Azam Ahmed: One morning earlier this year, I got a call from Mario E. Patrón, a prominent human rights lawyer in Mexico. He wanted to talk in person. When he arrived at The New York Times’s Mexico bureau, he took a seat in the conference room and asked me for my phone. He then collected the phones of everyone else in the room, walked them outside and placed them in our lobby. Out of earshot. “Our phones are being monitored,” he told me.