Sinaloa cartel in 2010; Sinaloa is one of the cartels that is known to have a relationship with Russian intelligence.
In 2015, the CJNG shot down a Mexican army helicopter in Jalisco, killing six soldiers during an operation to capture El Mencho. Cartel members fired a high powered rifle at the helicopter’s rotor, causing it to spin out of control and crash into the ground. A joint investigation by Mexico and the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) found that the 50 caliber gun used by the cartel to shoot down the helicopter was purchased by Erik Flores Elortegui, a 40-year-old Mexican native and an American citizen.
According to the indictment, the ATF found that Elortegui purchased the gun for over $15,000 at a gun shop in Rainier, WA, lying on the ATF Firearm Transactions Form that he wanted the weapon for himself, and listing his residence as Beaverton, OR. Court records show that the ATF was already investigating him for making straw purchases of weapons and accessories and illegally exporting them. He remains at large and on the ATF most wanted list.
A 2024 NBC report on “Storm-#,” a designation of Russian troll-farm propaganda groups, such as Storm-1516, which creates propaganda campaigns out of faked primary sources, Storm-1099, which uses bot networks coupled with fake news websites — dozens of which were recently seized by the Justice Department — to push disinformation, and Storm-1679, which creates films meant to mimic American documentaries and political thrillers in order to attack Western interests like the Paris Olympic Games.
Beyond the NBC report, Russian intelligence is already known to have attempted to undermine domestic American culture through a variety of strategies, such as disinformation published through fake local news outlets (such as the nonexistent KBSF-TV) and by poking at wedge issues that intersect with the themes of these events: racial conflicts and immigration and border issues, as well as gun control and gun rights.
According to NewsGuard, hundreds of fake local news outlets that publish this kind of Russian propaganda have been connected to John Mark Dougan, a disgraced former deputy sheriff who fled America for Moscow in 2016. Dougan left the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office in Florida after a jury found him guilty of violating the rights of another deputy, and then went to work for the Windham Police Department in Cumberland County Maine, where he was fired after six months for sexually harassing a female officer.
He was given asylum by Russia after leaking confidential information about thousands of police officers, federal agents and judges. Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post suggest that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the Marines, was provided funding by an officer from Unit 29155 in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.
According to the Wall Street Journal, American officials still don’t know who is behind the drones that have swarmed over sensitive national-security sites like Langley Air Force Base, where F-22 Raptor stealth fighters are based. According to The War Zone, after the drone incidents began, online flight tracking software showed one of NASA’s aircraft flying circular orbits with Langley at the center the following week.
Now-retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly said that despite the fact that the swarms continued for nearly 3 weeks, that the drones “…were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them.”
The War Zone suggests these incidents date back to at least 2017. That would be right after two alleged Russian intelligence operatives were implicated in an attempted coup d'état meant to keep Montenegro out of NATO.
Russian disinformation and covert intelligence operations in the United States date back to the 1930s, similar in nature to more recent activities like simultaneous support for and opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement, and apparent attempts by Russia to groom relationships with executives from the National Rifle Association and western media figures.
There are well documented attempts to nurture, fund and direct conspiracy theorists and extremist groups like the African People's Socialist Party and the Black Hammer, which was involved in things like street gang activity and aggravated sodomy in addition to political activism.
The Black Hammer situation is reminiscent of the Moldovan couple arrested in Paris for painting the Star of David on school buildings who reportedly told French investigators that they were acting on “orders from an individual in Russia.”
There are also accusations from Finland that Russia is weaponizing immigration by encouraging migrants from countries like Syria and Somalia to cross the border. Norway has similar concerns, and in the US, it was reported in early 2024 that law enforcement had identified over 400 individuals from countries like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Russia who crossed into the United States from Mexico with the help of “an ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network.”
The whereabouts of more than 50 of these individuals remain unknown. Partnerships between the cartels and Islamic militants have been previously documented. While Russia itself has struggled with Islamic militants…
…groups affiliated with Russian allies (like Iran supported Hezbollah and ISIS) are known to have established connections with criminal organizations in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. The relationship between Russia, criminal cartels across Latin America, and criminal activity at the American-Mexican border deserves closer scrutiny.