6 ms·

The Rise and Fall of Silk Road

86 points by Libertatea 11y ago

amyjess 11y ago
This whole thing is so bizarre. I went to college with Ross. I didn't know him personally, but we had a few friends in common (even looking at his Facebook page now, we have a few mutual friends, and I know others who were friends with him but don't have him on FB). To think that something as huge and infamous as the Silk Road was created by a dude I went to college with just blows my mind. On top of that, the article also mentions Richard Bates, who I knew personally. We were in some of the same clubs, we had a couple of classes together, and we were even friends for a short time before we had a falling out, involving Richard treating one of my best friends like shit and then treating me like shit when I tried to play mediator. After that, the aforementioned friend and I ended up coming up with a few juvenile nicknames for Richard Bates based on his name... I don't think I'll post them here, but you can probably guess, because his name is very unfortunate. By the time I graduated, Richard wasn't very well-liked... IMO, he wasn't a good friend or a good person. As mind-blowing as Ross was, this was even more shocking, and it's still hard for me to believe that Richard, somebody I personally knew, was part and parcel of the Silk Road.
- testingonprod 11y ago
  You sound like you have a knack for stumbling upon all the right people
  - def_illiterate 11y ago
    You might find this interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment It blew my mind when I first encountered it.
- ansible 11y ago
  Getting way off topic... Growing up, my family was friends with a guy who later became a murderer. He seemed like a good guy at the time (had a cool model train setup in his basement) if a bit curmudgeonly. The whole thing was a tragedy, and I believe he was at least a little bit mentally ill by that point. Sad.
PaulAJ 11y ago
Note how Curtis Green was raided: they delivered some drugs, then searched his house on the grounds that he was in possession of drugs. This is a standard US Postal Inspectors tactic: it was used many years ago (see http://totse.mattfast1.com/en/law/high_profile_legal_cases/aabust.html http://totse.mattfast1.com/en/law/high_profile_legal_cases/a...) and it looks like it is still being used. If you are thinking that this looks like an end-run round the fourth amendment, then you have been paying attention.
- mindslight 11y ago
  If you think 'the nth amendment' is more effectful than than any other ad copy, then you haven't been paying attention. > he’d [DEA agent] loved the physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a tactical vest, clearing some broke-down row house on some broke-down block and catching some dealer in the bathroom, cuffing the guy before he could wipe his ass In a just society, this criminal would be in jail or mental hospital (if he couldn't control his aggression). In ours, he's given a badge and a gun. Federal lawl enforcement organizations lost legitimacy decades ago, if they even ever had it (eg DEA, ATF). They should not be judged on the bad actors they do catch, but by the ones they create and the victims they steamroll with impunity (even a stopped clock is right twice a day). The only recourse a sane person has is to avoid helping, promoting, funding, or otherwise supporting their existence. I'd rather our society not fall apart, but the feedback loop became disconnected quite some time ago. The longer this cancer goes on, the uglier the transition.
- tptacek 11y ago
  It does not seem likely that evidence predicated on an unsolicited drug shipment from USPS would survive in court.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    http://theadvocate.com/home/7031641-125/postal-investigators-target-drug-trade http://theadvocate.com/home/7031641-125/postal-investigators... > “The trick is figuring out who’s supposed to receive it,” said Chief Deputy Tony Bacala of the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office, whose deputies arrested a St. Amant man in June after he accepted a package containing marijuana. > From there, law enforcement officials arranged for a “controlled delivery” of the package to Allen and later found marijuana, equipment used to cultivate marijuana and steroids during a search of his residence, authorities said. They don't seem to concerned about that part.
jmkni 11y ago
Haven't even read the article yet but had a quick scroll through to see how long it was and already enjoying the graphics!
cliveowen 11y ago
>Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola and powdered mini doughnuts. Fingers frosted synthetic white[...] >Green waddled to the door, his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, following attentively. How do the authors know any of these (useless) details? They weren't there. Is this a factual recount or fiction? I hate it when these failed novelists try to make a run-of-the-mill story sound like an Hollywood movie. Next time, just stick to the facts and save me a couple of pointless pages of unsubstantiated claims. Is is that hard to do?
- navait 11y ago
  The facts are gathered from the court documents. Admittedly, I'm sure the author exaggerated(this is wired, after all)
- CPLX 11y ago
  It's not that it's hard to do, it's that the author and the publication decided not to write it that way. This is what's called a feature story, it's the classic form in which long form monthly magazines tell stories. If you don't like this form of writing there are many other styles available to you, such as the very neutral and factual NY Times or AP style, or the more conversational style popularized by blogs, for example.
- serve_yay 11y ago
  Sometimes I think I'm bonkers because I want things like this to be an ordered, bulleted list of what happened and that's all. Have you ever been in a group where someone is telling a story and wished you could hear it without all the dumb narrative flourishes, instead just "this happened, then this, then this"?
  - subverting 11y ago
    This is certainly not what most people prefer. People enjoy embellishment and emotions demonstrated in storytelling. But I guess it can depend a lot in the skill of the storyteller. Something most people are not good at these days because we don't require good storytelling as much as we did pre-technology days.
fredgrott 11y ago
I have some questions: 1. Recently it has been revealed that USPS photos ALL mailed articles to store the send and rec metadata. Are 3rd party shippers under the same blanket secret surveillance ?
- sjg007 11y ago
  Why would they not be? It is all meta data.
Harkins 11y ago
Wow. Not in a good way. Sorry to cut ahead in the story, but Agent Mark Force is under indictment for abusing his position to commit theft and fraud. It is ridiculous to think of a long-term officer talking to the police without a lawyer. The idea that he would talk to a reporter is flatly unbelievable. All this stuff about him sitting up and taking notice in a briefing or musing on his career or fluffed pillows is straight-up invented. Making up stories is not journalism. Reading this can only mislead people. This is a terrible take on an incredible story.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  You're jumping to conclusions. It's possible the details are accurate (or at least come from the horse's mouth). You don't know what the reporters got from interviews or when. He may well have been interviewed earlier, or advised by his attorney that cooperating with a piece that would portray his earlier actions in a positive light couldn't hurt him. I don't know how high WIRED's standards of fact-checking are. Customarily, they'd need two independent sources for any statement of fact. (I believe the New Yorker, at least, cleaves to this standard.) I suspect this presages a book on the subject.
MichaelGG 11y ago
>Force was an athletic guy, and coming up through the agency he’d loved the physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a tactical vest ... So he literally likes being a jackbooted thug. Anyways the main takeaway, again, is opsec. Use delayed messages instead of chat. If for some reason you have to write to people and talk to employees, invent another persona that you use. Not just on the surface, but underneath. So you're posing as DPR, but talking about paleo and how the FDA food triangle sucks? That's your real persona leaking through. Instead, pickup someone else's point of views, location, cultural references, etc. Same happened to one of the Lulzsec guys. "Yeah I was in jail for pot" (or something like that). Bam you just leaked like 10 bits of ID right there. But if he had said "I got arrested for heroin possession but struck a plea because I was X years old" - you just provided fake bits. And if an agent was thinking they're so clever picking up on these bits, they've now narrowed down their search to people that aren't you. I wonder how deep this goes - do criminals do this often enough that LE is actively trying to figure out what personal details are fake?
- treetoppin 11y ago
  I've often wondered what happens psychologically to people who inject "noise" into their virtual personas to evade being identified. Does the fake persona start to leak back into their everyday personality? If you do this long term does your personal identity start to erode?
  - nostrebored 11y ago
    I'm of the opinion that the brain is very plastic. I feel like if you surround yourself with enough things that run contrary to your current beliefs your surroundings will leak in, without you being aware of this change at all. Psychologists have already shown that things such as violent media have immediate effects on the psyche, why would opinions etc. be any different? Also, you might find this interesting: http://www.seeing-i.co.uk/ http://www.seeing-i.co.uk/
  - walshemj 11y ago
    The BBC did an interesting two part dramatization on Kim Philby recently not sure if its been on PBS http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0406w88 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0406w88 They actually showed Philbys press conference where he was proclaiming his innocence - still used as a training aid apparently
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

86 points by Libertatea 11y ago

This whole thing is so bizarre. I went to college with Ross. I didn't know him personally, but we had a few friends in common (even looking at his Facebook page now, we have a few mutual friends, and I know others who were friends with him but don't have him on FB). To think that something as huge and infamous as the Silk Road was created by a dude I went to college with just blows my mind. On top of that, the article also mentions Richard Bates, who I knew personally. We were in some of the same clubs, we had a couple of classes together, and we were even friends for a short time before we had a falling out, involving Richard treating one of my best friends like shit and then treating me like shit when I tried to play mediator. After that, the aforementioned friend and I ended up coming up with a few juvenile nicknames for Richard Bates based on his name... I don't think I'll post them here, but you can probably guess, because his name is very unfortunate. By the time I graduated, Richard wasn't very well-liked... IMO, he wasn't a good friend or a good person. As mind-blowing as Ross was, this was even more shocking, and it's still hard for me to believe that Richard, somebody I personally knew, was part and parcel of the Silk Road.

testingonprod 11y ago
You sound like you have a knack for stumbling upon all the right people
- def_illiterate 11y ago
  You might find this interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment It blew my mind when I first encountered it.
ansible 11y ago
Getting way off topic... Growing up, my family was friends with a guy who later became a murderer. He seemed like a good guy at the time (had a cool model train setup in his basement) if a bit curmudgeonly. The whole thing was a tragedy, and I believe he was at least a little bit mentally ill by that point. Sad.

PaulAJ 11y ago

Note how Curtis Green was raided: they delivered some drugs, then searched his house on the grounds that he was in possession of drugs. This is a standard US Postal Inspectors tactic: it was used many years ago (see http://totse.mattfast1.com/en/law/high_profile_legal_cases/aabust.html http://totse.mattfast1.com/en/law/high_profile_legal_cases/a...) and it looks like it is still being used. If you are thinking that this looks like an end-run round the fourth amendment, then you have been paying attention.

mindslight 11y ago
If you think 'the nth amendment' is more effectful than than any other ad copy, then you haven't been paying attention. > he’d [DEA agent] loved the physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a tactical vest, clearing some broke-down row house on some broke-down block and catching some dealer in the bathroom, cuffing the guy before he could wipe his ass In a just society, this criminal would be in jail or mental hospital (if he couldn't control his aggression). In ours, he's given a badge and a gun. Federal lawl enforcement organizations lost legitimacy decades ago, if they even ever had it (eg DEA, ATF). They should not be judged on the bad actors they do catch, but by the ones they create and the victims they steamroll with impunity (even a stopped clock is right twice a day). The only recourse a sane person has is to avoid helping, promoting, funding, or otherwise supporting their existence. I'd rather our society not fall apart, but the feedback loop became disconnected quite some time ago. The longer this cancer goes on, the uglier the transition.
tptacek 11y ago
It does not seem likely that evidence predicated on an unsolicited drug shipment from USPS would survive in court.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  http://theadvocate.com/home/7031641-125/postal-investigators-target-drug-trade http://theadvocate.com/home/7031641-125/postal-investigators... > “The trick is figuring out who’s supposed to receive it,” said Chief Deputy Tony Bacala of the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office, whose deputies arrested a St. Amant man in June after he accepted a package containing marijuana. > From there, law enforcement officials arranged for a “controlled delivery” of the package to Allen and later found marijuana, equipment used to cultivate marijuana and steroids during a search of his residence, authorities said. They don't seem to concerned about that part.

jmkni 11y ago

Haven't even read the article yet but had a quick scroll through to see how long it was and already enjoying the graphics!

cliveowen 11y ago

>Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola and powdered mini doughnuts. Fingers frosted synthetic white[...] >Green waddled to the door, his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, following attentively. How do the authors know any of these (useless) details? They weren't there. Is this a factual recount or fiction? I hate it when these failed novelists try to make a run-of-the-mill story sound like an Hollywood movie. Next time, just stick to the facts and save me a couple of pointless pages of unsubstantiated claims. Is is that hard to do?

navait 11y ago
The facts are gathered from the court documents. Admittedly, I'm sure the author exaggerated(this is wired, after all)
CPLX 11y ago
It's not that it's hard to do, it's that the author and the publication decided not to write it that way. This is what's called a feature story, it's the classic form in which long form monthly magazines tell stories. If you don't like this form of writing there are many other styles available to you, such as the very neutral and factual NY Times or AP style, or the more conversational style popularized by blogs, for example.
serve_yay 11y ago
Sometimes I think I'm bonkers because I want things like this to be an ordered, bulleted list of what happened and that's all. Have you ever been in a group where someone is telling a story and wished you could hear it without all the dumb narrative flourishes, instead just "this happened, then this, then this"?
- subverting 11y ago
  This is certainly not what most people prefer. People enjoy embellishment and emotions demonstrated in storytelling. But I guess it can depend a lot in the skill of the storyteller. Something most people are not good at these days because we don't require good storytelling as much as we did pre-technology days.

fredgrott 11y ago

I have some questions: 1. Recently it has been revealed that USPS photos ALL mailed articles to store the send and rec metadata. Are 3rd party shippers under the same blanket secret surveillance ?

sjg007 11y ago
Why would they not be? It is all meta data.

Harkins 11y ago

Wow. Not in a good way. Sorry to cut ahead in the story, but Agent Mark Force is under indictment for abusing his position to commit theft and fraud. It is ridiculous to think of a long-term officer talking to the police without a lawyer. The idea that he would talk to a reporter is flatly unbelievable. All this stuff about him sitting up and taking notice in a briefing or musing on his career or fluffed pillows is straight-up invented. Making up stories is not journalism. Reading this can only mislead people. This is a terrible take on an incredible story.

Tloewald 11y ago
You're jumping to conclusions. It's possible the details are accurate (or at least come from the horse's mouth). You don't know what the reporters got from interviews or when. He may well have been interviewed earlier, or advised by his attorney that cooperating with a piece that would portray his earlier actions in a positive light couldn't hurt him. I don't know how high WIRED's standards of fact-checking are. Customarily, they'd need two independent sources for any statement of fact. (I believe the New Yorker, at least, cleaves to this standard.) I suspect this presages a book on the subject.

MichaelGG 11y ago

>Force was an athletic guy, and coming up through the agency he’d loved the physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a tactical vest ... So he literally likes being a jackbooted thug. Anyways the main takeaway, again, is opsec. Use delayed messages instead of chat. If for some reason you have to write to people and talk to employees, invent another persona that you use. Not just on the surface, but underneath. So you're posing as DPR, but talking about paleo and how the FDA food triangle sucks? That's your real persona leaking through. Instead, pickup someone else's point of views, location, cultural references, etc. Same happened to one of the Lulzsec guys. "Yeah I was in jail for pot" (or something like that). Bam you just leaked like 10 bits of ID right there. But if he had said "I got arrested for heroin possession but struck a plea because I was X years old" - you just provided fake bits. And if an agent was thinking they're so clever picking up on these bits, they've now narrowed down their search to people that aren't you. I wonder how deep this goes - do criminals do this often enough that LE is actively trying to figure out what personal details are fake?

treetoppin 11y ago
I've often wondered what happens psychologically to people who inject "noise" into their virtual personas to evade being identified. Does the fake persona start to leak back into their everyday personality? If you do this long term does your personal identity start to erode?
- nostrebored 11y ago
  I'm of the opinion that the brain is very plastic. I feel like if you surround yourself with enough things that run contrary to your current beliefs your surroundings will leak in, without you being aware of this change at all. Psychologists have already shown that things such as violent media have immediate effects on the psyche, why would opinions etc. be any different? Also, you might find this interesting: http://www.seeing-i.co.uk/ http://www.seeing-i.co.uk/
- walshemj 11y ago
  The BBC did an interesting two part dramatization on Kim Philby recently not sure if its been on PBS http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0406w88 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0406w88 They actually showed Philbys press conference where he was proclaiming his innocence - still used as a training aid apparently

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]