6 ms·

FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

62 points by aspanda 12y ago

orik 12y ago
Would a FOIA request need to be made to get the fill list?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
kordless 12y ago
As little as 50 years ago, selling these drugs wasn't illegal in the US. Look how far we've come.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  As little as 50 years ago, putting lead in gasoline was legal. Look how far we've come. As little as 20 years ago, spraying your crops with DDT wasn't illegal. Look how far we've come. As little as 5 years ago, selling furniture treated with brominated flame retardants wasn't illegal in the EU. Look how far we've come. We are wrong about chemicals all the time. The regulatory status of chemical X fifty years ago rarely means much.
  - MysticFear 12y ago
    The responsible use of drugs for your own use doesn't affect anyone except yourself. The chemical uses you brought up affects more than just yourself.
    - ogijaoijfawje 12y ago
      So alcohol, which is for your own use, can't affect anyone except yourself?
    - akerl_ 12y ago
      That's quite the qualifier. If the only issue was "responsible" use of drugs, we'd be dealing with a substantially easier debate. But before we get rid of the current legislation about drugs, we would need an actual plan for dealing with irresponsible uses of drugs.
    - threeseed 12y ago
      Except the issue is that many drugs affect your ability to be responsible. If people could take heroin or ice and (a) stop whenever they wanted and (b) still function as society expects then nobody would have an issue with them being legal. But drugs like those effectively rewire the brain and are incredibly destructive. A significant amount of domestic violence, child abuse, family breakdown incidents are directly attributable to drugs. You can't blame society for not wanting drugs like those to be readily accessible.
      - Nursie 12y ago
        There is an argument that removing the criminal sanctions against addicts might significantly mitigate these problems. Regardless, the current legislative frameworks around the world (with few exceptions) are based on fear and a twisted sense of morality rather than actual harm.
      - girvo 12y ago
        Hi. I'm an ex heroin addict, and while I was addicted for 6 years, only two other people in the world knew. I ran two businesses (one successfully), and wrote innovative software that made people a lot of money. I was successful. There are a number of other techies who have reached out to me to explain their stories, and as it turns out I'm not alone in this. I still got clean, because the risk of getting caught and the impact that would have on my future outweighed my addiction. I'm glad I did, and I'm lucky Australia treats it as a medical problem, not a criminal one, when you seek help.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- coralreef 12y ago
  Which drugs would those be? The press release didn't mention what kind of drugs were being trafficked.
- travisp 12y ago
  It's worth noting that other things sold include "firearms; stolen credit card data and personal identification information; counterfeit currency; fake passports and other identification documents". A number of the sites didn't even sell drugs (only these other things).
  - forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
    I'm not sure about silk road 2, but firearms were never sold on silk road.
    - dobbsbob 12y ago
      SR#1 they created the Armory, a seperate market. It was full of scams and extortion attempts so shut it down. Best listing was some guy in Russia trying to peddle uranium for GPS coord drop.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
- nowarninglabel 12y ago
  In response to negativity around the drug war, I'd say that for the first time in a long time we should be very optimistic about the future of legalization in the United States. Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Colorado, and D.C. now have full legalization in legislation. Florida got nearly 58% on medical marijuana vote that unfortunately needed 60%. 23 states have legalized medical marijuana. (Up to date map: https://localtvwtvr.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/marijuana-ma.. https://localtvwtvr.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/marijuana-ma.... ) More importantly, criminalization is moving towards citations across the nation. We are getting rid of draconian mandatory sentencing for drug crimes. This is all very good news, and while it's slow, remember that the government moves slow, but as long as it keeps moving in the right direction, we can look forward to a time in which full legalization of all scheduled drugs may eventually become a reality. So instead of being defeatist or spouting sarcasm, step up and support the people making this happen. It's not just public opinion changing, it's SSDP, MPP, NORML putting money, time, and effort into lobbying for these changes. That's against stiff competition from lobbying being done by prescription drug manufacturers (http://www.thenation.com/article/180493/anti-pot-lobbys-big-... http://www.thenation.com/article/180493/anti-pot-lobbys-big-...) Now is a time of pendulum swing in the right direction, and we should be keeping the momentum going behind it.
  - meowface 12y ago
    Legalization of marijuana within the next 30 years is inevitable for most states. But legalization of heroin, crack, cocaine, meth? That's really a pipe dream. It might happen some day, but that'd be more on the range of 70-100 years if I were to guess, and perhaps a lot longer. Marijuana is a significant portion of sales on all of the dark markets, but other more addictive narcotics still constitute the majority compared to marijuana.
  - puredemo 12y ago
    Sure, for marijuana. But the ethical imperative to allow people full control over what substances go into their own bodies seems to be as ignored as ever. Simple example: I'm not legally allowed to control the levels of testosterone in my own body. That seems absurd. #MyBodyMyChoice
- orbifold 12y ago
  I think people in power realized that the counter culture of the 60s and 70s posed a real threat to a capitalistic society, so they eliminated factors that could give people the idea their life purpose was not to be a drone in a large corporation.
  - adventured 12y ago
    Capitalism - an actual free market - would require the complete legalization of all drugs. You've got it exactly backwards. The counter culture won. America is the world's largest welfare state, has the largest entitlement systems, with a total government system larger than the economy of Japan, hyper regulation, high taxation, and has very few remnants of Capitalism.
    - orbifold 12y ago
      I did not mean some fantasy version of Capitalism, just the fact that for a modern capitalistic society to function, people have to want to buy a new car every few years, strife to have a house and take on consumer credits to buy a new flat screen TV. Maybe I should have used Consumerism. I think it is fairly indisputable that modern economies would not function, if there were not a constant and increasing demand for new stuff. From a global standpoint this seems far from optimal, if you want to optimize for conserving finite resources like oil. In a free market the only way to counter act that a finite resource is exhausted is by the fact that the price increases as time goes on. So there is a very long time where you can use a resource for frivolous stuff like Helium balloons, while at the same time being perfectly aware that it should probably be used for more useful things.
  - Nursie 12y ago
    Did it though? AFAICT when people came down from whatever it was and actually tried to live their 'new' ways, they pretty much degenerated and fell apart after short times for all sorts of reasons. Being a corporate drone is not an aspiration. Feeding your family and having a nice place for them to live certainly is though.
    - 12y ago
- mechatronics 12y ago
  Just once, I'd like one of you to admit that Silk Road (any many of the other sites) sold large amounts of identity theft equipment. These are not noble drug dealers harming nobody. They are sociopathic assholes selling whatever makes money, even if the ONLY reason for the item is to harm innocent individuals against their will.
  - polshaw 12y ago
    "They" are not the same person. Silk road and sites like it are/were marketplaces, not retailers.
  - dobbsbob 12y ago
    Vendors there sold phony identification for the sole puposes of renting drops to import narcotics or start a false front company. SR wasn't involved in trading databases of stolen info, though the other major sites that weren't busted are. Agora is like the walmart of e-crime
  - kordless 12y ago
    As I read the article I was thinking, "Shouldn't they be catching bad guys?" A 'war' on drugs is technically catching bad guys, where the 'bad' is defined as selling one thing to another for (presumed) personal use. What you are talking about is important, but you should take that up with the FBI. They are the ones going on and on about drugs.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dobbsbob 12y ago
The SR2 guy 'defcon' was also selling his services as a .onion developer/ops so likely all these other sites he set up for vendors and they were seized when he was caught and cooperated. From the FBI complaint he was completely careless like all other recently busted darknet admins and mods so wouldn't be surprised if they were all hosted at the same host too.
- fabulist 12y ago
  Every time something like this happens, lots of people shout that the sky is falling and Tor is "dead." Thank you for putting forward a reasonable hypothesis amid the FUD. That being said, I doubt he was a developer for 399 other sites, thats quite a few. I think a "watering hole" style attack is likely here, but I think there must be a part of the story that hasn't been revealed; perhaps there was a federation of .onion marketplaces that Benthall was a part of.
  - meowface 12y ago
    I work in the security industry, and normally I'm the first one to argue against the FUD, but this time I'm not so sure. Clearly, out of these ~400 a decent portion were probably on the same server or in the same datacenter, and many of their operators were obviously quite careless in terms of personal, infrastructure, and application security (as has always been the case and will likely forever remain the case). But it's still a pretty high number. I would not completely rule out some sort of trick or analysis being employed by global law enforcement to identify the ISP or datacenter being used to host hidden services. It may just be a matter of them plotting the volume of Tor traffic around the world and narrowing it down from there; it's likely not that difficult to distinguish Tor traffic from a popular hidden service and Tor traffic from a relay, exit node, or client. Note the bottom of the FBI's press release: >The law enforcement authorities of Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, whose actions have been coordinated through Eurojust and Europol’s EC3, provided substantial assistance. That's a lot of countries. Many unscrupulous hosting providers are located in those countries. It's possible that the FBI narrowed their search down to individual foreign ISPs, then had foreign law enforcement work with ISPs, NOCs, and hosting companies to place selective taps and narrow things down even further, centered purely around analysis of Tor traffic volume. Or they may have found a general purpose vulnerability. Or perhaps a combination of the two. These tweets by a (not currently arrested) popular hidden service operator are also very interesting: https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530764492326838272 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530764492326838272 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530766985794420736 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530766985794420736 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530768176007884800 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530768176007884800 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530768358355251200 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530768358355251200 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530891182612955136 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530891182612955136 Tor is not dead, but anyone running an illicit hidden service should probably be concerned, at least until further details are released or discovered. It's entirely possible that they took down all of these services purely through typical cybercrime investigative techniques, but I think it's unwise to rule out something a bit more powerful this early on.
oofabz 12y ago
Was anyone charged with a crime? It disturbs me that the FBI has free rein to seize people's property without even giving them their day in court. The Fourth Amendment says "nor shall any person [...] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". I don't see any process of law here. The FBI is law enforcement, not judicial.
- mikecb 12y ago
  *Fifth.
- pcthrowaway 12y ago
  They don't necessarily know who the administrators of these sites are to charge them. It should be noted that Blake Benthall of Silk Road 2.0 was charged yesterday.
- krapp 12y ago
  The government is allowed to gather evidence before it arrests people and tries them. You're jumping the gun a bit on the moral outrage.
  - sp332 12y ago
    Gathering evidence doesn't mean shutting a site down, let alone 400.
    - meowface 12y ago
      If they have a valid search and seizure warrant, it is legal for them to take down the sites. If you read through the criminal complaint filed against Silk Road 2.0 / Benthall, they establish pretty sufficient probable cause for a search and seizure. Arrest warrants for the individuals involved is a separate process.
    - threeseed 12y ago
      Are you serious ? Selling drugs is illegal. Hence running a website to sell drugs is also illegal. Of course the government is going to shut down the website or any other sites where there is clear evidence of criminal behaviour. The criminal case against Blake et al over whether they ran the site is a separate issue.
xnull 12y ago
Some here may know me as a critic of overreaching and aggressive cyber enforcement (and related surveillance). First, I'm quite happy that this activity does not appear to be the result of wide scale infrastructure sabotage. And I am quite happy that the FBI is doing its job to combat crime that is facilitated using (abusing) the technologies that are bastions for free speech, privacy and whistleblowing. Of course the flipside is that this means that there are capabilities in place to disrupt anonymizing technologies - the technologies make investigation more expensive but ultimately are merely an inconvenience to the powers that be. So when it comes down to it, anonymizing services and Tor can't be trusted to secure you if you have something to say where your life is in danger. The FBI (/others) wants the court system to replace technology as the gatekeeper to investigation. The court system, however, is brittle. It takes time, it fails, and it responds to external pressure - there are repeated studies that show that the length of time persons in US court systems are convicted to serve is highly correlated with how long it has been since the precising judge has eaten his last meal. There are also extralegal rights that law enforcement are given by legislature and evolving interpretations of what both these legal and extralegal rights entail. But law enforcement also is justified from their perspective. They don't want there to be criminals that get away with crimes simply because criminals load up some software that obfuscate their identities, locations and accounts. If you look at this published list there are criminal organizations that you and I as taxpayers do want taken down. (I recognize that the sale and consumption of drugs is a greyer area of morality as drug use is sometimes victimless). I think that for the most part law enforcement is capable of taking down these services and organizations other ways - ordering assault rifles and monitoring the drops - and that this provides opportunities for the government to enforce the law without sabotaging communications infrastructure. Taking down some .onion addresses doesn't do too much besides annoy the services for a time anyway unless the services operationally are not capable of standing up a new address and communicating with customers anonymously. All in all it's a blurry line but I feel safer with places that are anonymous and secure than I do by trusting a court system and legal process that can only see, process, and be accountable for so much.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  On the bright side it leaves us in the same position as man has always been- rather charted territory. I've been skeptical of Tor et-al from day one. I didn't have provable reasons why, but the court has always served as the gatekeeper to investigation, and the Tors of the world seemed like the sort of hubris we techies are so prone to- "Age-old social justice problems man has struggled with for thousands of years can be trivially fixed with my technology!" It is my opinion that we (techies) overestimate ourselves. Tor is useful, but it would have to be perfect (which no technology can be) to protect you from the flawed judicial system. Which is why I think we are destined for heartbreak, and the longer we forestall that realization the worse off we will be, for we will ignore the judicial system and allow it to become ever more broken. As a sidenote I find it bitter satire; people who cannot accept the will of others seeking tools to forcefully impose their own morality on the world instead
MCRed 12y ago
I wish the FBI would spend its time going after actual crimes- like the ones where people's money are stolen-- rather than political crimes. But that they aren't is proof positive to me that the government does not operate for the benefit of the people, but for the benefit of itself.

62 points by aspanda 12y ago

orik 12y ago

Would a FOIA request need to be made to get the fill list?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

kordless 12y ago

As little as 50 years ago, selling these drugs wasn't illegal in the US. Look how far we've come.

sliverstorm 12y ago
As little as 50 years ago, putting lead in gasoline was legal. Look how far we've come. As little as 20 years ago, spraying your crops with DDT wasn't illegal. Look how far we've come. As little as 5 years ago, selling furniture treated with brominated flame retardants wasn't illegal in the EU. Look how far we've come. We are wrong about chemicals all the time. The regulatory status of chemical X fifty years ago rarely means much.
- MysticFear 12y ago
  The responsible use of drugs for your own use doesn't affect anyone except yourself. The chemical uses you brought up affects more than just yourself.
  - ogijaoijfawje 12y ago
    So alcohol, which is for your own use, can't affect anyone except yourself?
  - akerl_ 12y ago
    That's quite the qualifier. If the only issue was "responsible" use of drugs, we'd be dealing with a substantially easier debate. But before we get rid of the current legislation about drugs, we would need an actual plan for dealing with irresponsible uses of drugs.
  - threeseed 12y ago
    Except the issue is that many drugs affect your ability to be responsible. If people could take heroin or ice and (a) stop whenever they wanted and (b) still function as society expects then nobody would have an issue with them being legal. But drugs like those effectively rewire the brain and are incredibly destructive. A significant amount of domestic violence, child abuse, family breakdown incidents are directly attributable to drugs. You can't blame society for not wanting drugs like those to be readily accessible.
    - Nursie 12y ago
      There is an argument that removing the criminal sanctions against addicts might significantly mitigate these problems. Regardless, the current legislative frameworks around the world (with few exceptions) are based on fear and a twisted sense of morality rather than actual harm.
    - girvo 12y ago
      Hi. I'm an ex heroin addict, and while I was addicted for 6 years, only two other people in the world knew. I ran two businesses (one successfully), and wrote innovative software that made people a lot of money. I was successful. There are a number of other techies who have reached out to me to explain their stories, and as it turns out I'm not alone in this. I still got clean, because the risk of getting caught and the impact that would have on my future outweighed my addiction. I'm glad I did, and I'm lucky Australia treats it as a medical problem, not a criminal one, when you seek help.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
coralreef 12y ago
Which drugs would those be? The press release didn't mention what kind of drugs were being trafficked.
travisp 12y ago
It's worth noting that other things sold include "firearms; stolen credit card data and personal identification information; counterfeit currency; fake passports and other identification documents". A number of the sites didn't even sell drugs (only these other things).
- forgotpasswd3x 12y ago
  I'm not sure about silk road 2, but firearms were never sold on silk road.
  - dobbsbob 12y ago
    SR#1 they created the Armory, a seperate market. It was full of scams and extortion attempts so shut it down. Best listing was some guy in Russia trying to peddle uranium for GPS coord drop.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
nowarninglabel 12y ago
In response to negativity around the drug war, I'd say that for the first time in a long time we should be very optimistic about the future of legalization in the United States. Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Colorado, and D.C. now have full legalization in legislation. Florida got nearly 58% on medical marijuana vote that unfortunately needed 60%. 23 states have legalized medical marijuana. (Up to date map: https://localtvwtvr.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/marijuana-ma.. https://localtvwtvr.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/marijuana-ma.... ) More importantly, criminalization is moving towards citations across the nation. We are getting rid of draconian mandatory sentencing for drug crimes. This is all very good news, and while it's slow, remember that the government moves slow, but as long as it keeps moving in the right direction, we can look forward to a time in which full legalization of all scheduled drugs may eventually become a reality. So instead of being defeatist or spouting sarcasm, step up and support the people making this happen. It's not just public opinion changing, it's SSDP, MPP, NORML putting money, time, and effort into lobbying for these changes. That's against stiff competition from lobbying being done by prescription drug manufacturers (http://www.thenation.com/article/180493/anti-pot-lobbys-big-... http://www.thenation.com/article/180493/anti-pot-lobbys-big-...) Now is a time of pendulum swing in the right direction, and we should be keeping the momentum going behind it.
- meowface 12y ago
  Legalization of marijuana within the next 30 years is inevitable for most states. But legalization of heroin, crack, cocaine, meth? That's really a pipe dream. It might happen some day, but that'd be more on the range of 70-100 years if I were to guess, and perhaps a lot longer. Marijuana is a significant portion of sales on all of the dark markets, but other more addictive narcotics still constitute the majority compared to marijuana.
- puredemo 12y ago
  Sure, for marijuana. But the ethical imperative to allow people full control over what substances go into their own bodies seems to be as ignored as ever. Simple example: I'm not legally allowed to control the levels of testosterone in my own body. That seems absurd. #MyBodyMyChoice
orbifold 12y ago
I think people in power realized that the counter culture of the 60s and 70s posed a real threat to a capitalistic society, so they eliminated factors that could give people the idea their life purpose was not to be a drone in a large corporation.
- adventured 12y ago
  Capitalism - an actual free market - would require the complete legalization of all drugs. You've got it exactly backwards. The counter culture won. America is the world's largest welfare state, has the largest entitlement systems, with a total government system larger than the economy of Japan, hyper regulation, high taxation, and has very few remnants of Capitalism.
  - orbifold 12y ago
    I did not mean some fantasy version of Capitalism, just the fact that for a modern capitalistic society to function, people have to want to buy a new car every few years, strife to have a house and take on consumer credits to buy a new flat screen TV. Maybe I should have used Consumerism. I think it is fairly indisputable that modern economies would not function, if there were not a constant and increasing demand for new stuff. From a global standpoint this seems far from optimal, if you want to optimize for conserving finite resources like oil. In a free market the only way to counter act that a finite resource is exhausted is by the fact that the price increases as time goes on. So there is a very long time where you can use a resource for frivolous stuff like Helium balloons, while at the same time being perfectly aware that it should probably be used for more useful things.
- Nursie 12y ago
  Did it though? AFAICT when people came down from whatever it was and actually tried to live their 'new' ways, they pretty much degenerated and fell apart after short times for all sorts of reasons. Being a corporate drone is not an aspiration. Feeding your family and having a nice place for them to live certainly is though.
  - 12y ago
mechatronics 12y ago
Just once, I'd like one of you to admit that Silk Road (any many of the other sites) sold large amounts of identity theft equipment. These are not noble drug dealers harming nobody. They are sociopathic assholes selling whatever makes money, even if the ONLY reason for the item is to harm innocent individuals against their will.
- polshaw 12y ago
  "They" are not the same person. Silk road and sites like it are/were marketplaces, not retailers.
- dobbsbob 12y ago
  Vendors there sold phony identification for the sole puposes of renting drops to import narcotics or start a false front company. SR wasn't involved in trading databases of stolen info, though the other major sites that weren't busted are. Agora is like the walmart of e-crime
- kordless 12y ago
  As I read the article I was thinking, "Shouldn't they be catching bad guys?" A 'war' on drugs is technically catching bad guys, where the 'bad' is defined as selling one thing to another for (presumed) personal use. What you are talking about is important, but you should take that up with the FBI. They are the ones going on and on about drugs.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dobbsbob 12y ago

The SR2 guy 'defcon' was also selling his services as a .onion developer/ops so likely all these other sites he set up for vendors and they were seized when he was caught and cooperated. From the FBI complaint he was completely careless like all other recently busted darknet admins and mods so wouldn't be surprised if they were all hosted at the same host too.

fabulist 12y ago
Every time something like this happens, lots of people shout that the sky is falling and Tor is "dead." Thank you for putting forward a reasonable hypothesis amid the FUD. That being said, I doubt he was a developer for 399 other sites, thats quite a few. I think a "watering hole" style attack is likely here, but I think there must be a part of the story that hasn't been revealed; perhaps there was a federation of .onion marketplaces that Benthall was a part of.
- meowface 12y ago
  I work in the security industry, and normally I'm the first one to argue against the FUD, but this time I'm not so sure. Clearly, out of these ~400 a decent portion were probably on the same server or in the same datacenter, and many of their operators were obviously quite careless in terms of personal, infrastructure, and application security (as has always been the case and will likely forever remain the case). But it's still a pretty high number. I would not completely rule out some sort of trick or analysis being employed by global law enforcement to identify the ISP or datacenter being used to host hidden services. It may just be a matter of them plotting the volume of Tor traffic around the world and narrowing it down from there; it's likely not that difficult to distinguish Tor traffic from a popular hidden service and Tor traffic from a relay, exit node, or client. Note the bottom of the FBI's press release: >The law enforcement authorities of Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, whose actions have been coordinated through Eurojust and Europol’s EC3, provided substantial assistance. That's a lot of countries. Many unscrupulous hosting providers are located in those countries. It's possible that the FBI narrowed their search down to individual foreign ISPs, then had foreign law enforcement work with ISPs, NOCs, and hosting companies to place selective taps and narrow things down even further, centered purely around analysis of Tor traffic volume. Or they may have found a general purpose vulnerability. Or perhaps a combination of the two. These tweets by a (not currently arrested) popular hidden service operator are also very interesting: https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530764492326838272 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530764492326838272 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530766985794420736 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530766985794420736 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530768176007884800 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530768176007884800 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530768358355251200 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530768358355251200 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530891182612955136 https://twitter.com/loldoxbin/status/530891182612955136 Tor is not dead, but anyone running an illicit hidden service should probably be concerned, at least until further details are released or discovered. It's entirely possible that they took down all of these services purely through typical cybercrime investigative techniques, but I think it's unwise to rule out something a bit more powerful this early on.

oofabz 12y ago

Was anyone charged with a crime? It disturbs me that the FBI has free rein to seize people's property without even giving them their day in court. The Fourth Amendment says "nor shall any person [...] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". I don't see any process of law here. The FBI is law enforcement, not judicial.

mikecb 12y ago
*Fifth.
pcthrowaway 12y ago
They don't necessarily know who the administrators of these sites are to charge them. It should be noted that Blake Benthall of Silk Road 2.0 was charged yesterday.
krapp 12y ago
The government is allowed to gather evidence before it arrests people and tries them. You're jumping the gun a bit on the moral outrage.
- sp332 12y ago
  Gathering evidence doesn't mean shutting a site down, let alone 400.
  - meowface 12y ago
    If they have a valid search and seizure warrant, it is legal for them to take down the sites. If you read through the criminal complaint filed against Silk Road 2.0 / Benthall, they establish pretty sufficient probable cause for a search and seizure. Arrest warrants for the individuals involved is a separate process.
  - threeseed 12y ago
    Are you serious ? Selling drugs is illegal. Hence running a website to sell drugs is also illegal. Of course the government is going to shut down the website or any other sites where there is clear evidence of criminal behaviour. The criminal case against Blake et al over whether they ran the site is a separate issue.

xnull 12y ago

Some here may know me as a critic of overreaching and aggressive cyber enforcement (and related surveillance). First, I'm quite happy that this activity does not appear to be the result of wide scale infrastructure sabotage. And I am quite happy that the FBI is doing its job to combat crime that is facilitated using (abusing) the technologies that are bastions for free speech, privacy and whistleblowing. Of course the flipside is that this means that there are capabilities in place to disrupt anonymizing technologies - the technologies make investigation more expensive but ultimately are merely an inconvenience to the powers that be. So when it comes down to it, anonymizing services and Tor can't be trusted to secure you if you have something to say where your life is in danger. The FBI (/others) wants the court system to replace technology as the gatekeeper to investigation. The court system, however, is brittle. It takes time, it fails, and it responds to external pressure - there are repeated studies that show that the length of time persons in US court systems are convicted to serve is highly correlated with how long it has been since the precising judge has eaten his last meal. There are also extralegal rights that law enforcement are given by legislature and evolving interpretations of what both these legal and extralegal rights entail. But law enforcement also is justified from their perspective. They don't want there to be criminals that get away with crimes simply because criminals load up some software that obfuscate their identities, locations and accounts. If you look at this published list there are criminal organizations that you and I as taxpayers do want taken down. (I recognize that the sale and consumption of drugs is a greyer area of morality as drug use is sometimes victimless). I think that for the most part law enforcement is capable of taking down these services and organizations other ways - ordering assault rifles and monitoring the drops - and that this provides opportunities for the government to enforce the law without sabotaging communications infrastructure. Taking down some .onion addresses doesn't do too much besides annoy the services for a time anyway unless the services operationally are not capable of standing up a new address and communicating with customers anonymously. All in all it's a blurry line but I feel safer with places that are anonymous and secure than I do by trusting a court system and legal process that can only see, process, and be accountable for so much.

sliverstorm 12y ago
On the bright side it leaves us in the same position as man has always been- rather charted territory. I've been skeptical of Tor et-al from day one. I didn't have provable reasons why, but the court has always served as the gatekeeper to investigation, and the Tors of the world seemed like the sort of hubris we techies are so prone to- "Age-old social justice problems man has struggled with for thousands of years can be trivially fixed with my technology!" It is my opinion that we (techies) overestimate ourselves. Tor is useful, but it would have to be perfect (which no technology can be) to protect you from the flawed judicial system. Which is why I think we are destined for heartbreak, and the longer we forestall that realization the worse off we will be, for we will ignore the judicial system and allow it to become ever more broken. As a sidenote I find it bitter satire; people who cannot accept the will of others seeking tools to forcefully impose their own morality on the world instead

MCRed 12y ago

I wish the FBI would spend its time going after actual crimes- like the ones where people's money are stolen-- rather than political crimes. But that they aren't is proof positive to me that the government does not operate for the benefit of the people, but for the benefit of itself.