By Juan Lechuga

Twitter has recently become the target of a crackdown in Mexico as the government begins to crack down on social media as the military and police fight drug lords and drunkards. A new bill has been drafted to begin regulating social media sites in Mexico in order to hunt down people who may be using them to break the law. The first group, nicknamed ‘Los Twitteros’, has been using Twitter messages to warn each other of the newest police program: drunk-driving checkpoints, which were implemented to catch drunk drivers.

The problem, say police, is that the whole point of the checkpoints is that people not knowing where they are, so they can’t actively avoid them. Twitter, however, is being used to broadcast the location, hampering law enforcement efforts to the point where the police attempted to prosecute those twittering the warnings for aiding law breakers, until it led to a massive media backlash that forced them to back down.

The other concern is the possibility that drug cartels may be using these websites to find out information about targets  and communicate with each other. According to Ghaleb Krame, a security expert at Alliant International University in Mexico City, “Facebook and Twitter have lots of weaknesses. For instance, criminals can find out who are the family members of someone who has a high rank in the police. Perhaps they don’t have an account on Twitter or Facebook, but their children and close family probably do.” Drug cartels, unfortunately, have extensive intelligence networks and are much more web savvy than Mexican police, which makes fighting a war against them that much more difficult.

The bill currently being discussed, drafted by Nazario Norberto of the PRD, would regulate the use of social media sites in Mexico to scour them for crimes such as kidnapping and drug trade, give the police power to punish those using these sites to break or aid in breaking the law, and even give judges the authority to shut down entire websites. As expected, this has drawn severe criticism from civil liberties groups and the general public for its potential threat to free speech.