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Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

134 points by dchs 13y ago

cottonseed 13y ago
Better to ask, has the war on drugs made the world a more dangerous place?
- venus 13y ago
  I wonder if there is anyone who believes - really believes - it has not. The war on drugs is kind of this diorama encapsulation of everything that is wrong with our politics, media, and society.
  - sker 13y ago
    I suppose that's a rhetorical wondering. There's plenty of people who think the government can do no wrong, even here on HN.
    - atlanticus 13y ago
      Most of what the government does is wrong, or at least terribly inefficient, so the less they do the better.
    - Nursie 13y ago
      Most of us that will argue with libertarians until we're both (all?) red/blue in the face believe that government is useful, necessary and generally a good thing (TM) for a variety of reasons. But do no wrong? That's a massive exaggeration. YOu can believe it does a hell of a lot wrong, in fact nearly everything, without believing we'd be better off without any government at all.
  - stinkytaco 13y ago
    The war on drugs is certainly dangerous. Making anything illegal makes it dangerous because it invites both the violence of the state, plus the violence that occurs in the absence of the state. The question is whether the danger the war on drugs has created is worse that the danger of those drugs being legal. Fortunatly, we have a very nice test bed here in the United States where we did make a dangerous drug illegal and then legalized it again. It would be interesting to run those numbers...
  - GhotiFish 13y ago
    Well. I'm not convinced it did, myself. If prohibition didn't happen 1920s for the americans, would Al Capone never of being born? Really these prohibition laws give lowlifes something to fight over, and the fightings dangerous, but who says they wouldn't be fighting anyway? Does it make life more dangerous. Maybe not. Does it make it more dangerous for me? Maybe. edit: Ouch. Looking forward to that rebuttal.
    - aeturnum 13y ago
      > but who says they wouldn't be fighting anyway? This is a totally fair question. So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that Al Capone's level of violence had nothing to do with his criminal syndicate. He just liked shooting people. However, shooting people is expensive, especially given that they employed reasonably advanced weapons (sub-machine guns). So, he's not going to get as many bullets when liquor is legal. Also, though Capone is believed to have killed people, far more people were killed on his orders[0]. Without an unregulated and lucrative source of income, it's hard to see him having the money to hire people to kill others. No one is saying that, absent the drug war, the cartel's enforcers would be in the peace corps. However, the extremely high street price of drugs finances a level of violence that would not exist otherwise. If you want an example, look at the history of Mexico in the last 20 years and compare it to any other nearby country. [0]http://history1900s.about.com/od/people/a/Al-Capone.htm http://history1900s.about.com/od/people/a/Al-Capone.htm
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Furthermore, while Al Capone could have found other crimes to orchestrate to make himself rich, he wouldn't have been able to perform those crimes as well as liquor smuggling, limiting his supply of cash (lets face it, he was probably doing those things in our history timeline as well as smuggling). Alternatively, if we suppose some crime that he really did neglect in favor of smuggling, why did he neglect it in favor of smuggling? Because it was not as profitable or carried greater risk (in our history timeline, he was able to manage his risk effectively. He wasn't killed in the act and was only eventually caught for tax evasion. Had he been, say, robbing banks instead, he undoubtedly would not have lasted as long.) Any way you slice it, prohibition made dealing with Capone worse than it otherwise would have been.
- hackerboos 13y ago
  Yes. Some senior police officers here in the UK realise this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24320717 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24320717
  - cottonseed 13y ago
    Around the world, see: leap.cc (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition). However, this voice is still soundly in the minority. I remember when the pot decriminalization ballot question came up in Massachusetts. Law enforcement came out loudly against.
    - Nursie 13y ago
      I find it hard to see what business it is of theirs. They're there to enforce the laws passed down by legislators, not make the laws.
      - aaronem 13y ago
        They're citizens of a democracy with every bit as much right to organize in support of their legislative proposals as any others, is what business it is of theirs. I may tend to disagree with their arguments, but until they try a coup, advancing those arguments is well within their rights. (Thought experiment: Would you make the same argument against LEAP, which is another organization of LEOs who take the opposite position on decriminalization?)
        Nursie 13y ago
        I agree they have the right to organise and speak like any other group. I just wonder why they think they ought to be given any special consideration when it comes to policy making, or be able to use their status as law-enforcement officers (a group the public give weight to) to voice such opinions.
        aaronem 13y ago
        Perhaps because they have domain expertise not generally available outside their field. Do you also argue developers have no reason to think they should be given special consideration in W3C's and IETF's standards processes?
HPLovecraft 13y ago
Do News Story Headlines Always Have To Ask A Huge Rhetorical Question?
- HPLovecraft 13y ago
  http://alexleo.tumblr.com/post/5244455384/newyorktimesheadlines http://alexleo.tumblr.com/post/5244455384/newyorktimesheadli...
- Coincoin 13y ago
  I like article titles with rhetorical questions because I don't need to read the article.
  - bigdubs 13y ago
    The answer is always "no", and you can keep doing what you were doing.
- corobo 13y ago
  Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
  - dingaling 13y ago
    Today in our supplement: Is Betteridge's Law always true?
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
As the article itself said, successor sites are inevitable (and there are at least two that are thriving right now in SR's fallout). Those who prefer online black markets over physical transactions will simply migrate to the new marketplaces and consequently turn them into the "new Silk Road". The only true effect, perhaps, will be people taking security even more seriously. I read a statistic at some point that approx. 80% of SR users didn't use PGP (The Daily Dot sources this claim, otherwise I cannot validate it).
- pyre 13y ago
  > 80% of SR users didn't use PGP I find this to be dubious. How does PGP relate to SR usage? When people communicated with SR vendors, did they use email (where PGP might matter) or did they use the SR software? Did their forum software allow people to sign their posts? How was this information sourced? Was there just an informal poll on their forums?
  - cbhl 13y ago
    PGP isn't just for email. PGP can be used to sign and/or encrypt messages wherever you publish them. PGP would be useful in ensuring that SR isn't tampering with your messages between any two parties on the site.
  - lmm 13y ago
    The site recommended buyers use PGP to encrypt their on-site messages to sellers (including their mailing addresses), so that even SR admins wouldn't have access to them. It's slightly cumbersome but really the only way to do secure messaging on the web, as the lavabit story shows.
  - gwern 13y ago
    > I find this to be dubious. I don't. People are lazy and don't want to use PGP because it's confusing and hard. PGP-related questions were some of the most common help problems, on /r/SilkRoad, people would regularly mention not encrypting their address (ranked up there with early finalization for being incredibly frustrating for those of us who knew what we were doing), and the Atlantis CEO stated that like 90% of Atlantis users relied on the Atlantis-provided PGP encryption rather than encrypting it themselves. > When people communicated with SR vendors, did they use email (where PGP might matter) or did they use the SR software? SR had an internal message system, much like Reddit's PMs. You would copy the public key off the vendor's profile page on SR (or possibly from a thread on the forums), you'd ASCII-armored encrypt your address to the public key, and paste it into an address form field during the order process. You'd do the same thing for a regular PM. > Did their forum software allow people to sign their posts? Sure: ASCII armor, remember. Any forum which allows you to type in text, allows PGP signing of messages. Few people bothered, except for important statements like from DPR about new rules or .onion addresses or stuff like that.
PaulHoule 13y ago
Well, I'm sure you're going to be able to buy weed no matter what.
- ianstallings 13y ago
  Amen to that. Mind if I do a J?
BashiBazouk 13y ago
Did Silk Road even put a slight dent in street drug sellers in the first place? I would be surprised if street level sellers and buyers are internet savvy enough to use a service like this. SR looks more like the ideal system for savvy college students and young techs to specifically avoid the street level market.
- jtbigwoo 13y ago
  Right. Just requiring the use of tor prevented 95% of the population from using SR.
  - carlob 13y ago
    Make that 99.5%.
  - epi8 13y ago
    I'm not doubting, but why?
    - princess3000 13y ago
      There were several obstacles to using SR, each of which would have been difficult or frightening to overcome when the alternative is doing transactions in person with cash. You needed to understand TOR (which, while not especially difficult to use in general, is harder than opening Chrome and going to Amazon), you needed to understand and obtain BTC (either mining them or purchasing them, which was generally somewhat difficult given that you couldn't use credit cards or paypal or other simple payment methods), and then you had to figure out PGP for sending your information to the vendor. It's all definitely doable and none of it really requires much technical knowledge but there's definitely some friction that I assume would intimidate a fair amount of people.
  - fragsworth 13y ago
    I doubt that. If you don't care (or know) about anonymity or security, it was extremely easy to access the Silk Road through a web proxy with a simple Google search.
acomjean 13y ago
Shutting it down certainly didn't help the US Post Office. Not a silk road user but being able to anonymously contract hitmen (and hitwomen) doesn't seem to make the world safer..
- nickpinkston 13y ago
  Yea, but to honest the Silk Road hitman business is probably like 10,000x smaller than the drug business - maybe more.
  - GhotiFish 13y ago
    My understanding is that Silk Road did not have a hitman business. I remember the site laying out explicit rules such that "nothing may be sold that could be used to hurt another human being." I believe that was the phrasing anyway. I that made sense to me, as it was inline with DPR's philosophies. However, my peers have said he had another site for stuff like that. Maybe they're mistaken? Anyway, I know that stuff wasn't on SR.
    - LukeShu 13y ago
      From Wikipedia: The site's terms of service had said that they prohibited the sale of "anything who's [sic] purpose is to harm or defraud."[15] This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations and weapons of mass destruction.[22][25] And: A sister site called 'The Armory' sold weapons (primarily guns) during 2012, but was shut down due to a lack of demand.[26][27]
      - GhotiFish 13y ago
        thanks for pointing that out. It seems for a time, the members took it upon themselves to buy and sell guns on the silk road. until it was moved to The Armory, then later shut down.
bsullivan01 13y ago
Stupid question and a stupid argument. Buying /selling drugs is illegal, so is buying /selling fake docs etc so why would anyone expect FBI to let such a service operate? Especially when sales numbers reach $1+ Billion and when the owner gives Forbes interviews saying FBI can't catch him? Let's get back to basics: FBI is supposed to enforce the laws. They do have some leeway in prioritizing, but a $1.2 Billion market is way too big not to attract enforcement. Now about the war on drugs...
- ralish 13y ago
  I think you've possibly misinterpreted the argument the author is making. My interpretation wasn't that he was being critical of the FBI for shutting it down; of course they had to shut it down. Rather, the criticism is of the laws and policies that are in place which dictate that the FBI had to shut it down in the first place. As the article notes, law enforcement has been given a "hopeless task", where if you subscribe to the view that Silk Road actually made buying and selling drugs safer (as I do), shutting it down has made the whole business less safe at direct risks to citizens of many countries. As you note, the FBI had to do this, but it's a huge indictment of our drug policy that this is the action they are compelled to take given the result. Which brings us back to the war on drugs...
  - bsullivan01 13y ago
    Silk Road actually made buying and selling drugs safer (as I do), shutting it down has made the whole business less safe at direct risks to citizens of many countries I got his point correctly, that's why I said it isn't up to the FBI to choose a safer way for people to buy/sell drugs. That it's not their mission. Congress of course can change the laws
    - epi8 13y ago
      I think you, GP, and the author are in violent agreement. All three of you, in my understanding, have made the same point.
- ryanSrich 13y ago
MattyRad 13y ago
>Extra-legal violence is often a part of black markets. Curious turn of phrase. Extra-legal violence meaning "violence outside of the government," which implies that there is intra-legal violence, "violence within the government," which may be referring to how the government coerces its citizens to not transact drugs, by means of violence (that is, the government will arrest/hurt you if you do not comply), and that somehow that is more appropriate or noble. Also it may be somewhat jokingly implying that the government's violence is "extra legal," meaning "more appropriate with respect to law." I wonder if the author had this is mind when they wrote the article. I don't mean to start a huge libertarian rant about government violence/coercion, only to point out that the sentence could have a clever hidden meaning.
- hvs 13y ago
  While I'm a libertarian, it doesn't require a big political discussion to debate whether the government generally has a monopoly on the legal use of violence. That also doesn't require that "legal" somehow implies "noble" or "appropriate". I guess my point is that the author almost certainly has a libertarian leaning, so I'm not sure that the phrase's meaning was all that hidden.
- lisper 13y ago
  > somehow that is more appropriate or noble Not "somehow". There's actually a theory behind it: when the government does it, it is (nominally) done according to the rule of law. In a democracy, that means that the people have condoned it, at least indirectly, and so it is less subject to the whims of a single individual. You may not agree with this theory, and the theory may not actually apply in practice. But the distinction between individual violence and government violence is not completely arbitrary.
- harshreality 13y ago
  The quote meant violence tied to the dealings of groups operating in extra-legal markets.
- peterjancelis 13y ago
  It means that for black markets transactions, which are made illegal by the state and thus impossible to discuss in the open, more peaceful ways of settlement (e.g. arbitration) are not available. This implies that instead of a doctrine of proportionate response, you end up with a binary system where you either get away with petty theft until you don't, because the guy you steal from has had enough and wants to end you. In concretu: If Silk Road was legal, the owner would have reacted with a lawsuit in the court system. It's not, so he had to resort to violence.
pak 13y ago
Here's a question for the techno-libertarians stepping up to say the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road. Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet? Life, liberty, freedom from discrimination, due process--these things I understand, and there are well supported philosophical frameworks (rule utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian etc.) for deriving them from first principles. I can also understand a society guaranteeing a right to privacy in limited circumstances: crimes affecting children are one obvious example, records of education and medical treatment are another. In each such situation, the benefits, harms and impact on the rights of the public and the individual have been weighed. But an anonymous free-for-all exchange being a natural right? We aren't born anonymous. In the "state of nature," without government, we are in no way anonymous. The fact that the internet sometimes allows us to be is in fact a very artificial circumstance that society has allowed to happen. Whether we like it or not, governments are ultimately the overseers that permit networking infrastructure comprising the internet to be built. That isn't some natural right any more than building a nuclear weapon in my backyard is a natural right. Society has weighed the pros and cons and decided that this particular set of technologies is on the whole good. That it might in fact want to limit the level of anonymity on the network seems reasonable, in the same way that making people put license plates on their cars is reasonable. I'm not supporting the idea of a government ID to access the internet (although some first-world countries already require some level of this), or nationwide surveillance a la China or the NSA. Anonymity no doubt has societal benefit, in that it has fostered great works of creativity (from Mark Twain down through Anonymous). Unfortunately, society depends on accountability, and accountability and anonymity are competing principles in the construction of a just society. Neither of them are natural rights on their own.
- mrbgty 13y ago
  The idea that we aren't naturally born anonymous is a little frustrating. We aren't born anonymous to everyone but we're born anonymous to most people we don't have a personal relationship with. Those we have personal relationships with have more reason to not do us harm than some organization on the other side of the world.
- pfortuny 13y ago
  There are two different concerns here which I think your abstract setting is mixing, probably involuntarily: a) Privacy and secrecy are part of normal personal relations. Any means of communication can be used to maintain secret conversations and this is something one should strive for because confidence and trust between individuals cannot exist in a never-private environment. b) On the other hand, the need for society to regulate contracts is there. A contract is not (has never been, at least in the West) a secret affair: it is something which society recognizes and whose terms can only be enforced if the mutual agreement is in some sense "public" (i.e. if it can be naturally known by society). So secret contracts cannot be lawful and in this I agree with you that secrecy in "civil" matters makes no sense (you would need a "secret police" and/or "secret judges" to enforce contracts, that is a parallel society, which as mafias have proved time and again, is a problem, not a solution). So privacy and secrecy are natural and necessary for interpersonal non-public (i.e. extra legal) relations. Not so for "public"/"civil"/"contractual"... ones. Notice that buying and selling is a "contractual" relationship (i.e. a willful, free, interchange of benefits with possible adverse consequences. It is the adverse consequences that require the legal environment and their being "public"/"accountable for").
mentos 13y ago
If we supplant all street markets for drugs with online ones, will we be trading drug/gang/gun related death with a higher incidence of drug related deaths from overdose/drug abuse? I'd imagine there would be net less deaths in a world where Silk Roads were allowed to exist. Thats not to say that drugs should be made legal, but we shouldn't wage a 'war' on them. I know drugs aren't safe but the last time I checked, wars aren't either? And theres no way sites like Silk Road aren't inevitable. Its a more attractive approach to being a street dealer and how many street dealers are there in the world? I'd imagine in another decade one of the thousands of SR copy cats will have (likely accidentally) made all of the right decisions with respect to anonymity and be the defacto online drug hub. Reminds of the opening scene of Layer Cake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5tzSks5lTI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5tzSks5lTI
- DanBC 13y ago
  > I know drugs aren't safe ...and keeping them illegal adds to the danger. Heroin is an unsafe drug, but impure heroin, injected with a needle that has been used and "cleaned" multiple times increases the dangers. Making sure that heroin is hard to get makes people turn to other drugs. (Because addicts are addicted, and drug addicts take drugs.) One alternative to heroin is the Russian drug krokodil - desomorphine - often made using a variety of weird things. CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES (http://www.krokodildrug.com/what-is-krokodil-drug-how-to-stop-abuse/ http://www.krokodildrug.com/what-is-krokodil-drug-how-to-sto...) EDIT: MORE HORRIFIC IMAGES (http://www.democracyindistress.com/2011/09/warning-graphic-photos-krokodil-drug.html http://www.democracyindistress.com/2011/09/warning-graphic-p...) (apologies for partisan source)
- dwaltrip 13y ago
  I know drugs aren't safe All I can do is sigh when I read statements like this.
twrkit 13y ago
The whole Drug War is a colossal waste of time and resources. Those who choose to indulge in narcotics will continue to do so, despite the legality or accessibility of their preferred substances. Of course, the fact of the matter is that an entire industrial complex has sprung up to wage this "war;" the DEA, weapons and surveillance equipment manufacturers, and many local and national LEO, among countless others. In short, it's a very Big and profitable business. So despite any logic or rationale for maintaining a "safe" venue to conduct narcotics trade, there will always be resistance from the entrenched lobbyists and business interests.
swamp40 13y ago
I think one of the unintended consequences of shutting down Silk Road so publicly will be that the existence of the Tor network is now being advertised to lots of people for the first time. A lot of regular people are probably now saying, "Wait, I can actually buy drugs online without getting caught or ripped off?" We'll see if there is another spike in the Tor users after this news cycle: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html
llamataboot 13y ago
One doesn't need to assert any natural rights. Once can make a completely utilitarian case for the decriminalization of controlled substances. In fact, nearly all available evidence points in that direction -- it is increasingly hard in w a world full of data to make the case that criminalizing substance use offers any utilitarian benefits at all. It makes the drug market a more dangerous place, controlled by violence. It destroys the lives and the communities of substance users by incarcerating them for long lengths of time. Etc etc etc. I don't need to lay out all the facts here, they are plain to see for anyone who looks into them.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Decriminalization of drugs does not answer the entire question - other illegal commerce was taking place there.
ufmace 13y ago
Maybe in some rhetorical sense, but not in any measurable way. Silk Road was enormous for what it was, but it's nowhere near even a tiny fraction of the global drug market. It's probably still tiny compared to the drug market in any large city.
- tsax 13y ago
  Worldwide global drug market is estimated to be around $350B/year. SR did around 1.2B over 2.5 years. So yeah a tiny amount, but a huge amount considering it just started couple years back and needed technical sophistication of bitcoin + tor + pgp to use.
malandrew 13y ago
The author raises an interesting point, you could easily write a headline that says "Online Black Market The Silk Road Helps Keep More Than One Billion Dollars of Drugs Off Our Streets"

134 points by dchs 13y ago

cottonseed 13y ago

Better to ask, has the war on drugs made the world a more dangerous place?

venus 13y ago
I wonder if there is anyone who believes - really believes - it has not. The war on drugs is kind of this diorama encapsulation of everything that is wrong with our politics, media, and society.
- sker 13y ago
  I suppose that's a rhetorical wondering. There's plenty of people who think the government can do no wrong, even here on HN.
  - atlanticus 13y ago
    Most of what the government does is wrong, or at least terribly inefficient, so the less they do the better.
  - Nursie 13y ago
    Most of us that will argue with libertarians until we're both (all?) red/blue in the face believe that government is useful, necessary and generally a good thing (TM) for a variety of reasons. But do no wrong? That's a massive exaggeration. YOu can believe it does a hell of a lot wrong, in fact nearly everything, without believing we'd be better off without any government at all.
- stinkytaco 13y ago
  The war on drugs is certainly dangerous. Making anything illegal makes it dangerous because it invites both the violence of the state, plus the violence that occurs in the absence of the state. The question is whether the danger the war on drugs has created is worse that the danger of those drugs being legal. Fortunatly, we have a very nice test bed here in the United States where we did make a dangerous drug illegal and then legalized it again. It would be interesting to run those numbers...
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  Well. I'm not convinced it did, myself. If prohibition didn't happen 1920s for the americans, would Al Capone never of being born? Really these prohibition laws give lowlifes something to fight over, and the fightings dangerous, but who says they wouldn't be fighting anyway? Does it make life more dangerous. Maybe not. Does it make it more dangerous for me? Maybe. edit: Ouch. Looking forward to that rebuttal.
  - aeturnum 13y ago
    > but who says they wouldn't be fighting anyway? This is a totally fair question. So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that Al Capone's level of violence had nothing to do with his criminal syndicate. He just liked shooting people. However, shooting people is expensive, especially given that they employed reasonably advanced weapons (sub-machine guns). So, he's not going to get as many bullets when liquor is legal. Also, though Capone is believed to have killed people, far more people were killed on his orders[0]. Without an unregulated and lucrative source of income, it's hard to see him having the money to hire people to kill others. No one is saying that, absent the drug war, the cartel's enforcers would be in the peace corps. However, the extremely high street price of drugs finances a level of violence that would not exist otherwise. If you want an example, look at the history of Mexico in the last 20 years and compare it to any other nearby country. [0]http://history1900s.about.com/od/people/a/Al-Capone.htm http://history1900s.about.com/od/people/a/Al-Capone.htm
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Furthermore, while Al Capone could have found other crimes to orchestrate to make himself rich, he wouldn't have been able to perform those crimes as well as liquor smuggling, limiting his supply of cash (lets face it, he was probably doing those things in our history timeline as well as smuggling). Alternatively, if we suppose some crime that he really did neglect in favor of smuggling, why did he neglect it in favor of smuggling? Because it was not as profitable or carried greater risk (in our history timeline, he was able to manage his risk effectively. He wasn't killed in the act and was only eventually caught for tax evasion. Had he been, say, robbing banks instead, he undoubtedly would not have lasted as long.) Any way you slice it, prohibition made dealing with Capone worse than it otherwise would have been.
hackerboos 13y ago
Yes. Some senior police officers here in the UK realise this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24320717 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24320717
- cottonseed 13y ago
  Around the world, see: leap.cc (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition). However, this voice is still soundly in the minority. I remember when the pot decriminalization ballot question came up in Massachusetts. Law enforcement came out loudly against.
  - Nursie 13y ago
    I find it hard to see what business it is of theirs. They're there to enforce the laws passed down by legislators, not make the laws.
    - aaronem 13y ago
      They're citizens of a democracy with every bit as much right to organize in support of their legislative proposals as any others, is what business it is of theirs. I may tend to disagree with their arguments, but until they try a coup, advancing those arguments is well within their rights. (Thought experiment: Would you make the same argument against LEAP, which is another organization of LEOs who take the opposite position on decriminalization?)
      - Nursie 13y ago
        I agree they have the right to organise and speak like any other group. I just wonder why they think they ought to be given any special consideration when it comes to policy making, or be able to use their status as law-enforcement officers (a group the public give weight to) to voice such opinions.
        aaronem 13y ago
        Perhaps because they have domain expertise not generally available outside their field. Do you also argue developers have no reason to think they should be given special consideration in W3C's and IETF's standards processes?

HPLovecraft 13y ago

Do News Story Headlines Always Have To Ask A Huge Rhetorical Question?

HPLovecraft 13y ago
http://alexleo.tumblr.com/post/5244455384/newyorktimesheadlines http://alexleo.tumblr.com/post/5244455384/newyorktimesheadli...
Coincoin 13y ago
I like article titles with rhetorical questions because I don't need to read the article.
- bigdubs 13y ago
  The answer is always "no", and you can keep doing what you were doing.
corobo 13y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- dingaling 13y ago
  Today in our supplement: Is Betteridge's Law always true?

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

As the article itself said, successor sites are inevitable (and there are at least two that are thriving right now in SR's fallout). Those who prefer online black markets over physical transactions will simply migrate to the new marketplaces and consequently turn them into the "new Silk Road". The only true effect, perhaps, will be people taking security even more seriously. I read a statistic at some point that approx. 80% of SR users didn't use PGP (The Daily Dot sources this claim, otherwise I cannot validate it).

pyre 13y ago
> 80% of SR users didn't use PGP I find this to be dubious. How does PGP relate to SR usage? When people communicated with SR vendors, did they use email (where PGP might matter) or did they use the SR software? Did their forum software allow people to sign their posts? How was this information sourced? Was there just an informal poll on their forums?
- cbhl 13y ago
  PGP isn't just for email. PGP can be used to sign and/or encrypt messages wherever you publish them. PGP would be useful in ensuring that SR isn't tampering with your messages between any two parties on the site.
- lmm 13y ago
  The site recommended buyers use PGP to encrypt their on-site messages to sellers (including their mailing addresses), so that even SR admins wouldn't have access to them. It's slightly cumbersome but really the only way to do secure messaging on the web, as the lavabit story shows.
- gwern 13y ago
  > I find this to be dubious. I don't. People are lazy and don't want to use PGP because it's confusing and hard. PGP-related questions were some of the most common help problems, on /r/SilkRoad, people would regularly mention not encrypting their address (ranked up there with early finalization for being incredibly frustrating for those of us who knew what we were doing), and the Atlantis CEO stated that like 90% of Atlantis users relied on the Atlantis-provided PGP encryption rather than encrypting it themselves. > When people communicated with SR vendors, did they use email (where PGP might matter) or did they use the SR software? SR had an internal message system, much like Reddit's PMs. You would copy the public key off the vendor's profile page on SR (or possibly from a thread on the forums), you'd ASCII-armored encrypt your address to the public key, and paste it into an address form field during the order process. You'd do the same thing for a regular PM. > Did their forum software allow people to sign their posts? Sure: ASCII armor, remember. Any forum which allows you to type in text, allows PGP signing of messages. Few people bothered, except for important statements like from DPR about new rules or .onion addresses or stuff like that.

PaulHoule 13y ago

Well, I'm sure you're going to be able to buy weed no matter what.

ianstallings 13y ago
Amen to that. Mind if I do a J?

BashiBazouk 13y ago

Did Silk Road even put a slight dent in street drug sellers in the first place? I would be surprised if street level sellers and buyers are internet savvy enough to use a service like this. SR looks more like the ideal system for savvy college students and young techs to specifically avoid the street level market.

jtbigwoo 13y ago
Right. Just requiring the use of tor prevented 95% of the population from using SR.
- carlob 13y ago
  Make that 99.5%.
- epi8 13y ago
  I'm not doubting, but why?
  - princess3000 13y ago
    There were several obstacles to using SR, each of which would have been difficult or frightening to overcome when the alternative is doing transactions in person with cash. You needed to understand TOR (which, while not especially difficult to use in general, is harder than opening Chrome and going to Amazon), you needed to understand and obtain BTC (either mining them or purchasing them, which was generally somewhat difficult given that you couldn't use credit cards or paypal or other simple payment methods), and then you had to figure out PGP for sending your information to the vendor. It's all definitely doable and none of it really requires much technical knowledge but there's definitely some friction that I assume would intimidate a fair amount of people.
- fragsworth 13y ago
  I doubt that. If you don't care (or know) about anonymity or security, it was extremely easy to access the Silk Road through a web proxy with a simple Google search.

acomjean 13y ago

Shutting it down certainly didn't help the US Post Office. Not a silk road user but being able to anonymously contract hitmen (and hitwomen) doesn't seem to make the world safer..

nickpinkston 13y ago
Yea, but to honest the Silk Road hitman business is probably like 10,000x smaller than the drug business - maybe more.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  My understanding is that Silk Road did not have a hitman business. I remember the site laying out explicit rules such that "nothing may be sold that could be used to hurt another human being." I believe that was the phrasing anyway. I that made sense to me, as it was inline with DPR's philosophies. However, my peers have said he had another site for stuff like that. Maybe they're mistaken? Anyway, I know that stuff wasn't on SR.
  - LukeShu 13y ago
    From Wikipedia: The site's terms of service had said that they prohibited the sale of "anything who's [sic] purpose is to harm or defraud."[15] This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations and weapons of mass destruction.[22][25] And: A sister site called 'The Armory' sold weapons (primarily guns) during 2012, but was shut down due to a lack of demand.[26][27]
    - GhotiFish 13y ago
      thanks for pointing that out. It seems for a time, the members took it upon themselves to buy and sell guns on the silk road. until it was moved to The Armory, then later shut down.

bsullivan01 13y ago

Stupid question and a stupid argument. Buying /selling drugs is illegal, so is buying /selling fake docs etc so why would anyone expect FBI to let such a service operate? Especially when sales numbers reach $1+ Billion and when the owner gives Forbes interviews saying FBI can't catch him? Let's get back to basics: FBI is supposed to enforce the laws. They do have some leeway in prioritizing, but a $1.2 Billion market is way too big not to attract enforcement. Now about the war on drugs...

ralish 13y ago
I think you've possibly misinterpreted the argument the author is making. My interpretation wasn't that he was being critical of the FBI for shutting it down; of course they had to shut it down. Rather, the criticism is of the laws and policies that are in place which dictate that the FBI had to shut it down in the first place. As the article notes, law enforcement has been given a "hopeless task", where if you subscribe to the view that Silk Road actually made buying and selling drugs safer (as I do), shutting it down has made the whole business less safe at direct risks to citizens of many countries. As you note, the FBI had to do this, but it's a huge indictment of our drug policy that this is the action they are compelled to take given the result. Which brings us back to the war on drugs...
- bsullivan01 13y ago
  Silk Road actually made buying and selling drugs safer (as I do), shutting it down has made the whole business less safe at direct risks to citizens of many countries I got his point correctly, that's why I said it isn't up to the FBI to choose a safer way for people to buy/sell drugs. That it's not their mission. Congress of course can change the laws
  - epi8 13y ago
    I think you, GP, and the author are in violent agreement. All three of you, in my understanding, have made the same point.
ryanSrich 13y ago

MattyRad 13y ago

>Extra-legal violence is often a part of black markets. Curious turn of phrase. Extra-legal violence meaning "violence outside of the government," which implies that there is intra-legal violence, "violence within the government," which may be referring to how the government coerces its citizens to not transact drugs, by means of violence (that is, the government will arrest/hurt you if you do not comply), and that somehow that is more appropriate or noble. Also it may be somewhat jokingly implying that the government's violence is "extra legal," meaning "more appropriate with respect to law." I wonder if the author had this is mind when they wrote the article. I don't mean to start a huge libertarian rant about government violence/coercion, only to point out that the sentence could have a clever hidden meaning.

hvs 13y ago
While I'm a libertarian, it doesn't require a big political discussion to debate whether the government generally has a monopoly on the legal use of violence. That also doesn't require that "legal" somehow implies "noble" or "appropriate". I guess my point is that the author almost certainly has a libertarian leaning, so I'm not sure that the phrase's meaning was all that hidden.
lisper 13y ago
> somehow that is more appropriate or noble Not "somehow". There's actually a theory behind it: when the government does it, it is (nominally) done according to the rule of law. In a democracy, that means that the people have condoned it, at least indirectly, and so it is less subject to the whims of a single individual. You may not agree with this theory, and the theory may not actually apply in practice. But the distinction between individual violence and government violence is not completely arbitrary.
harshreality 13y ago
The quote meant violence tied to the dealings of groups operating in extra-legal markets.
peterjancelis 13y ago
It means that for black markets transactions, which are made illegal by the state and thus impossible to discuss in the open, more peaceful ways of settlement (e.g. arbitration) are not available. This implies that instead of a doctrine of proportionate response, you end up with a binary system where you either get away with petty theft until you don't, because the guy you steal from has had enough and wants to end you. In concretu: If Silk Road was legal, the owner would have reacted with a lawsuit in the court system. It's not, so he had to resort to violence.

pak 13y ago

Here's a question for the techno-libertarians stepping up to say the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road. Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet? Life, liberty, freedom from discrimination, due process--these things I understand, and there are well supported philosophical frameworks (rule utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian etc.) for deriving them from first principles. I can also understand a society guaranteeing a right to privacy in limited circumstances: crimes affecting children are one obvious example, records of education and medical treatment are another. In each such situation, the benefits, harms and impact on the rights of the public and the individual have been weighed. But an anonymous free-for-all exchange being a natural right? We aren't born anonymous. In the "state of nature," without government, we are in no way anonymous. The fact that the internet sometimes allows us to be is in fact a very artificial circumstance that society has allowed to happen. Whether we like it or not, governments are ultimately the overseers that permit networking infrastructure comprising the internet to be built. That isn't some natural right any more than building a nuclear weapon in my backyard is a natural right. Society has weighed the pros and cons and decided that this particular set of technologies is on the whole good. That it might in fact want to limit the level of anonymity on the network seems reasonable, in the same way that making people put license plates on their cars is reasonable. I'm not supporting the idea of a government ID to access the internet (although some first-world countries already require some level of this), or nationwide surveillance a la China or the NSA. Anonymity no doubt has societal benefit, in that it has fostered great works of creativity (from Mark Twain down through Anonymous). Unfortunately, society depends on accountability, and accountability and anonymity are competing principles in the construction of a just society. Neither of them are natural rights on their own.

mrbgty 13y ago
The idea that we aren't naturally born anonymous is a little frustrating. We aren't born anonymous to everyone but we're born anonymous to most people we don't have a personal relationship with. Those we have personal relationships with have more reason to not do us harm than some organization on the other side of the world.
pfortuny 13y ago
There are two different concerns here which I think your abstract setting is mixing, probably involuntarily: a) Privacy and secrecy are part of normal personal relations. Any means of communication can be used to maintain secret conversations and this is something one should strive for because confidence and trust between individuals cannot exist in a never-private environment. b) On the other hand, the need for society to regulate contracts is there. A contract is not (has never been, at least in the West) a secret affair: it is something which society recognizes and whose terms can only be enforced if the mutual agreement is in some sense "public" (i.e. if it can be naturally known by society). So secret contracts cannot be lawful and in this I agree with you that secrecy in "civil" matters makes no sense (you would need a "secret police" and/or "secret judges" to enforce contracts, that is a parallel society, which as mafias have proved time and again, is a problem, not a solution). So privacy and secrecy are natural and necessary for interpersonal non-public (i.e. extra legal) relations. Not so for "public"/"civil"/"contractual"... ones. Notice that buying and selling is a "contractual" relationship (i.e. a willful, free, interchange of benefits with possible adverse consequences. It is the adverse consequences that require the legal environment and their being "public"/"accountable for").

mentos 13y ago

If we supplant all street markets for drugs with online ones, will we be trading drug/gang/gun related death with a higher incidence of drug related deaths from overdose/drug abuse? I'd imagine there would be net less deaths in a world where Silk Roads were allowed to exist. Thats not to say that drugs should be made legal, but we shouldn't wage a 'war' on them. I know drugs aren't safe but the last time I checked, wars aren't either? And theres no way sites like Silk Road aren't inevitable. Its a more attractive approach to being a street dealer and how many street dealers are there in the world? I'd imagine in another decade one of the thousands of SR copy cats will have (likely accidentally) made all of the right decisions with respect to anonymity and be the defacto online drug hub. Reminds of the opening scene of Layer Cake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5tzSks5lTI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5tzSks5lTI

DanBC 13y ago
> I know drugs aren't safe ...and keeping them illegal adds to the danger. Heroin is an unsafe drug, but impure heroin, injected with a needle that has been used and "cleaned" multiple times increases the dangers. Making sure that heroin is hard to get makes people turn to other drugs. (Because addicts are addicted, and drug addicts take drugs.) One alternative to heroin is the Russian drug krokodil - desomorphine - often made using a variety of weird things. CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES (http://www.krokodildrug.com/what-is-krokodil-drug-how-to-stop-abuse/ http://www.krokodildrug.com/what-is-krokodil-drug-how-to-sto...) EDIT: MORE HORRIFIC IMAGES (http://www.democracyindistress.com/2011/09/warning-graphic-photos-krokodil-drug.html http://www.democracyindistress.com/2011/09/warning-graphic-p...) (apologies for partisan source)
dwaltrip 13y ago
I know drugs aren't safe All I can do is sigh when I read statements like this.

twrkit 13y ago

The whole Drug War is a colossal waste of time and resources. Those who choose to indulge in narcotics will continue to do so, despite the legality or accessibility of their preferred substances. Of course, the fact of the matter is that an entire industrial complex has sprung up to wage this "war;" the DEA, weapons and surveillance equipment manufacturers, and many local and national LEO, among countless others. In short, it's a very Big and profitable business. So despite any logic or rationale for maintaining a "safe" venue to conduct narcotics trade, there will always be resistance from the entrenched lobbyists and business interests.

swamp40 13y ago

I think one of the unintended consequences of shutting down Silk Road so publicly will be that the existence of the Tor network is now being advertised to lots of people for the first time. A lot of regular people are probably now saying, "Wait, I can actually buy drugs online without getting caught or ripped off?" We'll see if there is another spike in the Tor users after this news cycle: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html

llamataboot 13y ago

One doesn't need to assert any natural rights. Once can make a completely utilitarian case for the decriminalization of controlled substances. In fact, nearly all available evidence points in that direction -- it is increasingly hard in w a world full of data to make the case that criminalizing substance use offers any utilitarian benefits at all. It makes the drug market a more dangerous place, controlled by violence. It destroys the lives and the communities of substance users by incarcerating them for long lengths of time. Etc etc etc. I don't need to lay out all the facts here, they are plain to see for anyone who looks into them.

dllthomas 13y ago
Decriminalization of drugs does not answer the entire question - other illegal commerce was taking place there.

ufmace 13y ago

Maybe in some rhetorical sense, but not in any measurable way. Silk Road was enormous for what it was, but it's nowhere near even a tiny fraction of the global drug market. It's probably still tiny compared to the drug market in any large city.

tsax 13y ago
Worldwide global drug market is estimated to be around $350B/year. SR did around 1.2B over 2.5 years. So yeah a tiny amount, but a huge amount considering it just started couple years back and needed technical sophistication of bitcoin + tor + pgp to use.

malandrew 13y ago

The author raises an interesting point, you could easily write a headline that says "Online Black Market The Silk Road Helps Keep More Than One Billion Dollars of Drugs Off Our Streets"