Millions of people use dark net marketplaces. The war on drugs has fueled their growth and more serious crimes like identity theft have benefited from it.
well, that's what the end user sees, but we can't pretend to know what happens behind the scenes from a data perspective, and how that data might be used in the future.
> They require a court order to open your package and even then can’t charge anyone with possession.
this is not true. only first-class mail (13oz and under) is subject to any fourth amendment protections at all,[1] and your mail can be opened without warrant if it comes from overseas.[2] USPS can also x-ray and use other imaging techniques on whatever they want, they even describe it as a best practice.[3]
this isn't to say dead drops are a better idea; there are plenty of reasons not to go that route as well.
1. https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/contactUs/faq.aspx
2. https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/114
3. https://about.usps.com/securing-the-mail/best-practices.htm
Whoa, that's news to me. I didn't realize that any class of mail besides First class is considered to not contain private correspondence.
Orders over 13 oz could simply be split into multiple sub-13 oz shipments, although then that means a possible increased risk of detecting a package.
Imagine a world where criminal gangs don't have access to the money they make through drugs and a government that doesn't have to spend huge amount of money on drug laws enforcement because drug trafficking would be much less lucrative in the existence of legal access and you get fewer and very cash-strapped drug gangs, and government making money from taxing drugs.
Surely such massive savings and earnings can be spent to help problem users and reduce violence, no?
I agree with your sentiment but I find it odd that you think judges are the worst. Of all the people in the system judges are probably the least worst because they don't have as many incentives to do things that are bad for society but good for them personally the way all the other actors do (i.e. they do not directly benefit from the war on drugs).
The bad incentive for judges seems to be that most of them have a desire to not rock the boat too much which is pretty benign compared to all the other actors who go out of their way to perpetuate and further the status quo because they materially benefit from it.
I find it hard to fault the judges for apathetically presiding over a flawed system when every other group you mentioned is doubling down to further that system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_comp...
But unlike say murder, "identity theft" isn't some serious crime - it's in the same basket as "war on drugs" in that they both attempt to fortify a nonsensical top-down design at odds with the underlying reality. It's arbitrage against a broken authorization paradigm, and will continue as long as banks (et al) choose to just bear the cost rather than actually fix their systems.
The ways to fix it are numerous, but most of them would involve a widely used national identity card that's actually designed for identification (as opposed to social security numbers which were never meant to be used like this). Alternatively have the banks pay fines for each instance of "identity theft" they suffer, and watch how they figure out better ways to identify people (probably verifying them in person).
I've done some research around social engineering and the no. 1 thing that stopped us from getting into bank accounts etc. was that to do anything remotely dangerous, you had to present your ID card. Even if you got your hands on someone's IBAN, name, address, bday and national ID number - no card, no deal.
It's not impossible to get fake IDs, but it's a significant investment to do so, which stops the kind of drive-by identity theft I read about from the states.
The real legislation that is needed is to statutorily shore up the banks' liability for the damage their negligence causes. A person that has to deal with fall out from a bank being defrauded (eg repudiating that bank's and surveillance bureaus' libel) should receive a decent hourly wage in liquidated damages.
But while I agree that tech alone wouldn't fix much, using a single number (with no biometrics whatsoever) for identification is just asking for trouble. Even my bus pass has my picture on it!
The real problem in the US is that for any newly proposed identity system, any protections that keep the private sector from hooking into it for their own commercial surveillance will get scrapped due to lobbying. At the present, even social security and license plates are just basic government mandates, but form a foundation for unrestrained commercial actors to implement totalitarian surveillance.
So given that, the sensible freedom-preserving USian position is to be against any new identity systems until some laws have actually been passed to prohibit abuses of the current ones.
And that's generally the best case. Name, state, and birthday are considered unique in a terrifying number of settings, including traffic stops, DMV records, and voter registrations. It's baffling to me that a police officer can 'run a license' and act on the results without making use of the unique ID already provided on the license, but it apparently happens.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...
For example, if you have a bank account at a brick-and-mortar bank (and haven't setup online access), anybody can obtain online access to that account by going to the bank's website and entering your name, social security number, and maybe the recent account balance. This is in fact the exact process a bank rep does when you open a new account if they setup that access for you, or sometimes they even tell you to go home and do this yourself! Similarly, if you forget your online banking password, you can reset it entirely online with access to your email account, making your email account more trusted than the bank account!
In actuality, your being in the bank in person is the primary trust relationship, and that needs to be leveraged for the above scenarios. So online access should only ever be setup in a branch, and perhaps password resets should even require going down there as well.
(Obviously this is just an example and does not also apply to online-only banks. As I said, the key is to stop treating quasi-public information as a shared secret)
Millions of people know this and routinely check them for good deals, the propaganda machine has failed to make them "scary"
cheaper than listing on ebay.
Its just cheaper mate
All DNMs offer an expanded audience and borderless payment system that wont freeze your account
That's a pretty big number, would be curious if based on anything more than a guess.
sometimes they even list! lower fees than Ebay. Maybe Ebay and Amazon write those Ask Reddit posts about the "scariest thing you've seen on the dark web" to perpetuate that its scary.