Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
politie.nl
politie.nl
> It is Hansa Market, currently the most popular dark market in the ‘anonymous’ part of the internet, the so-called darknet.
> ...
> The darknet markets enable large-scale trading in chiefly illegal goods, such as drugs, weapons, child pornography, and ransom software. ... No weapons or child pornography were sold on Hansa Market.
I'm much more okay with, eg, petty theft than murder, and would find it weird if people tried to make people stealing candybars from Walmart out to be equal to murderers.
it is pretty equal for the 3rd strike
And some people make the argument that people commit on average 3 felonies a day https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
My understanding is that possessing it means you obtained it from someone, who probably wanted some kind of payment, who abused children to produce the material so he could get that payment.
There are quite a few gaps there. What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
Of course the dominant factor is people are horrified by deviant sexualities. We're barely managing to accept homosexuality which is probably more common than peadophilia.
You're right that this is a very difficult topic to discuss rationally but I'm going to try anyway.
> What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
1) Compensation does not have to be financial to be an incentive. 2) Anonymous photography of individuals without their knowledge can absolutely cause harm. 3) Being a victim of a crime does not require knowledge of the crime taking place nor does it require physical contact.
> Of course the dominant factor is people are horrified by deviant sexualities. We're barely managing to accept homosexuality which is probably more common than peadophilia.
You're equating homosexuality to child abuse which puts you on the wrong side of history.
I don't think it is productive to strongly stigmatize all forms of paedophillac tendencies, specifically because it reduces the chance of would-be child abusers getting help controlling and/or channeling their urges.
There is some research that suggests higher availability of child pornography (including the simulated/drawn) reduces occurences of child abuse, and although it is of course highly controversial, to me it indicates that it is worth investigating.
As a specific example of what I consider to be a very harmful way of dealing with the (real or fake) child porn issue, is the UK porn identification requirement. No paedophile is going to enter their details when they want to look at loli hentai, so they'd be forced to find some other outlet, for instance by going on the darkweb. Or they end up not doing anything to pacify their urges, which might well raise the chances of them actually participating in child abuse. Of course this is purely speculative, but I don't think these are outcomes you can reasonably dismiss out of hand.
I'm not saying I condone the use of photographic material of minors, I tend towards "90% bad" but really have to think it through more, but I do believe it to be harmful to make hand-drawn or CG child pornography illegal. The "but you're abusing the children without their knowledge" argument doesn't hold water there, and it'd be great if it usurped large swaths of the market for abusive child pornography.
As an aside, I am curious as to the reason you are being down voted, besides your audacity of expressing an unpopular opinion.
As for cultural norms. Many primitive cultures use age of puberty as age of consent. I heard of one (probably Amazon) tribe where sex was treated as common as eating or pooing. It wasn't related to marriage, which they did have. Children were involved much younger than our age of consent. I don't think you could say they were harmed since it was normal behavior and they apparently grew up without emotional problems.
We tend to confuse normal sexual attraction to teenagers with peadophilia and lump them all into the same group. For example teachers having relationships with underage teenage students. It might be harmful but the sexuality is normal, not deviant.
It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could.
Teenagers sexting each other?
Someone drawing or 3d modelling fictional underage character?
In many jurisdictions thats the same thing as genuine child abuse base child porn. In my jurisdiction, Harry Potter fanfiction with sex counts as child porn - and as one with extended penalty because it is "delivered through very efficient means like computer network".
Not all things are all the same, even with the same label.
You are foolish to believe that all children are harmed by childhood sexuality and/or child pornography. Sex is part of the human nature, and we do not wake up on our 18th birthday and realize that we are ready to begin exploring our bodies. Never mind the fact that human beings can be conditioned to both be traumatized by and accepting of sexual activity by/as children.
>It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could. This amounts to morally-derived censorship.
It is foolish to presume that your cultural programming should not be scrutinized; society is worse off for this kind of puritanical closed mindedness. No, I'm not asking you to accept victimization of children, but if you cannot honestly discuss and/or examine both sides of an issue, you cannot be confident in your opinion.
If you believe the MPAA/RIAA's claims that piracy harms sales, there would be some moral case for piracy of CP. Although, there is still some direct harm from the distribution of the material (for the privacy for the victim). However it's more likely that (contra the MPAA) piracy actually serves as advertising, just like in the ordinary entertainment industry.
> What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed?
Still harmful for privacy reasons mentioned above, even if less harmful than actual physical abuse.
> Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
Probably, but the example I would reach for is art / drawings of obviously fictional characters, rather than any of the above. The fact that many CP laws extend to this is better evidence that lawmakers are being irrationally swayed by puritanism. (Or that puritanism breeds indifference. Maybe they don't care about the "deviants" interested in these sort of drawings enough to specifically target them, but they also don't care enough to carve out an exception.)
the dominant factor in stigmatized pea do philadelphia has very little to do with deviant sexuality and has everything to do with coercion and rape of still developing human beings. this is seen across just about every other facet of civilized society as well.
We don't allow minors into enforceable contracts, leave home or check out of school, smoke cigarettes or drink booze, and we sure as hell don't allow them to participate in "amateur" pornography where the consequences can be life long.
We restrict these things because the mind isn't developed or experienced enough to understand and appreciate the effects of these actions.
Is that true? Or is it the behavior that's illegal?
Is there a reason for the distinction?
Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime. This is in the US, but I would be quite surprised if various other countries did not have similar statutes.
More generally, there are all sorts of laws out there that effectively criminalize thoughtcrime rather than behavior. Of course behavior might be needed for anyone to _discover_ the thoughtcrime.
Wrong. It requires all the people to have taken action to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan, and only one of them to have taken additional action toward acheiving it.
People don't think in groups; thoughts have to manifest as action for people to conspire.
I think your definition needs some work.
And until those countries figure out mind control it's just going to be oppression of their actions.
Now that we've cleared that up, I still think laws against "acting" gay are wrong (within the same framework that it's legal to "act" heterosexual).
That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise," rather than what I think is more common, "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I want to buy a house without a lot of effort."
Either way, there's a lot of violence happening directly because of drug cartels, foreign and domestic.
No. I'm just saying that the people upstream manufacturing massive quantities of meth and heroin probably aren't the kinds of organizations that you want to be making that kind of money.
This depends very much on who you're talking about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ana-davila/drug-cartels-where-...
The solution will never be shutting down darknets and arresting people.
This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs but also smuggles forced prostitutes over borders on the side. Take away the drugs and they're likely to expand the side business.
The Mafia was all about prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets. The prohibition gave them a business where you could make far more than all the others combined, and all you needed to do was to kill people who got in your way.
Is that a counter argument? There are bad actors (in society). Some bad actors have social, moral, physical, intellectual barriers that prevent them from acting WORSE. Raising the social barrier (marketplace) isn't any different than the social barrier (legality). If you rather not compete bad actors out of the market because of what they might do, why legally punish them out of the market? Why bother trying to stop them at all?
Gangsterism is funded by various econmic oppornities which for one reason or another are illegal. Some things like assasination and extortion need to be illegal by their very nature.
But by passing laws that make new things illegal, we increase the amount of resources available to fund criminalality.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bloody-struggle-erupts-over-avo...
Sure, we can't possibly legalize murder for hire and still have a functional society, but how much profit can you really make filling those kinds of contracts, especially in a world with no illegal drug trade and no human trafficking because hookers are now clean and legal? They can try to expand side businesses all they want, but some of them have a natural cap to how much demand there can be.
I think there's also value in defining what people mean by 'small time dealer' in this context. To me, that connotes someone selling a bit of pot to their friends so they can smoke for free or something. People who ship misc. substances internationally and in some cases earn six figures plus annually don't fit that definition in my eyes.
You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.
I'm not convinced this is true, there's lots of ways to make a big profit illegally, drugs are just comparatively easy. I'm a proponent of full drug legalization (it's a space where I have large amounts of first hand experience that won't be discussed on HN), but it's still important to separate an ideological position from reality. The international drug trade is directly tied to human trafficking. Turning a blind eye to one is turning a blind eye to both.
Compared to the example you gave, where no one is harmed and no further harm is caused or funded by people being gay.
Edit to specify that this doesn't happen in every drug transaction.
Think of it this way, illegal images could be produced by advanced CGI, but aren't because that tends to be just as illegal. That doesn't excuse anyone who consume images not produced by advanced CGI.
It's like saying encryption is used by terrorists, so if I buy encryption I'm indirectly supporting terrorism.
Bit of a generalisation to apply it to every drug sale ever...
Don't think that you can claim innocence because you are following the law.
It's more accurate to say that government prohibition fund actions far worse than just creating drugs, human slavery (drug mules) to murder.
I buy my marijuana from a friend who grows a few plants in his basement. How exactly is that funding slavery and murder?
Are such levels of specificity required when talking about other illegal transactions which have a potential to be victimless?
same question with regard to home grown weed?
please, elaborate ...
So, what's left of that syllogism of yours?
This is a dangerous way to present facts that changes the perception of the reader in ways that may not be noticed while not technically telling a lie.
You are claiming that all crimes are of equal severity and should have equal consequences. That is absurd.
The paranoid side of me says Tor is unsafe (due to whatever - the authorities having backdoors on most hosting services, on your PC, due to the encryption being cracked by some unknown breakthrough or due to 90% of entry nodes being controlled by NSA). And NSA and FBI and co just have hundreds of people working on "parallel construction" of evidence.
Of course, a blunder by the operators is much more likely...
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/982821/downlo... (pdf)
This is true, but it dangerously misses the point. Every time someone gets taken down, the know-it-alls on various fora sneer and go "Ha! What terrible opsec! I wouldn't have made that mistake!" No, you would've made some other mistake.
To run a darknet market and not get caught, your opsec has to be perfect. Every second, every minute, every day, every person involved, forever. That is simply not possible once an operation exceeds a certain size. Like the IRA once said: "We only need to be lucky once. You need to be lucky every time". This is the "defender's dilemma" that guarantees you will be caught as t goes to infinity: sooner or later, you'll make some mistake that burns you.
Focusing on the specific mistakes made by bust-ees only boosts your confidence and ignores that you, in their situation, would've leaked information somewhere else.
One of the cornerstones of OPSEC is persona creation & management. This is orders of magnitude easier to perform in cyberspace than in real life, and can be used as a catch-all safety -- for exactly when mistakes are made and layers are compromised --.
You will make many many mistakes, but part of a well-implemented OPSEC strategy, is to have those mistakes land in a compartment, an illusionary persona that you created out of thin air. Operation size has nothing to do with it and should be completely irrelevant when the compartmentation strategy used is solid.
A good argument for not getting too greedy and keeping things small. It's the nail that sticks out that gets hammered down.
So that these are the stated reasons is no indication that they are the real reasons.
They are, in fact, so very, very convenient the they smell like parallel construction to me.
Might not be, but they certainly aren't good evidence that parallel construction isn't going on.
On the other hand, the evidence that parallel construction is going on appears to be a belief that everything is parallel construction.
1) They were investigating AlphaBay for nearly 3 years 2) They came upon somehow control of an email address which contained 3 year old mail that contained the password reset email 3) They are capturing and storing large amounts of tor traffic much like the NSA does on clearnet see: xkeyscore
This isn't really explained in the indictment
When he was busted he was logged in to the site, and had several passwords/keys stored in plaintext on his machine.
Multiple OpSec failures.
Good analysis here: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/dark-net-trap-545ae5dd8476
That seems like one plausible possibility.
The other spin would be "we discovered illegal activity through evidence that would be inadmissible in court, so we went ahead and focussed on gathering admissible evidence". Probably by looking in places they wouldn't have looked otherwise, but not by making anything up or breaking any laws.
It's hard to find an SSL provider that will sign a .onion domain though.
Also, considering this is a drug sting, which should be a really serious thing, it's strange that they make a joke on the page.
I would expect a plain HTML page saying "This hidden service hosted illegal activities. All transactions have been logged. If you participated in these activities, contact your local authorities."
We even have bespoke fonts, Rijksoverheid Serif and Rijksoverheid Sans: https://www.rijkshuisstijl.nl/basiselementen/lettertype
This image, however, seems to be a stock photo, the Dutch police logo, and white lettering. Given that it uses no less than four different fonts, I bet it was a quick paste job by someone from the cybercrime unit, not a professional graphic designer.
After some image searching, it turns out to be from a template: https://www.om.nl/publish/pages/51619/screenshot_zonder_brow...
That uh, says the exact opposite of what you say it says
Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies.
That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement.
Because obviously people buying a few pills of ecstasy or a tab of LSD are a serious danger to society and should be taken of the streets. /s
Sometimes the state apparatus is precisely the one committing the most heinous crimes. (with impunity!)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffi...
You don't need a address to send mail - sellers.
Personal use can be huge amounts - buyers
I can't see many dealers using dark markets above plausible personal use amounts since you get caught importing dealable quantities you are screwed, dark market or not (And the mail system will get a % of buyers). You might have a $1000 per week habit or be a $1000 per week dealer. Who's to say?
Because obviously it's impossible to express that one party might have viewed an outcome as favorable without agreeing with that view. /s
Calling out a commentor's statement about the police's state of mind at concluding what was undoubtedly a large project for their department doesn't effectively work as a launchpad into a critique of those responsible for the law when done through terse sarcasm that seems to target the wrong responsible parties.
You could also order kilograms there.
Obviously.
(Yes, I realize legalizing local drug production and distribution would undercut the market, which is one reason why I am for legalization. But that does not excuse supporting the current cartels.)
(I have never used drugs, other then alcohol.)
So law enforcement has lots of encrypted text along with some clear text from users not informed enough to follow any kind of opsec.
I really wonder if this happened at all
Dutch Police released a statement claiming as much http://politiepcvh42eav.onion/hansafaq.html
Maybe this was done on a case-by-case basis or Grams updated their keys to the new LE keys.
Furthermore, in order to lower the risk of anyone detecting this here's something the LEO could do:
1. They seize control of the servers.
2. They make note of who is an existing user and keep serving them the real PGP keys of other pre-existing users.
3. For anyone who registers after the point in time where LEO controls the servers, replace the PGP keys of sellers and also the keys of these new users with MITM key pairs.
Then when they run the site for a month as they did and they have the influx of users they got from AlphaBay, they will have plenty of evidence on all of the sellers that are active during that period of time due to there being so many new users all of whom you are MITMing, regardless of whether the sellers are new or old because the old sellers are also being MITMed in all exchanges they have with new users.
The sellers were the primary target of interest, so the LEO got what they wanted.
All of what I said is just something they could have done though. Not saying that it's what they actually did.
Of course, I know nothing and have just heard of either of those sites this morning.
In short, I doubt the police did this kind of thing because they risked blowing their cover for the sake of getting some buyers' addresses.
Also, these sites tend to have a big button labelled 'encrypt my message' - which ostensibly does all the PGP for you. I'd guess that most people are lazy and just press this instead of running PGP/GPG manually. It would be trivial for the police to capture the unencrypted messages just by subverting the auto-PGP.
Only send messages to vendors with known "trusted" keys and don't trust new keys? So in general, use a trusted channel for key exchange separate from the communication channel so that a MITM needs to control both channels?
Yes, this is how PGP verification is supposed to take place.
Someone sends you their public key, and then you meet them in person to verify it.
Of course, nothing stops the government from sending an agent to meet you, but it does raise the effort required to MITM substantially.
The size of the grid makes encryption work.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/07/exclusive-dutch-cops-on-...
"H: Yes, we called them “AlphaBay refugees.” It wasn’t the technical challenge that caused problems. Because this was a police operation, we wanted to keep up with the orders to see if there were any large amounts [of drugs] being ordered to one place, [so that] we could share information with our law enforcement partners internationally."
edit: I knew I saw something about this somewhere earlier today. Still, this proves nothing because it's source less.
https://www.politie.nl/en/news/2017/july/20/underground-hans... "Some 10,000 foreign addresses of Hansa Market buyers were passed on to Europol"
I thought this excerpt was interesting:
"The sale of small quantities of cannabis in coffeeshops is therefore technically an offence, but prosecution proceedings are only instituted if the operator or owner of the shop does not meet the criteria issued by the Prosecutor General:
no more than five grams per person may be sold in any one transaction and the coffeeshop is not allowed to keep more than 500 grams of cannabis in stock;
no hard drugs may be sold; drugs may not be advertised; the coffee shop must not cause any nuisance;
they are not allowed to sell alcoholic beverages; no drugs may be sold to minors (under the age of 18), nor may minors be admitted to the premises."
Could an implicated dealer use the legal defense that they were operating a coffee shop online? (Provided that they didn't sell > 5 grams of cannabis)
[1] http://www.emcdda.europa.eu//html.cfm//index5174EN.html?#
Also, it's also pretty much at the whim of the public prosecutor whether to close coffeeshops for not upholding the unrealistic 500 gram limit (for the amount of shops in densely populated areas other than Amsterdam).
Not exactly, these sites allow you to encrypt your address with the seller's public key. Of course it's possible that the site performs a man in the middle attack, but you could test for this. The big problem is that many users do not take advantage of the encryption features and send their address in clear text.
Regardless, there is inherent risk. Even with perfect encryption, as a buyer, you still have to trust a drug dealer with your mailing address. And there's no way to tell for sure that the seller isn't LE.
Then he'd track how long the package took, whether or not it was delivered normally by the postal service and even then wait a week or so and get it in the middle of the night. Nowadays they apparently just use drones instead to deliver stuff.
That's really bad, because not all countries are Holland, which is famous for its 'relaxed' attitude towards drugs in general, so some users might have their lives turned around by this - followed, arrested, jailed, extorted, etc.
http://www.sandia.gov/news/publications/labnews/articles/201...
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xz35e/us-law-enf...
http://www.coindesk.com/elliptic-partners-with-risk-controls...
Besides, it's possible that many of the users live in countries where _buying_ drugs isn't a crime, or where circumstantial evidence like this isn't enough to warrant opening an investigation. So it's possible that most of these users won't even face those repercussions.
Bad laws are usually changed because of public outrage and surprise so.......
If you know something is illegal, and it carries a fine of $1,000 and you do it, you get caught, and they fine you $1,000 you can't be like "What?! How DARE you catch me and fine me like the law says?! ARRRGH!"
Some countries execute people for drug possession alone.
Whether or not you approve of the law, you have to realise that you are putting yourself at risk if you are breaking the law.
Interpol now faces an ethical / moral / legal dilemma of how to proceed, but passing the addresses _up_ to Interpol was not a mistake.
Now, if Interpol was to share the addresses with a country which they knew had cruel and unusual punishments for the alleged crimes then _that_ would be a mistake.
For example, maybe people ordered drugs to their neighbour's address then waited for the delivery guy and intercepted the package.
In more ways than one.
What if this had been a tor website that was sharing documents proving government or police corruption? And yet somehow, the police did manage to shut it down. It goes to show that the tech needed for fully anonymous websites may not be good enough yet.
Any sufficiently anonymous website that could be used for good reasons can also be used for bad reasons. If Tor works, we have the good at the bad. If Tor doesn't work, we have neither.
The tech will never be good enough. Even if we had magic unexploitable webapps hosted in the platonic realm of pure forms whose privacy is protected by magic cryptography, darknet markets would still get busted. Darknet markets require support staff, managers and engineers to run the site. The humans who run such sites will always be exploitable.
When we call it parallel construction we buy into the surveillance communities marketing... that surveillance it is effective.
For example, a vendor was recently caught because of the packaging they used when posting drugs: http://www.k5thehometeam.com/story/35528504/affidavit-reveal...
The question is how to put them in a cell to begin with, but I don't think that it requires some super high tech or shady wiretapping. The publicly known lawful interception laws are most likely good enough for finding almost anyone accessing a know site.
As the current situation is in regards to islamistic terrorism in Europe, I really expect the law to be used to its full extent.
Unfortunately, the harsh stand on drugs play both criminal organizations and islamists in hand as they can make good money on even relatively harmless drugs. I'd prefer a legalization and regulation on those, in order to decapitate the black market.
So, basically, they took down a minor competitor to the bigger drug trafficking businesses.
"New registrations are disabled because of high demand caused by the exodus from AlphaBay"
https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow-to-...
Entrapment requires the cops to push someone into doing something they wouldn't otherwise have done.
Cops buying drugs from a dealer isn't entrapment, but repeatedly begging someone to sell you some drugs after they initially say no would be.
Given that Richard Bates faced prosecution for working on the code of the original Silk Road, this could result in very, very bad repercussions.
GitHub would very likely be raided, and anyone who committed to or forked the repo could be prosecuted. I don't think anyone wants that to happen. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub will update their TOS to ban this kind of software before anyone gets prosecuted in order to prevent themselves from being raided.
There's obviously gradient, because on one side you have Richard Bates and on the other side you have the people who work on Tor. I think that writing a generic "white label anonymous storefront" is much closer to the Tor side than the Silk Road side.
So admins of the other markets: always have a dead-mans switch.
Of course, failing to disclose the switch to the authorities and thus allowing it to trigger could be considered a violation of a court order and lead to punishment.
X'D
Black market operators are unlikely to be willing to take this risk for the sake of their customers, but political activists/dissidents might for the sake of their audience.
A dead man's switch can't wipe the server and all backups, imaging the machine is the first thing one does (before e.g. attempting to log in); the only thing that may vary if you dump the machine with or without turning it off, e.g. getting a memory image by direct hardware access of a live system or imaging disks (and possibly RAM as well, the chips can be read if they're cooled and re-inserted quickly) after cutting the power.
In another hypothetical, I wonder if one can give one's lawyer the (password-protected) decryption key, and he can only release it when one signs a letter saying "I hereby request the keys under my own will with no duress.". If the cops are making him hand over the keys, the lawyer knows that's bullshit and can't legally be allowed to handover said key...
Add in some server wipe jobs, and maybe add some kind of man in the middle payload modifications as well, and you could keep some computer forensics techs scrambling to try to find it all. It'd be a pain to maintain it all, and it'd probably be the operator in the end who compromised everything, but it could be done.
The police have these people in physical custody. Why would they take a fall for their (also criminal) customers? There is nothing to gain but much to loose.
PS: If there is not enough evidence for prosecution, having a dead man's switch would be incredibly stupid. It announces to everyone "You got the right guys. Keep digging for evidence"
Actually, having the DB and all important files encrypted would be a better negotiating position for the admin. If the police catch the Admin and also get the DB and important files unencrypted, what is the admins negotiating position? They have the Admin and the important files.
In a perfect world, for the police, they want both, but a second best choice would be having the DB and important files with some jail time for the Admin. If I was the Admin I would give the police a choice, you can get me or can get me with reduced jail time and the DB and important file. You can get the conviction for the Admin and the buyers of the drugs too or Life for the Admin and let thousands of buyers and seller go free. Encrypted files would put the Admin in a great position.
Make the killswitch physical, an attempt to open a server physically destroys it.
This appears to work for carding rings that operate in the clear
An example, an admin could have a personal password that is used to update a secure hash of "last known time the market was not compromised". The users can use the public key to verify the markers. Every day or two, the admin updates that marker using the private key (password). A few days after they're arrested, they won't have updated it, the users will know something is up.
In the right set of circumstances you would be compelled to hand over any keys (with their passphrase) in an investigation like this, and failure to do so would result in harsher penalties.
People are the weak link here.
You can often be forced to unlock encrypted data as part of evidence gathering, but there's no legal power to make you conduct arbitrary processes which only exist in your head.
The police relied on opsec faulires, not technical measures to capture them.
Well, it would work for people who build Tor sites for moral/ethical purposes
You seriously have to be a moron to host your DNM in Canada or NL though, NL LE especially has many years of experience and millions worth of equipment for these investigations. Pick a place where they're less likely to have advanced DMA equipment handy! Even better though, is to choose a place where the FBI won't be able to fly a team with advanced DMA equipment.
In fact, I wouldn't be too shocked if the rather sophisticated wiretap gear the Dutch police have at AMS-IX was capable of identifying hidden sites with timing attacks.
Supposedly this was posted on Hansa forums by the staff in the middle of the takedown http://i.imgur.com/yowD1Vr.png
Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers?
Maybe some smaller African nations? Botswana? Mali? Burkina Faso? Togo? But what's the state of 'net connectivity there? Is sufficient bandwidth available? Are there colo centers or hosting providers there? I honestly don't know...
Other possibilities?
Venezuela isn't a third world country. Yes, they have electricity (and it is very cheap, hence a lot of BTC mining there).
All of the Dark Net drug website busts I have seen over the last few years are because of poor coding, poor architecture, poor security and even worse OPSEC. The people who run these sites are not professionals.
I honestly don't know how that would work with getting servers to an ISP for them to rack and follow the networking instructions.
To me this paints a pretty realistic picture of how difficult it is for western LE to co-operate with Russia, it's not impossible but it certainly isn't easy. Both sides will be cherry-picking the things they share, with the Russian cops facing ever-increasing pressure from the intelligence side of things.
It's worth remembering that this story ended with Sergei Mikhailov in a Russian jail cell facing charges of treason.
No, I don't believe hosting in Russia will magically solve all of your problems. I however do believe that it'll make LE co-operation significantly more difficult, especially after the recent events.
Interesting about the Equinox DPI 'cache' too.
http://nos.nl/artikel/2181605-deze-data-blokkendozen-zorgen-... (Dutch)
Is there a bottleneck there similar to Cornwall? Spies huh!
Does this mean that the goal of the LEO was to only stop the deliveries without actually arresting the recipients? If that's true then it seems the way law enforcement works in the EU is very different than that in the US.
I may sound paranoid but I've since stopped accepting unknown packages.
It's generally used to distinguish psychological dependence and physical addiction. [1]
[0] https://www.government.nl/topics/drugs/difference-between-ha...
Also the darknet is great as it reduces the violence associated with drug crime, by taking the drugs off the streets and into the legitimate courier business. You have to love technology sometimes.
Prohibition doesn't work. It creates much more violence than it solves.
It seems that you are actually agains policing it, which is not the way forward, as there is a large amount of the population which is against drugs, and their needs need to be accounted for by the Government. So by catering for both parties (users/dealers and police), the darknet is a viable solution that helps everybody in the end (efficient purchase, efficient policing, less violence, less waste).
This bust was good because it reduced the amount of drugs being sold on dark net markets.
Dark net markets are good because they reduce the amount of drugs being sold on the street.
So which is it? Is it a good thing to take down the dark net markets or not?