11 ms·

Click Here to Kill

215 points by self 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
neonate 7y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20191212221610/https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191212221610/https://harpers.o... https://outline.com/y7DM9v https://outline.com/y7DM9v http://archive.is/DHAg6 http://archive.is/DHAg6
onesmallcoin 7y ago
Too many popups I quit
- naringas 7y ago
  [quietly whispers] sssh... reader mode
- criddell 7y ago
  I wonder if anybody at Harpers ever looks at the numbers to decide if the popups should stay? They should have a minimum success rate that, if signups drop below, they get rid of the popups.
  - joegahona 7y ago
    What would you tie it to? Bounce rate?
    - criddell 7y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean. For every thousand times it's displayed, how many times does the person viewing the page just close it and not act on the offer? If it's less than some very low number (maybe 30%), don't show it. Or maybe show it after the article has been scrolled all the way to the bottom. It's a long article and at that point you know the reader might be interested in seeing more from you.
      - mulmen 7y ago
        You're assuming Harpers is optimizing for not nagging people. That is not the case at all. They are optimizing for collecting email addresses. If you do not want to enter an email address and bounce they lost nothing, you weren't going to provide an email anyway. It is a dark pattern but it is not a mistake.
- egdod 7y ago
  Their website is extremely usable with JavaScript disabled.
- excalibur 7y ago
  Stock firefox, default tracking protection. I received a single nag about free articles that was easily dismissed. One first-party subscription ad at the bottom of the right column, another at the bottom of the article. No other ads of any kind.
  - graedus 7y ago
    I got two. For those that don't know, a good portion of these nagging modal windows play nice in the sense that pressing ESC closes them - good to be able to instantly dismiss them without having to hunt for the close button. The first one I saw could be closed with ESC, the second one required clicking "Close".
- onesmallcoin 7y ago
  I'm more getting at the facy that this is a link to reading an article Not a link to a who-can-get rid of the popup the best contest We're the people that build these systems and this is about design and usability and when you open a can of cola you would be upset if it were worms because it said cola on the front I wonder how many hours of peoples lives are lost to trying to control the computer to get it to do what it said it was doing on the tin, rather than what is in the interests of the politics or the profit I correlate it to the same level as clickbait and I'm sure their are other humans out their that get the same taste in their mouth when using the internet, and then go on to do other things instead, which means that they are potentially missing out on learning something vaulable in the future, because of an impression your design made in the past. People should think more about the psycology of design and what the goal of the message of the content their sending is and try not to give into logic like this: I publish my papers online, they are academic and educational; I want more money. I add ads or political messages onto the website that was before purely educational because it will help me aquire money. You are no longer selling a delicious can of cola but a terrible can of worms
haecceity 7y ago
You'd think it'd cost more money to kill someone. You'd have to pay insurance for the assassin. If something went wrong you'd need to pay the costs of taking care of the assassin's family. Whole lotta trouble.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lonelappde 7y ago
  That's only important if future assassins know if past assassins are mistreated.
- laretluval 7y ago
  Indeed, as revealed in his court documents, Ross Ulbricht paid a lot more more money than this (by an order of magnitude) to have his darknet hits carried out (although he was likely being scammed). The price mismatch makes me skeptical of this story.
  - Alupis 7y ago
    > although he was likely being scammed It was the FBI posing as a "Hell's Angel" gang member. That part was revealed pretty early on after his arrest.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lrobinovitch 7y ago
This was a really interesting and worthwhile read despite the two pop ups. The Beau Brigham case mentioned is sad[0]...guy seems to have been given a shit lot in life (bedridden with illness for 5 years), payed a token $3.50 for an assassination attempt on his stepmother, then received 3 years in jail. No one should allow their frustrations to build up to actionable murderous intent but you I can't help feel for the guy to some extent. 3 years in jail is probably not the sort of help he needed. That article also mentions how Monteiro is a registered sex offender related to child pornography. This article[1] goes in to more detail, stating that Monteiro had "58 images of child pornography on his computer, most of which he created" and that "he committed illegal acts in order to access content on the dark web. Monteiro said he compromised and shut down websites while obtaining information about the case". Seems like these child porn sites require users to generate content to gain and maintain access. Hard to tell from the testimony the intent and extent of good or harm Monteiro did around the child porn stuff. There should really be more published details around the sex offender registry - did someone swap nudes with their underage girlfriend or actively film abuse of their kids? There is a massive difference. Regardless, Monteiro is doing awesome work around the murder for hire business. Really tricky field to navigate, and seemingly quite taxing and unrewarding. He published this cool public data on murder for hire statistics here [2] [0] https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/08/15/jury-finds-beau-brigham-guilty-of-trying-to-hire-a-hitman/ https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/08/15/jury-finds-beau-brigham... [1] https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/07/31/key-witness-in-slo-murder-for-hire-trial-admits-to-being-sex-offender/ https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/07/31/key-witness-in-slo-murd... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AICLS8bS6Kh4GgRTWkSfBe96cKHWwf8EPYiFc3pcgMY/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AICLS8bS6Kh4GgRTWkSf...
mnm1 7y ago
Hard to not come away from this article with a sense that the FBI and other law enforcement organizations are simply incapable and unwilling to do their jobs. For example, this sentence: "The FBI has a mandate to pursue only those crimes that violate a federal statute." Sorry, but how can a crime over the Internet like this NOT violate federal statutes? It's impossible. By definition all these crimes would be pursued at the federal level. Then there's the description of the interview where they interviewed the husband and wife together despite the husband being the main suspect. That's like pulling the plug on your server and wondering why the website's down. Beyond incredibly stupid to the point where it's hard to believe that actually happened. Those agents should themselves be charged for facilitating that murder. I won't bother to go into the failing of allowing the identification of the British guy who placed the hit either by not allowing his ex-gf to read his messages. How dumb are these fucking cops? The whole piece reads like a story of police, FBI, and law enforcement failings at every level. It's practically guaranteed that hits are taking place online and this is law enforcement's response? Making things worse or at the very best, fucking up investigations with their extreme stupidity.
excalibur 7y ago
> In June 2018, news came of a second death from the kill list. Twenty-one-year-old Bryan Njoroge was found dead in Indiana, shot in the head on a baseball field. The police ruled the death a suicide. Weeks earlier, a user with the alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500 to order his murder and provided details of his upcoming travel. Njoroge was a U.S. military serviceman who, before he died, had made a female friend the beneficiary of his life-insurance policy. His father questions whether the death was a suicide, but the local police department has said that it is aware of the dark-web assassination order and stands by its conclusion. It's possible that the police know something the father does not. I would not put it past a suicidal person to order a hit on himself.
- thebean11 7y ago
  Ordering a hit on yourself doesn't really make it a suicide, someone has still committed murder
  - ksdale 7y ago
    I know nothing of the particulars of this case, but a person could order a fake hit and then kill themselves in order to make it look like a murder to ensure the life insurance payout.
    - excalibur 7y ago
      I mean maybe, if you thought the hit was real and were disappointed when nothing happened you might go that route.
      - ksdale 7y ago
        Or if you fully intended to commit suicide and were only interested in a hit as a way to make sure the insurance pays out. Trying to make sure someone gets a life insurance pay out is a really common feature of a lot of stories about suicide.
        7y ago
ogoffart 7y ago
I've read another article related to this about a year ago: "The unbelievable tale of a fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante... and a murder": https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kill-list-dark-web-hitmen https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kill-list-dark-web-hitmen HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767657
eindiran 7y ago
The Wired article on the original Silk Road back in 2012 was responsible for driving a huge amount of traffic to the site. Harper's has a smaller readership than Wired and fewer people are interested in pursuing hits than getting high (hopefully), so maybe that won't happen here, but I worry that the article will put these forums on people's radars. Thankfully the clearnet sites that track darknet .onion addresses usually avoid having sites like these listed.
paulpauper 7y ago
>Now it’s easy to purchase bitcoins on any number of mainstream markets and “tumble” them so that their point of purchase is obscured. Similarly, thanks to Tor, accessing the dark web requires only opening a browser and enduring slower download speeds. lol has the author tried buying bitcoins and then tumbling them? I would not call submitting tons of ID to buy and withdrawal $5000 of bitcoin and then setting up tor and getting a tumbler working to be easy, and not getting scammed in the process. Also tor and tumblers are not necessarily fully anonymous.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >Also tor and tumblers are not necessarily fully anonymous Money quote right there. I'm not sure how many people consider using this sort of thing to skirt the law. But believing in the anonymity of anything on the internet while you're skirting the law has landed many a naive person in prison. Especially if that person was within the jurisdictional reach of the US government.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Bitcoin Fog did pretty well during its run. It mixed Bitcoin from at least two huge thefts. At least one of them generated a huge Reddit crowd-sourced tracking effort. And as far as I know, nothing was ever tracked. I do get that Monero is ~anonymous by design. But then, how does one buy it anonymously? All I see are exchanges that implement KYC. Using bank transfers and credit/debit cards. Are there any cash by mail exchanges? Or even local meatspace exchanging?
    - obituary_latte 7y ago
      There are atm machines popping up where you can go and deposit cash to get btc. They typically have phone number requirements for transactions under $3000 (over requires ID) and they are located in places with cameras (e.g. gas stations/convenience stores), but those restrictions are easily worked around (burner phone/pay a homeless person/disguise) if you have the desire.
    - sybarita 7y ago
tpmx 7y ago
Potentially unpopular opinion: This is one of the reasons why we as a society can't afford to allow untraceable electronic money transactions. Imagine the combination of perfectly untraceable money transactions with actual working low-cost swarms of facial recognition-based killbots/drones. That's what, maybe 5-7 years away from now? The risk here is that the cost of a hit could go down to very low costs, say between $1k to $10k per hit/murder. If it goes that low we're screwed as a society, especially if the transactions aren't traceable.
- int_19h 7y ago
  Thing is, it doesn't really matter what you "allow". There's no way to enforce it for these kinds of uses. A blanket ban can put it outside of purview of your average mildly curious common person for purposes like, say, buying recreational drugs. But if they have seriously decided that they want to murder someone, they'll find out how to make that payment - and you can't meaningfully trace that short of full online Panopticon (all connections wiretapped 24/7, all Internet access tied to secure real name ID). There's a lot more coming. 3D printers similarly enable access to stuff that a lot of people would like to get banned, such as firearms and accessories to them. For example, it is already possible to 3D-print a high-capacity Glock magazine completely from scratch (the only metal part is the spring, and even that is bent to shape out of a suitable steel wire using a 3D-printed jig). And it costs about $200 one-off for the printer, and <$1 per magazine thereafter. There are already laws that make doing this illegal in some locations, but again - how do you actually enforce them? Our societies will have to either go high-tech totalitarian, or learn to live with these possibilities. I hope it's going to be the latter; after all, past societies - before the growth of administrative state with its IDs, registries, accounting, and pervasive bureaucracy - already had to deal with a situation where it was very hard to track a determined criminal. But looking at the evolution of surveillance and police power laws in modern developed democracies and China, it's probably going to be the former.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    My informed gut feeling is that legislation is surprisingly efficient. Your tangent on 3d-printing aside: If we decide to make cryptocurrencies illegal, I think that will solve like 80% of the problem. Given the tradeoffs involved, I think that's worth doing.
joshstrange 7y ago
So while I don't really participate in cryptocurrencies anymore I have a basic knowledge of how it all works and have read up on ETH contracts. Couldn't someone create a contract on the ETH network (my terminology might be off) that allows you send a message to contract with a name (maybe more PII), a date, and some amount of ETH to create the system Jim Bell hypothesized? Obviously a big issue would be "death confirmation" as is how do we know X person is actually dead so we can pay out to the "winner"? I imagine it could be done through some kind of majority system but what incentive would other "donators"/"would be killers" have to confirm a death has happened if they aren't the beneficiary? I'm sure someone clever could think of some way to do it...
- reidjs 7y ago
  For the second part, look at prediction markets like Augur.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Obviously a big issue would be "death confirmation" as is how do we know X person is actually dead so we can pay out to the "winner"? Put people on the blockchain, obviously.
  - strbean 7y ago
    Well this just gave me a chill down my spine. It isn't too crazy to imagine this happening.
- wavefunction 7y ago
  Anyone could see who the "winner" is though I believe?
- Random_ernest 7y ago
  The problem you describe is not really solved (at least not to my knowledge) and is often referred to as the Oracle problem in smart contracts.
cryptozeus 7y ago
Jesus that was crazy to read...this guy is doing god’s work “There is just one reason that a local police department in Minnesota was aware that someone had paid an obscure site on the dark web to have one of its teenage residents killed, and that reason is Chris Monteiro. Monteiro, a systems administrator who runs I.T. security for a midsize firm in London, spends his nights as a white-hat hacker and independent cybercrime researcher, navigating the shadowy spaces of the dark web. Murder marketplaces have in recent years become both his signature area of expertise and his exhausting burden” Imagine you can pay in bitcoin where AI drone and carry out the hit...all anonymous
- LyndsySimon 7y ago
  Now imagine trying to be a politician in that hypothetical world. Make one person angry enough to kill you, and you die. If you haven’t, I recommend reading “Assassination Politics” by Jim Bell. It’s an interesting though exercise.
  - milankragujevic 7y ago
    Black Mirror covered this scenario in S03E06: Hated in the Nation.
    - Thorrez 7y ago
      That has drone killing, but not an assassination market. No one pays or receives money.
      - milankragujevic 7y ago
        That is true. But they could, they have the technology, they would just need the marketplace.
  - DrPhish 7y ago
    In the 1942 Captain Future pulp "Outlaws of the Moon" [1], President Carthew was anonymously murdered by a drone. [1] https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/have-no-fear-of-the-bayin-hounds https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/have-no-fear-of-the-bayi...
mrandish 7y ago
Since this kind of scam "murder for hire" site has been around the dark web for a while and apparently, there are people dumb enough to pay them something, one would hope that various law enforcement agencies have set up fake sites and are harvesting erstwhile 'clients'. However, based on the article, there's an apparent lack of law enforcement interest due to jurisdictional challenges. Perhaps it's also harder to get govt funding for something as 'routine' as attempted murder vs headline fodder like pedos. I imagine there might be an opportunity for a reality TV producer to create a "To Catch a Murderer" show along the lines of "To Catch a Predator." Once they have a real 'client', they could let the client know a date and time for which they'll need an alibi and then suggest a nearby location that has video surveillance by which the would-be client can establish their presence. That creates an oppty for the host of the show to approach the client at the alibi location, ostensibly to return the client's money because there are 'problems' with the hit. The ensuing conversation would likely lead to some high ratings as well as broadcast-quality, multi-angle indictment evidence.
- sillysaurusx 7y ago
  > "To Catch a Murderer" Scene: a quiet house in the middle of suburbia of Nowhere, MO. The house is dark. From the inside, someone hears a tapping at the window. The killer quietly slides the window up and through the frame. Suddenly, all the lights come on and Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" starts blaring through a Logitech Z906 5.1 Surround Sound Speaker System. The killer immediately tries to jump back through the window, but – smack! – the window is shut. It's bulletproof glass, and has been remotely locked. The song mutes. "Take a seat." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c1vWnF9bS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c1vWnF9bS4
  - idclip 7y ago
    thats like the plot of john wick, brilliant!
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- flafla2 7y ago
ggm 7y ago
A headline designed to make me not want to.. click on it. Luckily reading the comments here got me much of the sense.
perl4ever 7y ago
I thought this might be about a viral facebook post that said something like "click here and a <something> will die" and how many people clicked.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
idclip 7y ago
What an amazing, jarring read.
rozab 7y ago
>After a few minutes, Monteiro succeeded in hacking into the site with stolen administrator codes and installing an automated script that scraped the entire site every three hours and dumped the data on his server. Ugh, fuck off. I think the big question here, the one that should be at the top of the article, is "Has a hit ever been purchased and carried out via darkweb sites", and the answer is "obviously not, lol".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- TimonKnigge 7y ago
  Someone didn't read the article :-) > While I was working on this story, journalists at BBC News Russia confirmed the first known case of a murder being ordered on the dark web and successfully carried out by hired assassins.
sandoooo 7y ago
so this 'journalist' Brian Merchant has not been able to prove shit, but he felt comfortable enough to dox someone, full name, and accuse him of being a murderer based on 1. his ex's suspicions and 2. the fact that he refused to give an interview? I suppose before you do this sort of thing you make very sure that your target is not rich enough to sue you for defamation.
- jen729w 7y ago
  It’s safe to assume that Harper’s legal team have a lot more information than we do, and that this information was sufficient for them to OK this story. Don’t forget how complicated the world is. If something looks too simple to be true, it probably is.
  - sandoooo 7y ago
    I imagine the legal review goes like this: "he's not rich, he doesn't have a social media following, and if we spin this shit right everybody will think he's a creepy stalker-slash-murderer so nobody will stand up for him. What's he gonna do, actually put a contract out on us? Yeah, print that shit."
mirimir 7y ago
I was sure that TFA would cover the US drone program. That's exactly how it works for the people controlling the drones. Just like a game.
sbussard 7y ago
Could natural language processing and machine learning feasibly identify who wrote the source code for dark web websites?
- yosamino 7y ago
  I don't know about NLP or ML, but the keyword you are looking for for the general process of identifying code authors is "code stylometry".
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
>Her father gave her a pocketknife, and her boyfriend gave her a bigger knife to carry in her purse. Stories like make me appreciate that someone can purchase and conceal a small firearm (in most cities). All things unequal, a person with a gun is always extremely dangerous. The police, after all, have no actual legal requirement to protect you[1] — and never forget that. 1. https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...
- zeveb 7y ago
  Miss Stern graduated high school in 2018, so she is probably too young to purchase or legally carry a pistol — that age is 21 across the U.S., to my knowledge and perhaps with a few exceptions. I would agree that arming herself is a really good idea.
fosco 7y ago
Makes be think of slaughterbots based on some comments and concepts touched on here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
kolleykibber 7y ago
Interesting Story. Nice of the journalist to forewarn the suspect so any proof can be destroyed. Suspect on linkedin I see. https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-fry-366693b2/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-fry-366693b2/

215 points by self 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

https://web.archive.org/web/20191212221610/https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/ https://web.archive.org/web/20191212221610/https://harpers.o... https://outline.com/y7DM9v https://outline.com/y7DM9v http://archive.is/DHAg6 http://archive.is/DHAg6

onesmallcoin 7y ago

Too many popups I quit

naringas 7y ago
[quietly whispers] sssh... reader mode
criddell 7y ago
I wonder if anybody at Harpers ever looks at the numbers to decide if the popups should stay? They should have a minimum success rate that, if signups drop below, they get rid of the popups.
- joegahona 7y ago
  What would you tie it to? Bounce rate?
  - criddell 7y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. For every thousand times it's displayed, how many times does the person viewing the page just close it and not act on the offer? If it's less than some very low number (maybe 30%), don't show it. Or maybe show it after the article has been scrolled all the way to the bottom. It's a long article and at that point you know the reader might be interested in seeing more from you.
    - mulmen 7y ago
      You're assuming Harpers is optimizing for not nagging people. That is not the case at all. They are optimizing for collecting email addresses. If you do not want to enter an email address and bounce they lost nothing, you weren't going to provide an email anyway. It is a dark pattern but it is not a mistake.
egdod 7y ago
Their website is extremely usable with JavaScript disabled.
excalibur 7y ago
Stock firefox, default tracking protection. I received a single nag about free articles that was easily dismissed. One first-party subscription ad at the bottom of the right column, another at the bottom of the article. No other ads of any kind.
- graedus 7y ago
  I got two. For those that don't know, a good portion of these nagging modal windows play nice in the sense that pressing ESC closes them - good to be able to instantly dismiss them without having to hunt for the close button. The first one I saw could be closed with ESC, the second one required clicking "Close".
onesmallcoin 7y ago
I'm more getting at the facy that this is a link to reading an article Not a link to a who-can-get rid of the popup the best contest We're the people that build these systems and this is about design and usability and when you open a can of cola you would be upset if it were worms because it said cola on the front I wonder how many hours of peoples lives are lost to trying to control the computer to get it to do what it said it was doing on the tin, rather than what is in the interests of the politics or the profit I correlate it to the same level as clickbait and I'm sure their are other humans out their that get the same taste in their mouth when using the internet, and then go on to do other things instead, which means that they are potentially missing out on learning something vaulable in the future, because of an impression your design made in the past. People should think more about the psycology of design and what the goal of the message of the content their sending is and try not to give into logic like this: I publish my papers online, they are academic and educational; I want more money. I add ads or political messages onto the website that was before purely educational because it will help me aquire money. You are no longer selling a delicious can of cola but a terrible can of worms

haecceity 7y ago

You'd think it'd cost more money to kill someone. You'd have to pay insurance for the assassin. If something went wrong you'd need to pay the costs of taking care of the assassin's family. Whole lotta trouble.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lonelappde 7y ago
That's only important if future assassins know if past assassins are mistreated.
laretluval 7y ago
Indeed, as revealed in his court documents, Ross Ulbricht paid a lot more more money than this (by an order of magnitude) to have his darknet hits carried out (although he was likely being scammed). The price mismatch makes me skeptical of this story.
- Alupis 7y ago
  > although he was likely being scammed It was the FBI posing as a "Hell's Angel" gang member. That part was revealed pretty early on after his arrest.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lrobinovitch 7y ago

This was a really interesting and worthwhile read despite the two pop ups. The Beau Brigham case mentioned is sad[0]...guy seems to have been given a shit lot in life (bedridden with illness for 5 years), payed a token $3.50 for an assassination attempt on his stepmother, then received 3 years in jail. No one should allow their frustrations to build up to actionable murderous intent but you I can't help feel for the guy to some extent. 3 years in jail is probably not the sort of help he needed. That article also mentions how Monteiro is a registered sex offender related to child pornography. This article[1] goes in to more detail, stating that Monteiro had "58 images of child pornography on his computer, most of which he created" and that "he committed illegal acts in order to access content on the dark web. Monteiro said he compromised and shut down websites while obtaining information about the case". Seems like these child porn sites require users to generate content to gain and maintain access. Hard to tell from the testimony the intent and extent of good or harm Monteiro did around the child porn stuff. There should really be more published details around the sex offender registry - did someone swap nudes with their underage girlfriend or actively film abuse of their kids? There is a massive difference. Regardless, Monteiro is doing awesome work around the murder for hire business. Really tricky field to navigate, and seemingly quite taxing and unrewarding. He published this cool public data on murder for hire statistics here [2] [0] https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/08/15/jury-finds-beau-brigham-guilty-of-trying-to-hire-a-hitman/ https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/08/15/jury-finds-beau-brigham... [1] https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/07/31/key-witness-in-slo-murder-for-hire-trial-admits-to-being-sex-offender/ https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/07/31/key-witness-in-slo-murd... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AICLS8bS6Kh4GgRTWkSfBe96cKHWwf8EPYiFc3pcgMY/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AICLS8bS6Kh4GgRTWkSf...

mnm1 7y ago

Hard to not come away from this article with a sense that the FBI and other law enforcement organizations are simply incapable and unwilling to do their jobs. For example, this sentence: "The FBI has a mandate to pursue only those crimes that violate a federal statute." Sorry, but how can a crime over the Internet like this NOT violate federal statutes? It's impossible. By definition all these crimes would be pursued at the federal level. Then there's the description of the interview where they interviewed the husband and wife together despite the husband being the main suspect. That's like pulling the plug on your server and wondering why the website's down. Beyond incredibly stupid to the point where it's hard to believe that actually happened. Those agents should themselves be charged for facilitating that murder. I won't bother to go into the failing of allowing the identification of the British guy who placed the hit either by not allowing his ex-gf to read his messages. How dumb are these fucking cops? The whole piece reads like a story of police, FBI, and law enforcement failings at every level. It's practically guaranteed that hits are taking place online and this is law enforcement's response? Making things worse or at the very best, fucking up investigations with their extreme stupidity.

excalibur 7y ago

> In June 2018, news came of a second death from the kill list. Twenty-one-year-old Bryan Njoroge was found dead in Indiana, shot in the head on a baseball field. The police ruled the death a suicide. Weeks earlier, a user with the alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500 to order his murder and provided details of his upcoming travel. Njoroge was a U.S. military serviceman who, before he died, had made a female friend the beneficiary of his life-insurance policy. His father questions whether the death was a suicide, but the local police department has said that it is aware of the dark-web assassination order and stands by its conclusion. It's possible that the police know something the father does not. I would not put it past a suicidal person to order a hit on himself.

thebean11 7y ago
Ordering a hit on yourself doesn't really make it a suicide, someone has still committed murder
- ksdale 7y ago
  I know nothing of the particulars of this case, but a person could order a fake hit and then kill themselves in order to make it look like a murder to ensure the life insurance payout.
  - excalibur 7y ago
    I mean maybe, if you thought the hit was real and were disappointed when nothing happened you might go that route.
    - ksdale 7y ago
      Or if you fully intended to commit suicide and were only interested in a hit as a way to make sure the insurance pays out. Trying to make sure someone gets a life insurance pay out is a really common feature of a lot of stories about suicide.
      - 7y ago

ogoffart 7y ago

I've read another article related to this about a year ago: "The unbelievable tale of a fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante... and a murder": https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kill-list-dark-web-hitmen https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kill-list-dark-web-hitmen HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767657

eindiran 7y ago

The Wired article on the original Silk Road back in 2012 was responsible for driving a huge amount of traffic to the site. Harper's has a smaller readership than Wired and fewer people are interested in pursuing hits than getting high (hopefully), so maybe that won't happen here, but I worry that the article will put these forums on people's radars. Thankfully the clearnet sites that track darknet .onion addresses usually avoid having sites like these listed.

paulpauper 7y ago

>Now it’s easy to purchase bitcoins on any number of mainstream markets and “tumble” them so that their point of purchase is obscured. Similarly, thanks to Tor, accessing the dark web requires only opening a browser and enduring slower download speeds. lol has the author tried buying bitcoins and then tumbling them? I would not call submitting tons of ID to buy and withdrawal $5000 of bitcoin and then setting up tor and getting a tumbler working to be easy, and not getting scammed in the process. Also tor and tumblers are not necessarily fully anonymous.

bilbo0s 7y ago
>Also tor and tumblers are not necessarily fully anonymous Money quote right there. I'm not sure how many people consider using this sort of thing to skirt the law. But believing in the anonymity of anything on the internet while you're skirting the law has landed many a naive person in prison. Especially if that person was within the jurisdictional reach of the US government.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Bitcoin Fog did pretty well during its run. It mixed Bitcoin from at least two huge thefts. At least one of them generated a huge Reddit crowd-sourced tracking effort. And as far as I know, nothing was ever tracked. I do get that Monero is ~anonymous by design. But then, how does one buy it anonymously? All I see are exchanges that implement KYC. Using bank transfers and credit/debit cards. Are there any cash by mail exchanges? Or even local meatspace exchanging?
  - obituary_latte 7y ago
    There are atm machines popping up where you can go and deposit cash to get btc. They typically have phone number requirements for transactions under $3000 (over requires ID) and they are located in places with cameras (e.g. gas stations/convenience stores), but those restrictions are easily worked around (burner phone/pay a homeless person/disguise) if you have the desire.
  - sybarita 7y ago

tpmx 7y ago

Potentially unpopular opinion: This is one of the reasons why we as a society can't afford to allow untraceable electronic money transactions. Imagine the combination of perfectly untraceable money transactions with actual working low-cost swarms of facial recognition-based killbots/drones. That's what, maybe 5-7 years away from now? The risk here is that the cost of a hit could go down to very low costs, say between $1k to $10k per hit/murder. If it goes that low we're screwed as a society, especially if the transactions aren't traceable.

int_19h 7y ago
Thing is, it doesn't really matter what you "allow". There's no way to enforce it for these kinds of uses. A blanket ban can put it outside of purview of your average mildly curious common person for purposes like, say, buying recreational drugs. But if they have seriously decided that they want to murder someone, they'll find out how to make that payment - and you can't meaningfully trace that short of full online Panopticon (all connections wiretapped 24/7, all Internet access tied to secure real name ID). There's a lot more coming. 3D printers similarly enable access to stuff that a lot of people would like to get banned, such as firearms and accessories to them. For example, it is already possible to 3D-print a high-capacity Glock magazine completely from scratch (the only metal part is the spring, and even that is bent to shape out of a suitable steel wire using a 3D-printed jig). And it costs about $200 one-off for the printer, and <$1 per magazine thereafter. There are already laws that make doing this illegal in some locations, but again - how do you actually enforce them? Our societies will have to either go high-tech totalitarian, or learn to live with these possibilities. I hope it's going to be the latter; after all, past societies - before the growth of administrative state with its IDs, registries, accounting, and pervasive bureaucracy - already had to deal with a situation where it was very hard to track a determined criminal. But looking at the evolution of surveillance and police power laws in modern developed democracies and China, it's probably going to be the former.
- tpmx 7y ago
  My informed gut feeling is that legislation is surprisingly efficient. Your tangent on 3d-printing aside: If we decide to make cryptocurrencies illegal, I think that will solve like 80% of the problem. Given the tradeoffs involved, I think that's worth doing.

joshstrange 7y ago

So while I don't really participate in cryptocurrencies anymore I have a basic knowledge of how it all works and have read up on ETH contracts. Couldn't someone create a contract on the ETH network (my terminology might be off) that allows you send a message to contract with a name (maybe more PII), a date, and some amount of ETH to create the system Jim Bell hypothesized? Obviously a big issue would be "death confirmation" as is how do we know X person is actually dead so we can pay out to the "winner"? I imagine it could be done through some kind of majority system but what incentive would other "donators"/"would be killers" have to confirm a death has happened if they aren't the beneficiary? I'm sure someone clever could think of some way to do it...

reidjs 7y ago
For the second part, look at prediction markets like Augur.
saagarjha 7y ago
> Obviously a big issue would be "death confirmation" as is how do we know X person is actually dead so we can pay out to the "winner"? Put people on the blockchain, obviously.
- strbean 7y ago
  Well this just gave me a chill down my spine. It isn't too crazy to imagine this happening.
wavefunction 7y ago
Anyone could see who the "winner" is though I believe?
Random_ernest 7y ago
The problem you describe is not really solved (at least not to my knowledge) and is often referred to as the Oracle problem in smart contracts.

cryptozeus 7y ago

Jesus that was crazy to read...this guy is doing god’s work “There is just one reason that a local police department in Minnesota was aware that someone had paid an obscure site on the dark web to have one of its teenage residents killed, and that reason is Chris Monteiro. Monteiro, a systems administrator who runs I.T. security for a midsize firm in London, spends his nights as a white-hat hacker and independent cybercrime researcher, navigating the shadowy spaces of the dark web. Murder marketplaces have in recent years become both his signature area of expertise and his exhausting burden” Imagine you can pay in bitcoin where AI drone and carry out the hit...all anonymous

LyndsySimon 7y ago
Now imagine trying to be a politician in that hypothetical world. Make one person angry enough to kill you, and you die. If you haven’t, I recommend reading “Assassination Politics” by Jim Bell. It’s an interesting though exercise.
- milankragujevic 7y ago
  Black Mirror covered this scenario in S03E06: Hated in the Nation.
  - Thorrez 7y ago
    That has drone killing, but not an assassination market. No one pays or receives money.
    - milankragujevic 7y ago
      That is true. But they could, they have the technology, they would just need the marketplace.
- DrPhish 7y ago
  In the 1942 Captain Future pulp "Outlaws of the Moon" [1], President Carthew was anonymously murdered by a drone. [1] https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/have-no-fear-of-the-bayin-hounds https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/have-no-fear-of-the-bayi...

mrandish 7y ago

Since this kind of scam "murder for hire" site has been around the dark web for a while and apparently, there are people dumb enough to pay them something, one would hope that various law enforcement agencies have set up fake sites and are harvesting erstwhile 'clients'. However, based on the article, there's an apparent lack of law enforcement interest due to jurisdictional challenges. Perhaps it's also harder to get govt funding for something as 'routine' as attempted murder vs headline fodder like pedos. I imagine there might be an opportunity for a reality TV producer to create a "To Catch a Murderer" show along the lines of "To Catch a Predator." Once they have a real 'client', they could let the client know a date and time for which they'll need an alibi and then suggest a nearby location that has video surveillance by which the would-be client can establish their presence. That creates an oppty for the host of the show to approach the client at the alibi location, ostensibly to return the client's money because there are 'problems' with the hit. The ensuing conversation would likely lead to some high ratings as well as broadcast-quality, multi-angle indictment evidence.

sillysaurusx 7y ago
> "To Catch a Murderer" Scene: a quiet house in the middle of suburbia of Nowhere, MO. The house is dark. From the inside, someone hears a tapping at the window. The killer quietly slides the window up and through the frame. Suddenly, all the lights come on and Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" starts blaring through a Logitech Z906 5.1 Surround Sound Speaker System. The killer immediately tries to jump back through the window, but – smack! – the window is shut. It's bulletproof glass, and has been remotely locked. The song mutes. "Take a seat." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c1vWnF9bS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c1vWnF9bS4
- idclip 7y ago
  thats like the plot of john wick, brilliant!
- deleted 7y ago
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flafla2 7y ago

ggm 7y ago

A headline designed to make me not want to.. click on it. Luckily reading the comments here got me much of the sense.

perl4ever 7y ago

I thought this might be about a viral facebook post that said something like "click here and a <something> will die" and how many people clicked.

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idclip 7y ago

What an amazing, jarring read.

rozab 7y ago

>After a few minutes, Monteiro succeeded in hacking into the site with stolen administrator codes and installing an automated script that scraped the entire site every three hours and dumped the data on his server. Ugh, fuck off. I think the big question here, the one that should be at the top of the article, is "Has a hit ever been purchased and carried out via darkweb sites", and the answer is "obviously not, lol".

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TimonKnigge 7y ago
Someone didn't read the article :-) > While I was working on this story, journalists at BBC News Russia confirmed the first known case of a murder being ordered on the dark web and successfully carried out by hired assassins.

sandoooo 7y ago

so this 'journalist' Brian Merchant has not been able to prove shit, but he felt comfortable enough to dox someone, full name, and accuse him of being a murderer based on 1. his ex's suspicions and 2. the fact that he refused to give an interview? I suppose before you do this sort of thing you make very sure that your target is not rich enough to sue you for defamation.

jen729w 7y ago
It’s safe to assume that Harper’s legal team have a lot more information than we do, and that this information was sufficient for them to OK this story. Don’t forget how complicated the world is. If something looks too simple to be true, it probably is.
- sandoooo 7y ago
  I imagine the legal review goes like this: "he's not rich, he doesn't have a social media following, and if we spin this shit right everybody will think he's a creepy stalker-slash-murderer so nobody will stand up for him. What's he gonna do, actually put a contract out on us? Yeah, print that shit."

mirimir 7y ago

I was sure that TFA would cover the US drone program. That's exactly how it works for the people controlling the drones. Just like a game.

sbussard 7y ago

Could natural language processing and machine learning feasibly identify who wrote the source code for dark web websites?

yosamino 7y ago
I don't know about NLP or ML, but the keyword you are looking for for the general process of identifying code authors is "code stylometry".

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3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

>Her father gave her a pocketknife, and her boyfriend gave her a bigger knife to carry in her purse. Stories like make me appreciate that someone can purchase and conceal a small firearm (in most cities). All things unequal, a person with a gun is always extremely dangerous. The police, after all, have no actual legal requirement to protect you[1] — and never forget that. 1. https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...

zeveb 7y ago
Miss Stern graduated high school in 2018, so she is probably too young to purchase or legally carry a pistol — that age is 21 across the U.S., to my knowledge and perhaps with a few exceptions. I would agree that arming herself is a really good idea.

fosco 7y ago

Makes be think of slaughterbots based on some comments and concepts touched on here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw

kolleykibber 7y ago

Interesting Story. Nice of the journalist to forewarn the suspect so any proof can be destroyed. Suspect on linkedin I see. https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-fry-366693b2/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-fry-366693b2/