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NOTE: There has been much talk in recent days of slowing U.S. artificial intelligence research. China immediately announced that it would have no part of the “fearmongering” and would not slow down at all. But they are far from the only active enemy employing AI against us. — RDM
by W.T. Hale
September 16, 2026
In 1999, two psychologists conducted a study in which test subjects counted how many times a basketball was passed among individuals wearing white shirts. The passing was not tricky to see. The action was not particularly fast. On its surface, it was a simple task.
Yet half of the participants missed the gorilla.
Midway through the video, a student in a full gorilla costume walked into the center of the court, turned to face the camera, thumped its chest, and strolled off-screen. The viewers’ eyes swept over the primate. Still, their brains, entirely consumed by the mental arithmetic of pass-counting, filtered out the visual data. They missed the obvious because they were preprogrammed to a particular task.
A decade later, researchers ran a similar experiment with board-certified radiologists. These were not novices, but bona fide experts, examining chest CT scans. These doctors were asked to look for suspicious lung lesions, called nodules, often indicative of cancer. Special software tracked their eye movements so researchers would know exactly where they were looking.
But then, just as in 1999, there was a gorilla.
Embedded in the lung tissue of the final scan was a graphic of a gorilla, 48 times the size of the average cancerous nodule. Of the 24 radiologists in the study, 20, or 83 percent if you are so inclined, failed to see it, despite the eye-tracking software proving they had stared right at it for half a second.
How could they have missed a gorilla in a chest CT scan? When they stared directly at it?
This cognitive glitch, inattentional blindness, is not merely an academic curiosity. It is the ultimate cloak for asymmetric warfare. When sophisticated transnational networks build advanced technical capabilities, they do not rely solely on physical camouflage. They construct operational decoys tailored to the predictable diagnostic schemas of state bureaucracies.
Flood the field with common crimes, and the big one gets through. Send a flurry of small drug shipments to distract from the large one. Give the state a low-level, familiar crime to count, and it will count it. A bureaucracy will never look up, never see the oddity.
The Cartels Up Their Game
Many civilians hold preconceived notions about criminals and their activities. Some are surprised to learn that criminals are not all bumbling, uneducated brutes, and that their ranks include highly intelligent businesspeople, scientists, and engineers. Professionals carry this same burden. Preconceived notions abound.
For years, many experts felt confident that fentanyl would not be abused, simply because it was so potent and dangerous. More than 500,000 Americans have died from fentanyl-driven synthetic opioid overdoses since 2005.
Strange submarines were once dismissed as Bigfoot sightings, urban legend, and nothing more. Then, in 1996, the United States Coast Guard captured an intact semisubmersible narcosub 100 miles off the coast of Costa Rica. It had a carbon-fiber hull, diesel-electric power, thermal-blocking, water-cooled exhausts, and satellite navigation. A clandestine shipbuilding program was operating in the jungles of South America. The myth of the narcosub was shattered.
El Chapo’s communications network told a similar story. What looked like disposable SIM cards and burner phones turned out, once an FBI-turned IT specialist gave up the details, to be a private VoIP network running on servers scattered across Canada and the Netherlands. The network was complete with automated wiretap software, spyware for real-time GPS tracking, and counter-surveillance tools aimed at cartel rivals and Mexican state officials.
The Zetas were thought to rely on off-the-shelf walkie-talkies and pirate frequencies. They were actually running an air-gapped, military-grade multistate radio command network.
Even the small stuff got underestimated. Los Viagras ran what looked like a low-grade Wi-Fi extortion racket in rural Michoacán, charging residents $25–$30 a month, a simple municipal shakedown worth $150,000 a month on paper. Then cyber-forensics specialists opened the seized routers and found firmware built for deep packet inspection, MAC address logging, and traffic redirection. In other words, a signals intelligence network for monitoring police radios and triggering an internet kill-switch during military operations.
The submarine, the burner phones, the walkie-talkies, the Wi-Fi shakedown, all these “myths” were far more than anyone expected. The preconceived notion dictated the charge, and the charge dictated the scope of the investigation. If an anomaly fell outside the standard legal form, it simply did not exist. Figments of the imagination, until they could not be ignored.
A Server Farm in Cartel Country
All of this brings us to a secluded mountain compound in Tlaola, Puebla: 100 miles northeast of Mexico City, 175 miles inland from the Gulf ports of Veracruz and Tampico, less than 500 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Brownsville, Texas.
