German police take down 'world's largest darknet marketplace'
barrons.com
barrons.com
Probably legalizing weed would stop most of that more effectively than all those police operations after month of preparation.
They'd have to legalize all the club/party drugs to make a dent; pills and powders, lsd.
As a German, I can, with no problem whatsoever, go into the next supermarket and buy enough alcohol and cigarettes to severly hurt myself. No one gives a shit, probably because the state earns money when I do so.
Either we find (all) drugs bad, or we stop being such liars in regards to this.
Weed is considered less of a problem by the scientific community.
The logical conclusion: Increase taxes on alcohol and legalize weed.
--
Can you really say in good conscience that other drugs wouldn't be worse if they became equally ubiquitous?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210
A UK study led by a panel of experts analyzed a number of recreational drugs and evaluated them across 16 different criteria.
Alcohol was one of the most dangerous drugs and was unique in that it was the only drug that posed more risk to society than it did for the actual user.
This is of course, not definitive proof of the parents assertions but the findings do lend evidence to it.
Knowing and doing are two different things. Yes, you'd get fewer accidental overdoses from people getting stronger stuff than they thought. But you'd get more (possibly a lot more) people overdosing from chasing a high despite having built a tolerance, or from doing crazy shit while high, and drug psychoses.
> Having drugs being illegal make them stronger, as they have to be transported in secret, and create derivative drugs to fill lower price ranges for long term addicts, such as crack and oxy.
And with full legalization, you'd have billions of advertizing dollars invested into marketing and research departments by companies trying to convince people to get high from their brand.
Remember, I am not arguing for the status quo or against some degree of decriminalization. I am arguing that the larger observed harm caused by alcohol is not useful evidence that illegal drugs are inherently less dangerous than alcohol.
I'm sure that in general people on weed, shrooms, DMT or MDMA are much much less prone to violent aggression and destructive behaviour than drunk people. I'm also sure all of these but the last do much less (if any) harm to your health than alcohol does.
The only drugs I know which can be considered as or more dangerous than alcohol are opioids (except kratom - it's considered opioid but is harmless unless you consume huge amounts regularly for too long), cocaine (if taken chronically), meth (if abused, can change life for good if used properly to treat severe ADHD cases) and bromo-dragonfly. LSD probably is dangerous for people who are borderline crazy - psychos may become more violent after taking it.
Generally, though, you're kind of on the right track. Alcohol is the absolute worst. I might also add to the conversation that making something illegal doesn't reduce it's use.
IIRC it permanently increases the big-5 personality trait Openness
[1] https://transformdrugs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/CTC-Ec...
Wow, you're not using your imagination well enough to recognize how ubiquitously widespread opioid addiction would be were it integrated into our coffee, soft-drinks, an aperatif with dinner etc.. It would be a massive, ongoing public health crisis.
Combined with the fact that the effect quickly erodes, that users want ever more aggressive substitutes like Fentanyl, it almost guarantees the inevitable OD.
Blaming the 'harm' on systems literally trying to stop the promulgation of what arguably is actually poison ... is a leap in logic.
Tobacco is similarly additive, but it obviously has a completely different set of health effects.
Finally - if Tobacco is really in the same category of addictivity, then ironically, you've made an argument that we really should shut down the opioid industry hard, because while quitting smoking is difficult, it's not existentially hard and the resulting withdrawal does not require medical attention or anything on the scale of 'Trainspotting withdrawal'.
An acquaintance in Prison indicated they call the heroin addicts zombies, because they bang on the doors and yell 3 times a day as they receive their poison, which is slowly killing them. I'd argue that incarcerating people and slowly killing them is a strange punishment for those wanting to 'reduce harm' whereupon the logical thing for their health would be to make sure they had absolutely no access and an opportunity to dry out. I hope that in 50 year we look back on 'free heroin' like lobotomies or shock therapy.
Humans have some control of our faculties and must overcome impulses of all kind - facilitating the total degradation of that control system by administering poison is definitely a form of torture. I'd rather be waterboarded.
That would never happen. People literally wouldn't buy the products enmass because they don't want to sit around drooping all day.
> Finally - if Tobacco is really in the same category of addictivity, then ironically, you've made an argument that we really should shut down the opioid industry hard, because while quitting smoking is difficult, it's not existentially hard and the resulting withdrawal does not require medical attention or anything on the scale of 'Trainspotting withdrawal'.
Everyone seems to be thinking about how bad the withdrawal is and not how long the addiction lasts. The addiction to heroin and many other substances is over in days and weeks. Tobacco as any former smoker who has successful quit will tell you, you have cravings for months, not constant but enough that it's a thing for quite a while.
> An acquaintance in Prison indicated they call the heroin addicts zombies, because they bang on the doors and yell 3 times a day as they receive their poison, which is slowly killing them. I'd argue that incarcerating people and slowly killing them is a strange punishment for those wanting to 'reduce harm' whereupon the logical thing for their health would be to make sure they had absolutely no access and an opportunity to dry out. I hope that in 50 year we look back on 'free heroin' like lobotomies or shock therapy.
You should look into how Portugal has dealt with the drug problem. The free heroin isn't the issue, it's the lack of other support systems to get them off the heroin. Prison is not a place for support.
No.
> Lots of the harm comes from the fact they're not legal and cheaply available.
I fully agree with this.
> For example, heroin, I would say nearly all the harm comes from the fact it's not legal. Overdoses are prevented because they can happen in safe places where people will notice.
Even if that is true, the harm that does not come from the fact that it's illegal would be magnified a hundredfold if it became as widespread as alcohol (which is, please keep that in mind, the scenario I was talking about). That's not hyperbole: Accodding to the European Drug Report 2018 (https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/8585/...), the prevalence of injecting drugs (chiefly heroin) is between 0 and 0.9%, which consumption of alcohol is pretty damn near 100%.
> Considering tobacco is more addictive, and we have way less crime to buy tobacco, it seems logical to assume crime would drop if drug addicts didn't have to spend 20-30 a day on drugs. Then you have the violence and anti-social behaviour which for most drugs is non-existent.
Even if that is not exaggerated (which I strongly supect it is), those are not the only kinds of harm: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/hero...
> Overdoses are prevented because they can happen in safe places where people will notice
what kind of places? If you become so addicted that overdose is likely, where would you be welcome? Making something illegal doesn't mean it automatically becomes socially acceptable; piss-stained street drunks don't attract lots of caretakers.
It feels like your assuming that people will be able to manage their addictions, and remain functional - I'm not sure this is realistic. Even mildly addictive substances can really wreck peoples ability to function.
Can you provide a source that suggests: "tobacco is more addictive [than heroin]"?
But it's a bit of an outlier in that regard, among illegal drugs.
That is in itself an extremely bad faith statement.
> Just look at relative harm numbers, the stats (especially at something like the EU level) are available publicly.
Yes, look at them. They do not support your statement because you are asserting that the corellation is basically linear, but I was talking about an (entirely hypothetical) scenario that is completely outside the data, namely full legalization.
No EU state has legalized heroin or cocaine. The poster boy for decriminalization is Portugal, but they haven't even legalized use, let alone production or distribution. They have merely turned use into an administrative offense rather than a criminal one and are providing a lot of harm-reduction services.
There is a huge difference between that and full legalization where big business spends billions on advertising to market addictive substances - which is the situation we have with alcohol that leads to a lot of harm.
In 2001, Portugal became the first European country to abolish all criminal penalties for personal drug possession
Which is what I meant with "not fully decriminalized".
If you make something easier to access - either by reduced price, more contact, reduced social stigma - people will consume more of it, straight up.
Think of it like a social disease that has an R0/R1 that communicates itself much like COVID.
Kids how absolutely don't know anyone who's ever done Heroin, are unlikely to ever even have the thought, let alone, try to find out 'where on earth' to buy.
If you have a group of 3 kids in school who are starting to use, the likelihood that they 'infect' other students is very high.
We force people to isolate and take certain precautions when they threaten the community with COVID, why on earth we wouldn't do the same with heroin addiction?
And of course, it's not illegal to 'have' COVID and we are sympathetic to those that have it, so there's that as well ...
That is a very ridiculously wrong statement.
> Despite being illegal they are still so very easy to access in almost all countries
You apparently have a pretty wide definition of "Very easy". I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to lay my hands on some heroin. Yes, I might start asking around in the vicinity of nightclubs based on hearsay that party drugs are supposedly sold there and the dealers might know someone who sells heroin. That would require navigating some scary situations quite outside my comfort zone. That's a completely different level of availability than alcohol, of which there are shelves full in every supermarket and ads plastered all over telling me how it will make me hip and attractive.
> Legalising them would bring users/abusers into a more public sphere where it is far easier to access harm reduction and the state can provide it without legal complications
You don't need legalization for that, merely decriminalization of use and possession.
access isn't the only issue. There is a high risk with obtaining and possessing an illegal drug.
plus there's no guarantee anything you obtain is safe (mixed with shit) or the correct strength, so there's further risk in putting it in your veins.
https://amp.reddit.com/r/tooktoomuch/comments/kjnisn/going_t...
Illegal production of homebrewn alcohol is a thing and has been for centuries. Raising taxes at will does not mean that everyone will, unhappily, continue to buy expensive alcohol in the store. There is a limit after which people will start to produce their own moonshine, which is less safe than whatever you buy legally. Or start drinking various chemicals that resemble alcohol. (Window cleaner is a big hit.)
The problems with War on Drugs translate neatly to any possible War on Alcohol as well: the black market will kick in once it has a good business case to exist, and all sort of problems will come with its emergence.
I think this is similar to some UX patterns we see in software: most people will go with the default option because it is easier. Raising the amount of effort needed for something means fewer people will end up doing it.
Nordic countries: https://www.statista.com/statistics/693505/per-capita-consum...
Great success?
1. People there still buy a lot, even at expensive prices.
2. I have never seen so much heavy consumption and problems in Southern Europe than what I saw living in Finland.
3. I had never seen people brewing their own wine in their flat in my country (not counting real wine in farms when I was a kid, of course). Youngsters wouldn't even use berries like their elders, but just sugar & yeast (bearing the suiting name of 'kilju').
4. You could sometimes illicitly buy moonshine alcohol from a car trunk on a car park, in plastic water bottles. Classy.
5. Anecdote: I remember vodka was smuggled from Russia in timber lorries (trunks were hollowed out and filled with bottles) :-D
Maybe it is in the wine vs. vodka difference; vodka, being much more concentrated, will wreak havoc on internal organs sooner. Including brain and liver.
There were some additional effects to this as well. Food is also cheaper in Latvia. Some people ended up doing a lot of their grocery shopping in Latvia as, because they were already there for be alcohol.
Politically, the Social Democrats got most of the blame for the tax increase. They had a large drop in votes in the most recent parliamentary election.
Seems like people in Nordic countries (especially when not considering Denmark) consume less alcohol than their neighbours, although the difference has been decreasing.
The wealthy won't be concerned if they're spending twice as much on booze, as it's such a small fraction of their income. But the working class may be denied one of their few pleasures - even if they were perfectly capable of keeping their consumption at reasonably healthy level.
Even worse than taxing alcohol is trying reduce car use by taxing people off the roads (without significantly improving alternatives). That's taking away vast numbers of opportunities from those who need them the most.
As much as I enjoy my beer every other day it's crazy. Double that and pay for rehab/hospital costs with that money.
If taxes were really high, I suspect that home brewing would be become far more popular, too.
You can read about the taxation and the effects of a tax cut in this paper from 2018, https://www.alko.fi/INTERSHOP/static/WFS/Alko-OnlineShop-Sit...
Everclear already exists. Not going to get much cheaper than that w/regards to diluting it in fruit juice or whatever else.
40's also quite affordably exist.
And still let people do drugs if they want;
I would expect weed to be the same. As such, I don't just want to know the net negative effect, I also want to know the distribution. AFAIK weed can agitate certain mental conditions - the average joe can enjoy weed, just the expense of a minority losing their mind. I might not find that acceptable.
There's also an argument that society should seek to decrease chemical over-indulgence in general, including alcohol, and maybe fat/sugar too; legalising another drug just increases the battlefront perimeter.
Like for alcohol, I doubt that would work. Some substances are simply hard to use responsibly, some offer unique ways of escapism (especially during a lockdown), many people lack restraint. I don’t imagine the number of people dependent on substances would go down, it would probably just diversify. In the end, I think it’s very hard to predict societal outcome of such a big decision. To name a few – confused parents, drug tourism, self-medication instead of going to doctors.
In any case, we don’t have to go fully legal-as-broccoli drugs. We could start by decriminalization for well-defined amounts, by legalizing drug checking, by educating instead of fearmongering. But since we replaced the worst imaginable state representative for drugs with the second worst imaginable state representative for drugs, I doubt anything will happen here soon.
| Either we find (all) drugs bad, or we stop being such liars in regards to this.
It’s not that people are liars, most just don’t know that alcohol is among the hardest drugs out there, and fear the unknown.
Despite this, and a social culture that revolves around drinking, the vast majority manage to avoid serious alcohol problems.
This essentially shows how responsible people are - even with a culture that makes it very easy to start, and very difficult to quit, most people manage to maintain a reasonable distance from an extremely addictive drug.
If you follow this argument along, I think if you legalized drugs, but also put some restrictions on their use (for instance, not allowing supermarkets to sell them, not allowing child-branded stuff, etc) - there's no reason to imagine the situation would not improve vis-a-vis the current one.
All this said, my preferred drug policy (for all drugs, including alcohol) would be something like a ban on their public use and sale. As somebody who used to take a lot of drugs, I have no illusions about the destabilizing influence they can have on people's lives. Alcohol is well known for being a force multiplier for pre-existing misery or mental instabillity, and I think even mild drugs, like weed, work in the same way.
That's a bit shortsighted though. Because if you end up in the hospital or with lung cancer, you will cost the public insurance lots of money.
What they found was that smokers, on average, died early so they collected a decade or two less in pension payments. They paid tens of thousands in tobacco taxes. And when they did die, it was relatively quick and not that expensive to treat (chemotherapy). Overall, smokers were a net benefit to society.
That equation might have changed today with expensive lung cancer drugs and longer life.
I do not KNOW this to be the correct I am simply asking you to consider that it could be the case that some drugs are more dangerous to people/society than others.
I do however agree that alcohol is likely extremely bad for people/societies but its sort of a cat that can't be put back in the bag as the USA showed. It escaped thousands of years ago.
Not really a recreational drug, but for instance paracetamol is mostly free of access while having a potential for severe damage on overuse, and it kinda works thanks to having someone hand over the goods with a kind warning (and not being able to buy it willy-nilly at night when you're drunk for instance)
When you look at something like Meth, you may not realize it's a schedule 2 drug in the US (so are cocaine, and pcp). While weed is a schedule 1.
We really need to look at how this scheduling works, and consider lowering the bar for certain substances, and raising it for other.
In the US methamphetamines are already available legally as Desoxyn.
Criminalization can work. Portugal decriminalized in 2001 and overdose deaths dropped 80%. People weren't as afraid to get help.
What we need to decouple are costs on society for people that decide to endanger themselves by shifting socialised health care to a voluntary basis.
Same logic as... "let us not legally force face masks on people, but trust in their responsibility. Let us not control social distancing, but trust that people, especially young people, will be responsible"
... booooom, over 9000 covid cases.
Democracy assumes rational people and people with responsibility. We see now how well it all works.
Same "responsibility" applies to the free internet. It is amazing, when people are responsible and are not pushing fake news to allow demagogues and populists to rise to power.
Was it Sokrates who once said that Democracy fails because of Unmündigkeit?
I cannot find the English translation of this word.
Now, banning smoking in public, that I can get behind. I don't want none of that nasty second-hand smoke.
I do not want to finance health insurance for drug addicts, for example. And yes, I agree, also smoking should be banned and the health insurance limited.
Sorry, but not sorry for having a conservative stand. You _must_ accept my opinion instead of downvoting... I thought that Pluralism of Opinions is a valued concept in democracies...
I do not want to finance health insurance for you. But I have a healthy understanding of risk sharing and know I am better off with more people, yourself included, in my risk pool, than with less.
Rehabilitation of drug addicts is, iirc, cheaper than the policing and economic (inc. opportunity) costs they tend to otherwise cause. The health insurance system can't natively deal with this kind of thing, but a decent healthcare system supporting drug addicts would cost you less.
Also, I do not have to accept your opinion. Not every opinion is valid nor should every opinion be considered. For example, I can ignore anti-vaccine sentiments, white nationalism, and serious flat earth bs without investigating further.
That's got nothing to do with whether people are in a Democracy at all. It's not even to do with whether the society is individualistic or collectivist. It's more to do populist messaging and how they are spread.
... booooom, millions of people dead.
... or we could look at countries that did indeed legalize drug use completely and are successful with it.
I can only agree on this.
Sure different parts of Germany differ in their handling of weed but I don't think anyone in Berlin bothers buying weeds from the dark web. I mean it's just way to easy to get weed from other sources, which don't require any online payment and by asking frequent weed consumers in your environment you have a better shot at getting good quality weed.
But while this is the case for weed it's much less so for other drugs, mainly due to the police being very lax on weed but less so on many other drugs.
Cocaine trafficking is (unfortunately) a very murderous industry. Legalizing that alone would probably save thousands of lives every year.
[0] https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/13042...
Agree on the legalisation though. In the Netherlands at least, I find it hard to name more than a few individuals in my social group (university students from a range of studies) that aren’t recreational users of XTC/psychedelics. Having visited festivals and clubs in other European countries, I think the situation is not much different there.
It seems a bit pointless to keep spending money on hunting these markets when the market consists of such a large percentage of the population. Most people still get it through dealers aswell, delivery is quicker than ordering pizza.
More concerning are obviously the weapons, credit cards, etc. sold on these markets. Taking away the sales of drugs would probably help in that fight.
We won't stop drugs because people don't want to.
This isn't the case, it's been a loong time since the last big market takedown. LE takedowns are rare, exit scams are not.
If they're not selling guns, child abuse imagery or other extreme stuff maybe treat it as a source of intelligence rather than keep playing whack a mole?
Weed is extremely difficult to send by mail, relative to most other drugs. It's large in volume, and it produces a distinct smell. You can combat that, but it's a pain, and I'm not sure how effective it is.
Compared to something like LSD, which you could easily slip into the pages of a book, and produces no recognizable smell. At least on the human spectrum, and I severely doubt drug dogs can smell it.
Most of the weed vendors aren’t shipping internationally so they don’t need to worry about dogs.
Antibiotics are an obvious one. Antibiotic resistance is a real, and growing, issue. If people start popping them every time they get a sniffle, that's going to get a lot worse.
Some medications have very serious side effects, and a doctor really should vet that you're healthy enough to withstand those.
Some medications can have very severe interactions. Part of the prescription process is that their computer is supposed to alert the pharmacist if some combination of the meds you're on creates an issue.
Honestly, those few categories knock out most of the useful medications. Mental health drugs are generally safe, but self-medication isn't usually effective in those scenarios.
So pharmaceutical companies and other medical product manufacturers manage their risk by only selling to approved suppliers, so that they don't have people randomly putting themselves at risk using their products.
Medical products have risk assessments a mile long for every scenario the manufacture can think of, and the mitigation for being administered on the wrong patient is often "Don't sell to non ISO-13485 approved clients"
If enough people get injured because of your product, the FDA or MHRA is going to investigate you, no matter how many disclaimers you put on your products.
So even if legalising it would make those markets lose profits, they still have a lot of nasty things to sell -- so taking them down is still the best thing to do for the moment, IMHO.
Further, the costs of these LE operations is very high to catch some small fries. These are extremely counterproductive.
I think that's the point. As far as I understand their reasoning (although I don't agree with it), is that some people buy drugs when they are easily accessible over the internet, but wouldn't do so if they have to meet risky people in person AFK. Of course, people who want drugs will get drugs, somehow, and if it's safer, that'd be better. But they want people to move into the riskier meat-space as it's easier to keep track on people and eventually arrest them then.
People need promotion.
This article says that police called their operation "Operation DisrupTor" in 2019....
edits: https://matt.traudt.xyz/posts/tracking-tors-network-wide-v3-... suggests that it wasnt an attack although was written before the news.
https://twitter.com/SttyK/status/1349034993893265408
https://twitter.com/5auth/status/1349358474476613633
https://twitter.com/SttyK/status/1349261670477045760
The owners previous identity was known for a long time on Dread (.onion reddit clone)
An attacker would (1) send much more traffic to dirauths or find an easier/better way to disrupt the dirauths' voting, and (2) ignore the fallback dirs.
(Author of the matt.traudt.xyz post)
This one seems to have decent volume by BTC and other crypto, but it's not really anything earth-shattering.
In the scheme of things, I don't see there being any major ground made in preventing people from selling dope online. It's nearly trivial to ship it anonymously and it's nearly trivial to package it and sanitize it and aside from taking the time to scan and inspect every single piece of mail, people are going to continue to want to buy drugs online.
You talk a big game, but I don't think you understand the reality for people who are involved and get caught. Let me know when one of your closest friends gets arrested by the Feds and you don't get to see them for a decade plus.
> Let me know when one of your closest friends gets arrested by the Feds and you don't get to see them for a decade plus.*
Which seems like an argument in support of GP. If we didn't make these illegal, which then increases prices and danger (only the most ruthless survive), which in turn incentivizes one of your closest friends to take the risk by getting involved in the supply side, then you wouldn't have to worry about "your closest friends gets arrested by the Feds and you don't get to see them for a decade plus."
If you're talking about demand side (i.e. your friend is a user), banning the markets won't address that problem. Sure it impacts demand, but it will never eliminate it and it only makes those sucked in all the more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, and unable to get help from law enforcement since they are committing crimes (this is the identical problem that sex workers with abusive jons and/or "pimps" often have as well).
I intended to call out the folly of their idealism - "the war cannot be won" - the Feds don't have to win a war. Every battle they win destroys the lives of the people foolish enough to be involved. Once you're in their sights it's only a matter of time before you slip up and then you're done.
That's the total from 1-2 years (I can't find when in 2019 did they start). If that's the biggest right now, I'm surprised how small the markets are.
"servers" is not a useful metric.
"""
Now, goods are hidden in publicly accessible places like parks and the location is given to the customer on purchase. The customer then goes to the location and picks up the goods. This means that delivery becomes asynchronous for the merchant, he can hide a lot of product in different locations for future, not yet known, purchases. For the client the time to delivery is significantly shorter than waiting for a letter or parcel shipped by traditional means - he has the product in his hands in a matter of hours instead of days. Furthermore this method does not require for the customer to give any personally identifiable information to the merchant, which in turn doesn’t have to safeguard it anymore. Less data means less risk for everyone.
The use of dead drops also significantly reduces the risk of the merchant to be discovered by tracking within the postal system. He does not have to visit any easily to surveil post office or letter box, instead the whole public space becomes his hiding territory.
...
To prevent theft by the distribution layer, the sales layer randomly tests dead drops by tasking different members of the distribution layer with picking up product from a dead drop and hiding it somewhere else, after verification of the contents. Usually each unit of product is tagged with a piece of paper containing a unique secret word which is used to prove to the sales layer that a dead drop was found.
"""
It's worth reading the entire article for more detail, the business model is quite clever.
Your customers are limited to your immediate geographic area and those who are willing to search for their purchases. The use of cryptocurrency to make purchases is a pretty big barrier for most people and reducing your customer base even further seems like it would make the whole operation uneconomical.
Paradoxically, the purchases should be inconspicuous yet easy to find. The mention of using Bluetooth and WiFi to help guide your customers would help, but at some point you have people out in public (presumably they’re in public because private locations provide even more obstacles) looking for hidden objects. That in itself is pretty conspicuous, even with the greater public knowledge of things like geocaching and Pokémon go (your customers also risk being engaged by those people). Additionally, placing and maintaining your drop locations is conspicuous. All it takes is one person seeing you leaving an object for the bomb squad to get called in.
The idea that a seller could place multiple orders ahead of time and then activate them as required seems odd as well. Your customers are going to have to be okay with buying drugs that could be degraded from being exposed to environmental conditions if the drops are outside (placing them inside of buildings exposes both you and your customers to more scrutiny). Likewise, leaving them for extended periods of time makes it more likely for them to be discovered. You’re also limited by what you’ve previously placed. If a customer wants multiple items, they’ll have to go to multiple drop locations.
There’s also the time and expense of setting up all these drop locations. You don’t want them concentrated because that makes it more likely that your customers will be noticed, but spreading them out will reduce your profit.
Shipping through the mail obviously poses it’s own problems, but it also has a lot of advantages. Mail generally can’t be opened without a warrant, sending and receiving mail is pretty inconspicuous and it gives the buyer more plausible deniability.
The article reads more of a “maybe this is how it could be done” than a “this is how it’s actually being done”.
- How is collection of the product verified. In other words, a customer can say they went to the drop location and nothing was there. The seller has no way of knowing if the customer was lying or if the product was "intercepted" by chance or federal officials
- How can people making the drop be confident that authorities making controlled buys won't be able to trace them via CCTV (if there is a camera recording in that area, their identity can be determined) I suspect the normalization of face masks has helped make this somewhat easier to evade, but in normal times, the government could go to 100 drop zones used by the same seller, compile a list of all the people who have been seen near those zones in the last 6 months with facial recognition, then dig into people who have been seen in more than one of those zones. I assume these are obscure enough locations that random people won't find the drops, so a person appearing in more than one is enough to flag them as likely to be involved. But in the event these are just really good hiding places in more public locations, someone being near 3 or more of these locations is still enough to suggest involvement.
- Most of the risk still seems to be the buyer's burden; if a government official impersonates the seller, they can just wait for the person to show up to collect their package, and they'd be caught "red-handed" so to speak. I suppose the person can claim ignorance, but I don't know how good of a defense this would be.
- Sellers would be taking massive risks with bulk orders being found by the wrong party (I assume bulk orders are most of their profits). Additionally, they wouldn't really have the ability to tailor the amount to the customer for complicated orders
1) The article mentions the drop locations need to be places where another person stumbling upon them will be super unlikely, and which also haven't been used before (not regular, recurring locations as I assumed).
3) There is still likely a fair bit of risk to the buyer, but the writer seems to believe they can plead innocence
4) Addressed in the same as 1, and with drop locations being new every time, making more involved drops may not be as much of an issue
(2) still begs the question, people making lots of drops seem to have a lot of risk; if many controlled buys are taking place, officials can crossreference the lists of people who have been near that location. Once they identify people who make the drops they can then watch the people who are seen in many of the locations, subpoena location information from Google, etc. until they catch them in the act of making a drop or gather enough evidence to indite them. These people could then face very serious charges of conspiracy. It's not unlikely that these people could then be turned informant. Get enough surveillance on, or cooperation of the people making the drops and you can then use the same techniques to suss out the sales layer. Rinse and repeat.
I suppose this might differ worldwide, but I’m guessing most countries have post boxes?
Wapo did an article on it some time ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/16/postal-se...
In Germany, apartments have mailboxes accessible without entering the building. Mailboxes have last names on them, we don't send mail to apartment numbers.
If you need a secure dropbox you go to a random building with some vacancies, look for an unused mailbox, change the lock (many have them on the outside as well) and put a random name on it.
However, buying or selling weapons is no joke here.
You can buy an amount of weed here (for personal) use that would absolutely get you convicted with "intent to supply" in the UK.
My weed smoking friends were worried they wouldn't be able to pick up when they came to visit. It was not a problem.
When USPS does randomly seize a package (such as a fake ID caught at customs) the end result is nothing happens to the receiver other than the package not arriving.
I suspect the cost for local enforcement or for the post office of preventing weed being sent via mail is just too high to be considered.
We know that Tor isn't resistant to state-based attackers, so my money is always on global surveillance networks picking up missteps by the operators.
"Whoops I forgot to turn my VPN on and SSH'ed into one of the servers they were already watching" -- this kind of thing.
Why would someone be using a VPN if they're using tor for the market? Why would a VPN offer any protection at all? If you're using a VPN and "SSH into one of the servers that they are already watching", then a VPN isn't going to provide anonymity.
User --> VPN --> Tor --> Market
If you normally use the VPN, but forget it one time, you are now exposed.
On the other hand, if you normally do this but forget to one time, it doesn't mean you're automatically exposed. It simply means that if anyone is currently attempting to find you and have an exploit that will actually work on you, then they will be getting you directly instead of your VPN. However, even if you had a VPN, if it's a government agency then generally speaking they will be able to find you anyways. A VPN doesn't "hide" you. It's not meant to.
If you want to stay anonymous, there are several methods that can be utilized. The most obvious one is not connecting to the internet from your own home. Use the Starbucks WiFi. A more clever method would be buying slave bots and using poorly secured wifi netowrks around them to hop over one. Assume VPN connections are from companies based in countries not on friendly terms with yours. Like China/U.S.
User -> RandomWifi -> VPN/SSH -> Slave -> SecondSlave/WifiHop -> VPN/SSH 2.0 -> Tor -> Market
Small note. This assumes you're actually setting up your VPNs, not buying some "VPN service." I saw you wrote about being careful with VPNs and how "trustworthy" they are. I'm not sure why you would ever use a VPN service.
One thing I would add to the RandomWifi at starbucks is to make sure not to bring your phone as they could detect you went there if they get to find your RandomWifi starbucks location. Also make sure to change starbucks/RandomWifi location every time and for extra-paranoid reasons, maybe wear some toupee and fake moustache in case they try to get camera recording from the starbucks. I would also do most of the work from home, just run all the db/code updates from home and then sync/push the update at RandomWifi so you just need to stay there a few seconds. You don't even need to get in, just stay outside walking and click the push button from your laptop quickly. Never do it on the same hours either.
Geolocking. That seems to be the only 'accepted' technical answer.
What that means changes on the threat model, but for this scenario we'll say a hypothetical VPN provider in a different jurisdiction that takes Monero and has good OpSec.
The reason they can do the deanonymization attack on the Tor circuit is that they have basically unlimited resources to set up nodes, and Tor is built on the assumption that the nodes are all unrelated.
If a Tor session looks like:
User -> VPN -> Tor( A -> B -> C ) -> Market
Anyone can set up a Tor node, but it's not possible to just randomly add nodes to a VPN's network, so they shouldn't be vulnerable to that (barring insecurity in other forms).
I'm not saying that this happened only that if you think that there is a global adversary that can break the Tor anonymity a VPN won't protect you.
[0] https://www.ohmygodel.com/publications/usersrouted-ccs13.pdf
Plus, you can restrict what nodes are used. It's not like the public nodes are the only ones that exist.
Clearly I've got gaps in my understanding, any good resources you could point me towards to study up?
It kinda seems like fees and taxes, but instead of paying them on every transaction the users gamble on whether they'll be the one stuck with the bill.
I'm also interested in the particular opsec failure for this iteration, I just think don't think it's the only factor.
The person running this site did not have anything near the technical skills required to operate a darknet market.
Instead of developing his own, he used a very clunky public script for his market https://github.com/5auth/eckmar-source
All of the early posts by /u/darkmarket on Dread were in /d/darknetmarketsAU. Very early on other users figured out his previous handle he used as a drug vendor.
DarkMarket was plagued by repeated IP leaks of its servers, and had its servers seized in the 2019 Cyberbunker raid.
https://twitter.com/SttyK/status/1349034993893265408
Dream market remained online for 7 years and shut down gracefully after the administrator got tired of dealing with DDoS attacks, odds are the site earned closer to $100M even if you ignore bitcoin appreciation.
>and he will be given long enough time and high enough incentives
You only have to last a couple of years to make tens of millions, Empire Market exited the business with over $30 million after two years.
If you were worried, you could evade capture forever by just moving around with a bunch of prepaid SIM cards and a 4G modem that lets you change your IMEI. Even if the police could somehow track down your Tor connections, they'd never be able to find you in a big city.
The risk of getting caught can be eliminated almost entirely without taking any unrealistic steps, an actual security pro would be able to get away with this with ease. Perhaps this is why we haven't seen any infosec people go to jail for operating darknet markets?
There's an opportunity. Marketplaces that will exist for X days only.
It's like with small-town drug dealers. Kids seek them to purchase weed, but then after a while the dealer is trying to push other stuff on them.
If anything, the world needs to legalize a lot of drugs, properly regulate them. Keeping things illegal will only result in all things illegal being centralized, and more available to those seeking those markets.
This sounds like one of those 90's scary stories. Do you also believe that the first dose is free?
That said, I think the gateway drug phenomenon is a ridiculous theory.
There are people who are going to try any drug they can and there are people who are going to research the subject and just do drugs they deem to be safe / not addictive.
For what it's worth - I don't use anything. But I have friends who are regular users. Some use a lot of different stuff.
I've been told that whenever cannabis (here in Europe, that's usually hashish) dries up, there's always going to be people that turn to harder stuff. Apparently after COVID hit, hashish became very difficult to get, and people started dabbling with speed, etc.
"Most things illegal", at least the violent kind (weapons, etc) is typically related to the war on drugs. If we stop the war on drugs, the demand for weapons will fall dramatically. Most violence you get in major cities is drug gangs fighting each other. The war on drugs ending would also put an end to that and their demand for weapons.
Fraud can be dealt with technical improvements. There's no reason card fraud is still a thing in today's day and age. You're telling me I can buy a ~50$ smart card, put a client certificate in it and nobody else can login as me without physically having the card but banks can't do the same? Come on.
Whatever remains then (which is going to be in much lower volume) can be dealt with later.
I'm sorry you know people who have problems with drugs, but drugs clearly won despite their illegality.
Quick, ugly counterexample:
Date rape drugs.
You can of course say that the crime is on whoever uses it but criminal neglect is a thing.
Somewhat more nuanced example:
Vulnerable people are still given highly addictive drugs as "marketing" from dealers.
This isn't something all of those victims have chosen, so I'd say it isn't victimless.
That said I agree that there's a fair chance that legalizing many drugs would bring large benefits to society.
> This isn't something all of those victims have chosen, so I'd say it isn't victimless.
In a manner of speaking, this rings hollow to my ears - a sort of platitude. I would make a counter example with depression drugs. A former colleague, lives in NY amd has his wife and daughter on anti-depressants. Upon inquiry on why they were drugged up, his response was both spine chilling and grotesque.
"They've been feeling a bit down lately. "
A medical professional saw fit to prescribe an otherwise healthy 12yr old and a healthy 34yr old anti-depressants because those drugs are legal. That was eye opening. The medical establishment is using their trust to peddle these drugs Have you met someone taking anti-depressants then they stop?
I havent. Small sample size but I still havent.
I remembered years ago reading, and recognizing as BS, some policeman's story about a bust of GHB dealers, implying there were no recreational uses, and that it must be intended for date-rape. Yet somehow I still believed some TV scare report in high school that having Rohypnol without a prescription could only mean it was intended for date-rape.
On a side note, I did know of recreational chloroform use. My dad is a retired anesthesiologist, and our family kind of adopted one of his closest work friends, a much older nurse anesthitist, as a surrogate third grandmother. In the old days, after a long surgical case, she would often drive home pleasantly buzzed from second-hand chloroform inhalation. In the old days, the nurse anesthetist would sit right over the patient with a stopwatch and an eye dropper full of chloroform, adding a few drops to gauze over the patient's mouth every time the patient's pulse got a bit fast.
The only drugs I see not being used recreationally are antipsychotics and antidepressants, and even among those there are some exceptions.
And possibly scopolamine and other deliriants, but those are arguably the worst date-rape drugs ever despite the media hype.
Alcohol is legal, everywhere, and just works better.
Many countries has laws that regulate the sale of certain kinds of knives that are created primarily for use in fights/combat.
> I would argue that alcohol is the biggest date rape drug by a large amount. Do you advocate banning alcohol?
Good point. There's still an order of magnitude or two between those options.
Also the alcohol is mostly consumed voluntarily unlike date rape drugs that are almost only consumed involuntarily.
So again, saying drug dealers are selling drugs specifically to help rapists, is no more likely than the liquor store specifically selling to wife beaters and drunk drivers.
Now a quick question for you: are you equally for second amendment rights?
The same logic applies here IMO.
FTR: I'm in favour of 2nd amendment rights (in the US at least) but not a hardliner, so I'm mentally processing now if this goes both ways and I should agree with you. I don't think so but I'm considering it.
Source: https://twitter.com/DarkDotFail/status/1299444442584158208/p...
Tell it to that kid.
Decriminalizing drugs wouldn't fully solve the problem of drug abuse either but at least it would significantly reduce the violence surrounding the field, so that's still a net win in my opinion.
How many people are hurt because of irresponsible drug use itself compared to being collateral damage as a result of the current (illegal) drug supply chain powered by gangs and violence? I bet the latter is much bigger and decriminalizing drugs would reduce that significantly.
There is no country where drugs are legal, just some where drugs are not criminalised and I think that's a sane approach (Portugal as prime example). But to have wide and legal sale of drugs would probably destroy society.
Society should treat citizens as responsible adults, not as children in kindergarten requiring constant care.
Yes, some people will fail to fight with addiction, unfortunately.
I believe, eventually all drugs need to be legalized. But not all at once. It should be done very slowly.
There are legitimate cases even for addictive recreational drugs. I think of this. Suppose I'm told I'm dying of cancer in 6 months. I could take painkillers for these 6 months and dying of boredom. But instead I'd prefer to stick to cocaine and have a lot of fun.
Not to mention that some drugs are so addictive and destructive that jurisdictions have good reason to stop their distribution.
There is nothing stopping the liquor store from selling alcohol to wife beaters and child abusers.
On taxes, to be honest I don't like those either, although I pay every dollar I am legally required to and actively avoid paying all taxes I can legally avoid paying. As I'm someone publicly arguing for the legalization of all drugs, my stance on that issue is not surprising.
> Not to mention that some drugs are so addictive and destructive that jurisdictions have good reason to stop their distribution.
Honestly I would rather ban videogames. I have seen many smart, hard working people whose lives have been ruined by videogames. So much wasted potential.
Me too, I've also seen a lot of life wasted on games. Some of it my own!
But isn't this much the same line of reasoning as with drugs? Some people just can't control it. I'm all for adults being adults and making adult choices. But clearly there's people who can't deal with games as well as drugs.
Where I grew up, you can get weed without a problem. I just somehow never thought it was worth the money, and though I had a few friends who'd buy they never got into any trouble with it.
Perhaps it's also a function of your environment what you find destructive. Like many kids, I grew up in the middle class where games would eat more time than drugs. I wonder if you are the same? There are others who grew up much more exposed to drugs and drug addiction, who maybe didn't have a computer to waste time on.
I'm also in favour of legalization, but mainly for practical reasons. We've tried making hard drugs illegal, and people aren't satisfied. Maybe try a different approach and see if there's a better balance there.
My main issue with it is that I don't really want to give the drug lords a head start on a business that we want non-criminals to run, but that's something else to thing about.
Of course you can say well screw it I don't like the rules I'm just going to sell it anyway but then really you can't be surprised if the gov. brings the hammer down on you.
I think Ross Ulbricht's sentence is too high, I'm generally not a fan of lifelong imprisonment, but he engaged in lawlessness and crime on a very large scale and that deserves punishment. If people aren't punished for breaking the rules tomorrow someone will break laws that you actually think are valuable.
Are anonymous SIM cards illegal in Germany? There are definitely some EU countries where you can buy a prepaid SIM card in a newspaper stand without presenting any ID and it is 100% legal.
If you buy a SIM card from an operator's store they might ask for ID but they didn't the last time I did this (a couple of years ago).
When I last flew into the UK there were even prepaid SIM card vending machines, provided by the network operator, in the entrance/exit to the airport.
COntrast that with Switzerland, where I had to provide my passport to buy a SIM card.
In France as far as I know they are not illegal, but almost completely disappeared from physical retail, and I had to identify myself to get a prepaid SIM card from one of the major operators (Orange). 10 years ago I'd just have bought it in a supermarket, no questions asked, and the line would be alive as long as it's credited.
I wouldn't be surprised that pressure was put on operators to set barriers and make their clients jump through hoops if they try to buy anonymously.
- Buy BTC from an exchange with KYC and then send it to the seller (police)
- Receive the product by post or collect it at a pick-up point where the seller (police) knows the address.
What strategies can the buyer follow to protect his privacy and trust the seller?
2. Pick trustworthy sellers with a long history and good reviews.
3. Use monero (or shuffle your btc).
4. Make a new account with a unique username for every purchase.
5. Order only domestically.
Same with hugbunter who seems to have no market affiliation but obviously knows her stuff and can clearly hack a thing or two.
Statements like this are always funny.
Any idea why?
>Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.
eg "legally" report stuff there, and strangely enough anonymous tips to your local LEO officer would probably happen. ;)
They have no jurisdiction abroad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
> The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is a 2010 United States federal law requiring all non-U.S. foreign financial institutions (FFIs) to search their records for customers with indicia of a connection to the U.S., including indications in records of birth or prior residency in the U.S., or the like, and to report the assets and identities of such persons to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.[1]
(Also does largest == best? A market could have a huge volume of mostly scams for example)
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
The quotes in the title should be around "world's largest" only (since they're about the inability to fully know what's happening on the dark web)
> “Police in the northern city of Oldenburg ‘were able to arrest the alleged operator of the suspected world’s largest illegal marketplace on the darknet, the DarkMarket, at the weekend,’ prosecutors said in a statement,” according to Barron’s.
(with "Barron’s" linking to the Barron's article)
I'd call it a stretch to say Barron's is the original source. It's entirely possible Bitcoin Magazine just pulled a quote from the Barron's article, but I don't know journalism.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/darkmarket-world...
I'm not sure I follow your point about the quotes but it's the article's own title and it doesn't appear to be misleading or linkbait, so we can probably just keep it. (From the guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.")