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Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction
- ahi 14y agoSounds like the police got lucky at customs. Apparently, "buy local" is a must when it comes to drugs.
- benesch 14y agoExactly my thoughts. The quote from the manager of crime operations made me laugh: > "Criminals are attempting to exploit the international mail system through online networks, but the recent arrest demonstrates that we are one step ahead of them." Yes, you intercepted one transaction. Congratulations.
- Cushman 14y agoWell, buy domestic. USPS only, to be precise.
- RobertHoudin 14y agoCan you explain what you mean, please?
- Cushman 14y agoOne of the reasons the Silk Road operates in the relative open with such impunity is because of the absurdly low probability that a small quantity of well-packaged drugs will be detected unless they pass through customs. The USPS is especially good since it extends Fourth Amendment protections to parcels, which the commercial carriers don't need to do.
- duaneb 14y agoThere appears to be a lot of interest in the SR and not a lot of actual success in cracking down. One guy is a tiny drop in the bucket of that site.
- squidsoup 14y agoPause for a moment and consider that one can purchase narcotics from an anonymised network using virtual money. There's no need to read speculative science fiction these days, you can just read the news.
- betterunix 14y agoThose drugs still have to be shipped via a real postal system. Speculative scifi suggests that I will have a machine in my house that will produce drugs on the fly, with chemical reactions that are controlled by software.
- stephengillie 14y agoSo the drugs are 3d-printed? Maybe in pill form?
- sliverstorm 14y agoThat implies one of the following: 1) The printer is capable of "printing" complex compounds using individual atoms 2) The printer is pre-loaded with cocaine, LSD, MDMA... My point being not everything can be printed...
- zevyoura 14y agoThere's a concept floating around for something called a 'chemputer' that would effectively be a 3D printer for chemistry: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-chemputer-that-could-print-out-any-drug http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-chemputer-that-could-print-out...
- stephengillie 14y agoNot everything can be printed today...
- toufka 14y agoIt actually wouldn't be much more complicated to have a machine into which you pour a bit of bakers yeast, sugar and water and out comes a highly-enriched biomolecule of your choice. Most (recreational) drugs can be created via natural biochemical pathways. Honestly, not that much more complicated than your espresso machine.
- jerguismi 14y agoApparently SR forums gained almost 5000 new users last month. http://imgur.com/a/asNew http://imgur.com/a/asNew The numbers from the store are unknown, and also I'm pretty sure it is very difficult to get a realistic volume from the sales.
- wmf 14y ago"We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road... We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012... We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers, from public listings, to slightly over USD 1.2 million per month..." http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139 http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139
- jerguismi 14y agoYeah, I know about that study. I'm still very sceptical that their estimates are realistic at all.
- umbrella 14y agoSo he was caught importing drugs, told the police he ordered them from the Silk Road and therefor the police are cracking down on the Silk Road.
- DanBC 14y agoI never know from stories like this if law enforcement are hopelessly clueless or if they do know what they're doing but just not releasing details. While the tech is probably secure it's easy for people to make mistakes that leak information; and while NSA or GCHQ probably find it easy to get that information they have no interest in doing so. So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes people make with Tor and Bitcoin?
- betterunix 14y ago"So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes people make with Tor and Bitcoin?" I met a researcher who did some work on attacking Tor, the results of which were given to law enforcement agencies. He was a bit light on details, but the basic idea of his approach was this: 1. You narrow down the geographic location of your target. Not hard in the case of the Silk Road, since there is a physical package being shipped. 2. You connect to your target's system, and modulate the latency of packets that you send. This is a covert channel. 3. You have a van rolling around the geographic region you believe the target to be in, and listen on wifi frequencies. When the covert channel is detected, you home in until you have located the target computer. Obviously you can defend against this sort of attack by just not using wifi, although similar attacks at the ISP level are possible. Cover traffic helps with this, assuming the covert channel has low tolerance to noise (this may not be true; again, few details were given). It is also wise to avoid connecting from your house, if possible, and to use a public location where you can quickly shut down your laptop when you see the cops. Or, you know, you could not sell large quantities of illegal drugs over the Internet, since it is basically asking for trouble.
- sliverstorm 14y agoClever. Good to know they aren't totally clueless.
- dr_doom 14y agoYes they are. He said a researcher shared that information with police officers, not that they did anything but say "thanks a lot, this will help". I'm willing to bet no officer on the drug enforcement team even read the paper. No law local enforcement agency will known how to even begin step 2, and none will waste the time and resources for step 3.
- sliverstorm 14y agoTalk about bad press for Bitcoin. Silk Road is probably the number one reason regular Joe's would ever hear them mentioned.
- pippy 14y agoTo be realistic though, bitcoin is mostly used for gambling and drugs. Depending on your philosophy, the freedom it enables is far more important than what it's used for.
- sliverstorm 14y agoYou pose an interesting philosophical quandary. If the freedom it enables is simply the freedom to gamble illegally and trade illicit goods, is that important...? Do people make the argument that freedom is simply intrinsically good? Or do they argue, like with bittorrent, that the possible occasional positive uses outweigh the more common, primarily negative uses ?
- polarix 14y agoI think the idea is that prohibitions against any value exchange are purely evil or misguided, so they should be routed around.
- sliverstorm 14y agoWait, what? There are no transactions that should be blocked? Preventing the sale of napalm to a triple-arsonist is evil? I know I'm being a little extreme, but again- what!?!
- mindcrime 14y agoWait, what? There are no transactions that should be blocked? I'll be a little bit extreme here and agree that there are no voluntary transactions, made between consenting adults, that should be blocked. Any use of force (or threat of force) to try and achieve some social or political end is evil, IMO. Even if the "end" is a noble one, like preventing arson. It's the act of the arsonist which is evil, and intervening to prevent him/her from torching someone else's property is just self defense, which I would consider acceptable. But, then again, I'm a radical anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist, so I'm a bit biased.
- anonymous 14y agoI'd like some clarification on Tor, please. Namely, how can the silkroad's site operate without the owners being detected? AFAIK Tor has its own DNS with <hash>.onion, but don't those resolve to regular IPs? And if police have a normal everyday IP, can't they just imprison the site's owners directly?
- throwaway125 14y agohttps://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en tl;dr hidden services are anonymous
- sliverstorm 14y agotl;dr hidden services are the digital implementation of dead-drop as a transmission protocol. Which is actually pretty neat.
- Natsu 14y agoIf they're smart, they'll just focus on compromising the site itself or using fake buyers/sellers. There are tons of ways to attack a site like that which do not rely on attacking tor.
- Devilboy 14y agoLike what?
- Natsu 14y agoCompromise the site itself & gather information. Catch & turn real sellers. Crapflood it with fake buyers/sellers making it less useful. Order drugs & gather forensic info from the packages. Try to trace the money trail via the bitcoin block chain. While bitcoin is nominally anonymous, I believe there was an article a while back about how easy it is to accidentally deanonymize your bitcoins (see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses for example). Heck, agree to sell someone drugs and actually send them flour + a GPS/camera if you want to go that route. For the most part, just go after the weak human links in the chain and use standard anti-network tactics like turning people into informants and isolating everyone via mistrust. Heck, they could just start scamming folks on the site. Create lots of new sellers, never deliver the promised drugs. BTC aren't revokable, so you can just rob them blind. The marketplace requires trust and there are lots of ways to break that. Yes, they could start building escrow services and the like, but those just create new avenues for attack. With a little imagination, this could be used by the police as a giant honeypot.
- dobbsbob 14y agothis was already posted here a few days ago and everybody agreed this guy was a moron, and that no magic police tor tracing was used. He told them everything when customs found a bunch of drugs in a box from the netherlands with his name on it. This definitely is not the first silk rd conviction plenty of ppl have been nabbed by customs around the world if you read the forums just they were smart enough not to say anything without a lawyer