A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

Promise (YC startup) was also saying that 70% of people in jails are waiting for judgement or are in for a technical violation (ex: did not show up to a hearing). And being in jails they end up losing their job, eventually they lose their house etc.

This is a space with a lot of low hanging fruits. And minor fixes may end up doing a lot of good.

    > Land of the free (as long as you are rich, that is).

Assuming random assignment/selection of the guards, each time one is chosen it has a 98% chance of not being "caught" by choosing an adversary's guard. Going with 50 services as you said would be .98^50=.364, meaning the chance of getting caught is 1-.364=.635 - 63.5%. This is vastly different than being nearly 100%.

[1]: https://blog.torproject.org/announcing-vanguards-add-onion-s...

Its 2020 now so much has to have changed. Tor sucked 7 years ago.

You can do fancy attacks all you want, if the server is in Russia they're probably not going to be honoring any MLATs

So does the guard know that it is a guard and that the traffic comes from a hidden service? I thought Tor worked by jumping from node to node, and that each node didn't know whether the traffic came from the original client/service or from another node in the chain. So each time you make a connection over Tor you're essentially telling a guard node "here's my real IP, send this traffic to this hidden service and return the response please" and you have to trust that they keep it a secret? I feel like I'm missing something here.

He said something seemed to be dos'ing the guard nodes, causing his service to automatically choose a new guard, in an attempt to get his service to connect to a guard node controlled by the adversary. He said in one case, they found his server's actual IP address and dos'd it.

Could that be what happened?

We have analyzed for those wondering!

Even when the case agents get access, policy dictates what evidence is allowed to be taken to a public trial. Otherwise you get repeats of the FBI/4chan/8chan debacle. This is especially true for legal "grey areas" like mass surveillance. This means that agents will often get evidence they won't use in order to guide active surveillance using more legal means in order to collect evidence they feel comfortable admitting in public court.

A Wired article on it:

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/

Slides:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140413004837/http://cryptome.o...

A breakdown of the malware:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140417081750/http://ghowen.me/...

Imagine all of the criminals out there who are running operations so well oiled that they leave little exposure for being caught.

Didn't help Ross. It's a bad idea to do illegal stuff in public.

The internet is designed to send data from point A to point B. Keeping point A and point B truly anonymous means that the internet won't work.

Tools like Tor don't really protect you, it's more like they make it hard enough to figure out who you are that only people with strong incentives will track you down.

This is completely the wrong way to think about it. Remember the Defender's Dilemma: to run an illegal business like this, your opsec needs to be perfect: every single possible channel of information leakage (including the "unknown unknowns"), every minute, every hour, every day, forever. You need to be lucky every time, the feds only need to be lucky once.

When you focus on the specific mistakes that people made and thus call them "sloppy", you're missing all the things they did right; you might not have made those mistakes if you were in their position, but you would've made different mistakes.

One can argue that he had to know about it, perhaps so, but the way he's being portrayed by LE and media is as if he was the kingpin of child porn. That's far from the truth. Freedom host served half of the Tor network, including perfectly legitimate services like Tormail, wikis etc.

I think his mistake in not cloaking the identity used to purchase servers can be explained this way: He was never planning to host CP starting out (or do anything else illegal for that matter). He probably thought universally recognized no-liability laws would apply to Freedom Host just as any other hosting business. Perhaps he later went down a darker path, but at that point it was too late.

The fact that he now pleads guilty means absolutely nothing however. Remember, he was extradited from his country to USA, and while he should never have been sent there, he now have to adapt to the way the "justice system" works over there and it works kind of like this: 5000 years in jail or take a plea deal and get away with 15-30 years. Even if he is innocent, you need to realize that when you're facing a kangaroo court and subsequent rotting away in jail for life it might be better to pick the lesser evil.

Sure, this works for torrenting TV shows. If you are the number one peddler of child porn on the planet however, this won't help you for very long. The FBI (or whatever national police force is trying to find you) will just go to the access point, realize you're connected remotely and triangulate your position with (essentially) some signal-strength meters in much the same way the FCC tracks down particularly disruptive unlicensed broadcasters.

Should the government prove that it followed the law when investigating a criminal? Did they obtain the proper warrants that people recognize preserve stable law and order?

It's unreasonable to assume that the vulnerability, that brought this case to justice, is the last one that could ever be used. More so, if you assume that most people are good and a healthy society needs privacy, we now know that there is a vulnerability that will affect more good people than bad and we are duty bound to protect good people's privacy.

Checks on the government's power aren't there to let 'bad people' go free, there there because we know if we let the government's power reign free, more good people will be hurt than the few 'bad people' we punish.

By that logic, the government shouldn't ever have to describe its investigative methods and prove they both comport with the law and accepted science because if their investigative methods are known then criminals benefit.

In reality I realized that this has always been the case in the last 100 years.

That same logic applies to any sort of forensic technique, but it's a basic precept of the US justice system that an accused can see and respond to the evidence against them, including questioning the scientific validity of how that evidence was gathered.

Just because a technique is "cyber" doesn't mean an accused magically doesn't have a right to know the chain of custody, techniques used etc.

Just assume any one of their servers were vulnerable to RCE attacks, they hosted dynamic web sites on conventional web hosting stacks! These things leak deanonymizing information like a sieve.