A Bitcoin bust that took down the web’s biggest child abuse site
wired.com
wired.com
The whole idea of ethical porn is something that needs more discussion, and it's an area where if you enjoy porn you should put your money where your ideals are and encourage something involving consenting adults respecting certain norms, and treating people involved with the human dignity they deserve. Paying to encourage those kinds of ethical productions is the only sensible solution, IMO. Endlessly frequenting copy-and-paste free content sites is a race to the bottom that isn't doing anyone any good.
In any case, I hope you have some people in your life who have shown you the respect you deserve as well, and been there to help when you needed it, and not just take what they could get from you whatever the cost.
Edited for clarity and typos.
A couple of weeks ago on a related topic I was getting down voted for expressing that the child in these images is revictimised every time their images are viewed and shared. The attitude was the harm was already done so there was no issues, but that is definitely not the case.
Reddit was more permissive than they should have been for a lot longer than they should have been and may not be representative. But even accounting for that, it really opened my eyes to how common it can be.
This is also what turned me against free speech fundamentalism in the end. Every attempt at getting this addressed was shot down in the name of free speech and anti-censorship. Every time it was actually improved caused what felt like an internet-wide backlash against the changes.
What if there were no redit servers, and each subredit was self hosted? What would the incentive be for people to post child porn on some small independently run server?
As the subredit owner, you could just censor whoever you wanted, with very little global internet drama. Tools for autoflagging posts could still exist. Over-censored forums would piss off users, and be easily replaced. Similarly, under censored ones would lose users / get busted.
This all worked fine pre-internet. Editors would decide who and what would be posted.
It still works for things like audio fiction podcasts, where "slush readers" filter submissions, and money / reputation are exchanged when stuff gets published. In addition to leading to much better moderation than the big Internet sites, it creates jobs for domain experts.
The main problem is that it doesn't scale to a $1B/mo business that investors can siphon money off of. Instead, it's best structured as an ecosystem of small botique businesses.
Other friends have had the same problem with actual child pornography.
But... that's precisely what the article is about?
> The Korean agent showing Janczewski around eventually pointed the phone’s camera at a desktop computer on the floor of Son’s bedroom, a cheap-looking tower-style PC with its case open on one side. The computer’s guts revealed the hard drives that Son seemed to have added, one by one, as each drive had filled up with terabytes of child exploitation videos.
> This was the Welcome to Video server.
> "I was expecting some kind of glowing, ominous thing," Janczewski remembers, "and it was just this dumpy computer. It was just so strange. This dumpy computer, that had caused so much havoc around the world, was sitting on this kid’s floor."
The incentive in this case was profit from/access to more CSAM. GP is referring to how most subreddits/forums do not have that incentive.
It provides a larger target where failure of the system to regulate content can impact more users.
But it also provides economies of scale in the regulation apparatus having outsized impact when it is improved.
The tricky question is whether the mute grows proportional to the megaphone.
> This all worked fine pre-internet. Editors would decide who and what would be posted.
Obviously this argument is inconsistent.
It's also wrong. The worst problem isn't with Reddit, it's with sites like the one reported in the article. These are exactly like the "under censored ones [sites]" you advocate for above. They don't lose users - they gain the types of users who want that kind of material.
Not to defend the material in question in any way - but the people who expressed concern... were right. As soon as Reddit gave mods the tools they needed to expunge the really terrible stuff from the site, those tools were almost immediately used to ban completely unrelated conspiracy subs.
Would you like to argue where your line is?
My information is very out of date but I'm curious how you know how unrelated they were.
My more-than-lay understanding is that the trading didn't happen in the open. Users used questionable comments, line-toeing images, and "jailbait jokes" to find each other and then swapped in DMs or off-site entirely.
Reddits mods have always had a rich grapevine. In my time I never once heard of a sub getting banned that didn't have a months or years long reputation for turning a blind eye to that. Possibly that completely changed after I left, sure.
You can't even know there's a problem until you can properly see the situation you're in, and if you advocate for measures that allow the apparent imposition of a false reality, you can't use that apparent false reality as evidence that "everything is OK and no theoretical harm has come to pass".
I fear nearly the entire world is awash in this nonsense and it gains purchase with every passing week. Everybody craves the illusion of normalcy and sees no sin in the truth being betrayed in pursuit of it, and then when that illusion falls away they scream blue murder that they were deceived, seemingly with complete ignorance of the fact that they begged for that deception, demanded its imposition, and vilified those who opposed it.
The truth always outs eventually, you can only hide from it for so long. And all you buy in the hiding is license for those who need your ignorance to operate, with all the harm that implies.
To cite just a few obvious examples from the past few years of social media censorship to cover up things the special interest groups in control of social media would rather have concealed; COVID Lab leak evidence, Hunter Biden laptop, Metabiota links, Ukraine Gas company positions, bribery being passed back up the chain, Daszak and EcoHealth alliance activities, etc. I know that all of these were vigorously attacked and suppressed over the past few years, and most people either knew nothing about them or believed them to be entirely false due to that active suppression, and they made critical life-changing decisions which altered the trajectory of the political and economic realities of the entire world based on those outright lies.
And here we sit, raising them as examples for somebody who started from a position of claiming they were unaware such things even existed because of their vaunted and optimal information control regimes. Whether you react with an admission that you were clearly wrong or doubling-down on it because you dislike the implications of the above is once again beside the point; Censorship of this kind is absolutely unacceptable and intolerable. It is a wholesale license for the censoring parties to sculpt the views of everybody to that which best serves the censoring parties interests. Nothing more, nothing less.
If it honestly could be kept to purely policing cp and super intrusive gore spam, that would probably not be something worth getting up in arms about. The fact of the matter though is that it is near globally applied by this point in time to force the perspective that the owners of the centralised media services want and shut out every opposing view for as long as possible truth be damned. And that is utterly unacceptable. It is turning the world into a complete hellscape.
If you're advocating a return to older internet status quo, I think we have solid evidence that it would cause pain.
I think I need to know what definition you're writing from to have an opinion on that.
Moderated public discourse is the rule, not the exception, in vast spaces of human communication. It's not perfect but usually good.
In contrast, unfiltered bidirectional public communication can cause significant issues. It gave us 4chan and Reddit before the admins decided ad revenue was important to them.
Vast majorities on a site like that are already self-censoring.
The damage in terms of isolation and radicalization is already very real.
Some ends don't justify their means. Others do. Depends on the magnitude of the ends and the means.
Freedom of speech means that the government can’t put you in jail for saying something stupid.
Censorship of privately owned online forums is entirely up to the forum. There is no high principle at stake there. In fact, censorship of this kind of forum is itself a kind of speech - so forcing someone to publish what you want them to publish, is also a form of suppression.
The solution is to put these vile pieces of sludge in prison forever, or execute them - not turn against liberty. This is a red herring for at least morally questionable people.
Liberty means the freedom to do what is right. Child exploitation isn’t even in an adjacent universe to that.
I have a problem with you executing people.
There are plenty of hypothetical people whom we could agree deserve execution.
The problem is: Who has the power? What else will they do with it?
If the subjects of that power are kept alive then there is a chance to "put right" injustices, if not then not.
That is the problem with execution as a "tool of justice"
>Liberty means the freedom to do what is right.
I understand the sentiment, but you do see how those two statements together are problematic?
Of course you would cut off the second part of the sentence where I specifically reference people committing one of the most heinous crimes in order to make your “gotcha”. Perhaps trying to imply that I am not opposed to any and all uses of capital punishment when I am talking about a very specific crime. Frankly a pretty lazy attempt at building a straw man.
Capital punishment should be reserved for the absolute worst among us. Exploiting children for sexual gratification is one of them.
Child rapists get full due process at least.
So, concretely, are you arguing that Reddit mods shouldn't have the power to shut down r/fatpeoplehate, but should have the power to permanently imprison or execute people?
If you're not willing to take the Internet flamebait from time to time, are you even alive...
Child porn never add anything to do with "free-speech". I'm sorry but trying to link the 2 as they are somehow related issue is completely absurd. Reddit still has plenty of child porn, revenge porn and child grooming subs, so much that Reddit now keeps modlists hidden cause the depraved people Reddit hires as "supermods" apparently need that kind of protection to continue their misdeeds.
I hope one day that depraved website and its depraved admins and "supermods" get its day of reckoning, in a court of law.
Well, they are related in that the tools needed to combat one can also be used to combat the other. If I can delete a post because [I believe] it contains child porn, I can also delete a post because it's saying something I don't like.
Here's what the Bitcoin whitepaper itself speculated.
"As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner."
And here's an early Bitcointalk thread. Traceability was discussed and acknowledged from the very beginning.
There's often a disconnect on HN between what HN users collectively know by virtue of this being their field of trade, and what the average non-tech person is aware of. It's this latter group of people that, by and large, as Bitcoin started to become popular, were under the impression that it was anonymous.
Edit: It doesn't help that, as the article states, Satoshi even said, "Participants can be anonymous," back in 2008[1]. To your point, he did say this as he linked to the white paper you mentioned, but average users are less likely to read the white paper than we are.
[1]https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October...
In large part, "the average non-tech person" is not aware of a great many things because they actively ignore or dismiss those who know those things and try to warn them in advance of impending troubles they face due to their faulty Facebook acquired "knowledge" about any topic of great importance or significance (until after they're bitten in the ass by it, at which point they blame those same people they previously ignored). Network security issues are one easy example. We're ridiculed as "paranoid neck-beards" for calling out clear and obvious security issues right up until something bad happens and huge troves of personal/private data are leaked or stolen, and then we're raked over the coals for not somehow magically fixing an issue that we were previously told were "unimportant paranoid perfectionism".
Thiel literally was calling out bank CEOs and Warren Buffett a day or so ago for preventing the future.
You can be anonymous if you deal with BTC exclusively just as though you would with cash. But, and this is a very big but: if you use the same addresses repeatedly or if the addresses that you use can be linked and your identity can be tied to one of the addresses then all of your linked transactions are now no longer anonymous.
So you're anonymous right up to the point that you aren't, and then it works retroactively on anything that can be tied to that same identity.
Cash doesn't really have that property, and is therefore more anonymous than BTC, anonymity is in principle a boolean but there appear to be grades of anonymity when you start looking at it more closely. Anonymity as in 'the state of knowledge about an individual' vs 'anonymity, the level of anonymity that an individual can expect as the use of a particular method of payment' are two different concepts that we lump together as though they are the same thing.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous. It's baked into the protocol. Every transaction is public, and authenticated and authorized via cryptography. But every transaction has a name attached... Just not a name immediately linked to the human being responsible for executing the transaction.
Once that link is made, the blockchain becomes a towering monument to all that name's sins.
Contrast with a chan site, where the default configuration is that every post has a unique identifier independent from any posts previously made by an author. Depending on what data the administrator is collecting, those posts may be reversible to a human being, but tugging on one piece of the thread does not unravel the tapestry because a person's posts aren't tied to each other by default.
(HN is pseudonymous too. I post under a handle. I prefer not to link this handle to my public name. It would not take much effort to do so, and once somebody did, every comment I've ever made is immediately searchable).
Am I nitpicking if I say that's actually true? Anonymous means "not identified by name; of unknown identity". Disguised people can also be anonymous. The fine print is that your disguise won't help you much when you go visit your family and you're subject to gait profiling.
I don't understand how this can be what you think I'm getting at, when my post was myth-busting. You agree with me that most average, non-tech-oriented people seemed to misunderstand that Bitcoin was largely anonymous. Now, those assumptions had to come from somewhere, right? I'm not saying they know who Satoshi is, or what a Bitcoin whitepaper is at all, nor am I saying Satoshi should be lionized or mythologized. But what I am doing is pointing to rhetoric used early on in Bitcoin's life that could've easily made it's way into the lexicon of the less technically-minded and explain how we ended up there.
An analysis of how the myth was built, as it were, rather than further building of the myth.
It's reasonable to assume that if you were purchasing illicit substances online, that the currency wouldn't be traceable, when it reality it was because no one really cared at the time for this new bitcoin thing.
Keep in mind how most people don't read documentation for anything, let alone a whitepaper
I think Lex Friedman did interview with a drug dealer and he told this as well.
At the same time I don't use Monero for example as I'm not a drug dealer and they are using really complex cryptography for me to verify and trust.
I think the fact that the U.S. Government put out a bounty for cracking Monero shows that it's working fairly well so far
If this ever happens, it could lead to a massive wave of crime resolution on par with what happened when DNA testing became cheap and ubiquitous.
Because of this, when it comes to significant organized crime, physical cash and seedy banks like Chase and Deustche Bank are still king.
Bitcoin is for people who don't mind living in the light.
To be clear, if that is the case, I have no objection.
This is the antifragile nature that some proponents acknowledge and like.
Before there is proof of a state action, forums go back and forth ad nauseum on what level of work and inconvenience is necessary. After there is proof of a state action, they just go ahead and implement the multisig escrow (making sure consumers and merchants can get their money even if the government seizes the servers, greatly increasing the costs for the government while lowering the bounty collected) privacy enhanced coins (like Monero), contribute to UI/UX improvements for making Monero easier to use, etc
If you look at these darknet busts, the level of effort and coordination has gone up by orders of magnitude over the last decade while the amounts seized have gone down.
Then just use that site like normal and it will have a list of popular onion services like the New York Times and Dread and also including darknet markets (DNMs) and their mirrors, and the liveness of those URLs
Then I would go on Dread (if its up) and see what people are saying about any particular DNM, else I would find the darknet market subreddit to see if there is anything there, else find articles about current top markets. some last for so long and are still lasting that they're pretty reliable, so I would probably skip all this if I've still got credentials to one thats still up. its a hassle to sign up to some markets and some more secure ones so it thwarts my curiosity
for just browsing those sites I'm fine with Tor browser, but if you actually want to buy things or download things or communicate with a vendor I would say stick with Whonix (or Tails if thats fine for you) because you need other apps and having Tor for all connections and other anonyming techniques at all times is better.
(if you are going to a site with more objectionable content for even viewing, don't use Tor browser either. dark.fail doesn't list those)
Cat and mouse game. They're trying timing attacks all the time while improving the UX, assuming “they” are state actors
Many people held the opinion that these transactions were anonymous or quasi anonymous. The dumber among them are in prison.
I don't think thats a crypto specific perspective, as there is this super large population in this country (USA) that only has the experience of their employer taking a big chunk of their money for the whole year and giving it to the government automatically, so a lot (most?) of that population thinks that any situation where they have something valuable on their own has no way of being known about for taxes. Crypto amplifies that myth to those people, when its just a total misunderstanding about how taxes and tax reporting works, and how the blockchain works, and what organizations already exist to specialize in watching the blockchain as well as trades at exchanges.
It's correct that you can trace transactions through the blockchain, but in practice you need something like Reactor to be built and maintained. It's not going to be obvious to police, because the skill is a specialized thing in the domain of coders, and those coders have to have a reason to look at blockchain.
I'd put anything available to the general public in the "trivial" camp, even if the underlying tech is fantastically complex or difficult.
I mean sure if there's some self service website then yeah. Keep in mind this is back in 2017 though, a lot of stuff has matured since.
Ah, from satoshi himself! Group signatures. I wonder if someone implemented a protocol that does this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote
Aha!
Everyone using it for criminal activity, and that’s a lot of people for whom it has been true.
Some people missed one word in that sentence. :-)
A lot of people I've talked (face to face) about crypto with
Reminds me of the postal inspector who blew open the case of two foreign agents with sniper rifles and other weapons impersonating federal officers in Washington DC.
The Secret Service believed their B.S. story about being DHS investigators working on J6 investigations. 4 SS agents apparently took bribes from them, including one who protects the president's wife.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-secret-service-places-ag...
Recent coverage makes it seem this started in Feb 2020 as Soleimani retaliation: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/secret-service-arian-taherzadeh...
>Law enforcement sources told CBS News that investigators are looking into the possibility that the two suspects have ties to Iranian intelligence including to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite component of the Iranian military that conducts special operations, or the Quds force.
…
>The FBI also singled out a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) employee who interacted with Taherzadeh and is listed among DHS personnel who received gifts from suspects in the affidavit. According to a senior DHS official, the current employee, who does not serve in a law enforcement capacity, has not been put on administrative leave and is not the subject of any internal review.
They knew what they were doing.
https://twitter.com/Angry_Staffer/status/1512515586491879435
> Joe Biden is expected to receive Secret Service protection with a new team that is more familiar to him and replacing some agents amid concerns that they may be politically allied with Donald Trump.
>...
>He spotted what he was looking for almost instantly: an IP address. In fact, to Gambaryan’s
>surprise, every thumbnail image on the site seemed to display, within the site’s HTML, the IP >address of the server where it was physically hosted: 121.185.153.64.
That is indeed an opsec failure, along with using that same IP on an exchange. Which later turns out to be a computer aka the abuse website in the guys apartment.
The whole point of bitcoin is trustless action. I don't have to trust you because I can verify the transaction.
If anyone can verify a transaction, it's obviously traceable.
I think the confusion seems from the fact that you do not need to issue a form of identity to use bitcoin. Which is how cash works too.
If your intention is to turn bitcoin into fiat, you will be found out. Fiat is highly regulated, your identity is required. Unless you turned bitcoin into pure cash, which is unlikely at scale.
"Ah but Monero" no. Monero requires you to trust the authors because you can't verify any of the transactions, especially the genesis blocks. Use at your own peril. Bitcoin does not in anyway attempt to mirror this.
Half the value of a bank is that the bank authenticates transactions have actually happened. Bitcoin does too. Publicly. There's nothing "anonymous" about it. There's just no requirement to tie an address to a human identity, but that doesn't mean it can't be done (and you should always act like it has been done, lest the law come for you too).
The idea that crytocurrencies empower criminals because they're anonymous is braindead. There's a lower barrier of entry but scams are older than Central economies are. Crypto is just the newest vehicle and getting rid of crypto will not get rid of scammers (or ransomware).
For example: The Bangladeshi bank heist.
But you do not need everyone to verify but instead take a shortcut and just verify the proof. That's what zero knowledge proofs are all about [0]. Unfortunately a lot of people pass over these subtleties. So, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "verify".
>"Ah but Monero" no. Monero requires you to trust the authors because you can't verify any of the transactions, especially the genesis blocks. Use at your own peril.
Can you elaborate on this point? By "verify" again, you simply mean a transparent blockchain where every tx and address is unambiguously visible to all. E.g. Ring signatures aren't something you need to trust the authors.[1][2]
But in general, yes, at some point without being able to "verify" the whole code I have to "trust". This is true for every sufficiently large enterprise. For example there are a lot of (complicated) mathematical proofs I didn't fully go through but nonetheless used shamelessly in my mathematical modeling because I "trusted" its applications (I have learned from).
[0]https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html
Bitcoin maxis: See, Bitcorn can't be used for crime.
Everyone will see what they want.
It is a weird story. On the one end, anyone using crypto by now should know, there is a trail following it ( there are means to obscure it, but a lot of ways to screw up too ). On the other, does that mean this investigation was a low hanging fruit?
I remember a story of a guy being busted who ran a business, bought his $500k house in cash, his half dozen trucks in cash, and yet paid almost nothing in taxes. The thought was, "I'll under-report my income, and pay everything all in cash so they can't trace anything!" Except for the fact that transactions over $10K get reported to the IRS, not to mention all of the property to various agencies which circle back to the IRS.
People who have a least a clue what could go wrong tend to also realize they probably aren't seeing other ways for it go wrong, as well.
Used to be worth about $65,000. This will probably be a requirement when $10,000 is worth $1,000 of today's dollars--do nothing, and more and more stuff comes under reporting requirements.
Ridiculous that these things aren't inflation adjusted. I ended up paying the alternative minimum tax once, the old "millionaire's tax". Spoiler: I'm not a millionaire. If I was, millionaire isn't what it used to be, either. https://www.thebalance.com/alternative-minimum-tax-amt-who-h...
1. Clued up criminals will choose crimes that are less risky.
2. The more ignorant the criminal is, the more likely they are to be caught.
3. When you are smart enough, there are legal ways to make criminal amounts of money.
Smart people either avoid crimes, or they avoid getting caught, or they do crimes with low penalties (some white collar crimes can have very high expected gains).
Yes, absolutely. The same law that provides for banks reporting deposits and withdrawals over $10K also puts similar requirements on retail establishments that accept payments that large.
The same thing happens with houses. Someone buys an absolute dumpster fire in cash. Then they pay contractors to fix it up nice, beautiful appliances, tiling etc. The house gets sold and the money ends up all in the white.
I used to work at a restaurant that regularly deposited more than $10,000 cash per day. We never filed any IRS reports for that, maybe the bank did.
I bought a car a few years ago half cash, half financing. The dealer sent me a letter stating that they notified the IRS under their obligation to report cash transactions over $10K.
People think it’s private because they are told so but actually it’s a public ledger where anyone can see what you’ve spent and associate you fairly easily by your behavior and links to not so secret crypto addresses.
There’s rarely any paper trail between buying GPUs/ASICs and the mining itself. That’s why these currently sell above the amount they’d be profitable mining with. Because illicit actors are willing to pay a premium for anonymous crypto.
Or you use Monero, which as far as I know is not illegal, let alone a crime.
- money side is getting more anonymous, e.g., monero / tornado
- ... in theory. Money crime still often using less anonymous schemes and often at exchange points, so chainanalysis-style companies still make sense, though decreasingly so IMO. A lot of the startups have shifted to verifying contracts, or providing (dubious) KYC risk scores, and interesting to consider why.
- For our customer base (half of which are sec/fraud/crime teams)... what's happening is the criminal platforms + participants have broken (digital) operational security. So it is more about offchain data (app logs, ...) and sometimes combining onchain<>offchain data. So not too different from our projects tracking malware/phishing/misinformation/etc via OSINT techniques (IP addresses, unmasked metadata, ...), or detecting account takeovers on their websites
- ... more new, IMO, in this space is areas like graph neural networks that have the potential to act smarter & more automatically, e.g., understanding behavior. Very early days here though, so interesting times !
Now having a clearnet IP address over Tor website, as well as converting straight to fiat using standard exchanges is about as low-hanging as it gets.
In the article, there were many users with low technical competence interacting with a central criminal site that, itself, made some pretty glaring mistakes. The stupidity of all is what made them easy to catch.
What if the central site had not left its IP out in plain sight? Its operators would still likely have been caught because many of the bitcoins they were cashing out could have been tracked due to mistakes made by the site's users. Then, once the site's servers were captured, it's data could have been used to track down users who had made fewer mistakes.
Will future sites and users make the same mistakes? Probably less frequently, but they'll make new mistakes too. Law enforcement will adapt and come up with new ways to track criminals down. No system with users can ever be totally secure.
On the other hand, you can do a lot better if you cut down the number of users. e.g. If criminals hack a company's servers and extract a ransom, the transaction will probably have a much higher standard of anonymity because the hackers are more security minded and can specify how their victim acquires cryptocurrency and transfers it.
The crypto haters and maxis are both right and wrong at the same time. Bitcoin isn't private if you aren't careful and knowledgeable, but bitcoin absolutely can be used for crime if it's the right kind of crime. We're currently seeing a renaissance in ransomware attacks thanks to bitcoin.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/17/defi-rug-pull-sc...
1. their value is completely arbitrary
2. The launderer can buy an artists whole collection, and legitimately sell some for more than they were bought for since everyone can see the artists NFTs are selling for huge sums
3.NFTs can pay the minter a percentage every time they're sold.
How is this compatible with human rights? The proper process should be like this: if country A thinks that someone from country B has commited a crime against them then they should come to that country and prove it in a court without being able to add additional charges. This is the only way where the defendand won't be stripped of their rights.
Am I missing something here and there are valid reasons why prosecution for international crime cannot be implemented like this?
It's not meant to be a system to convict people incapable of defending themselves in a foreign court.
Plus, there are extradition treaties: countries A and B have to _agree_ to the conditions under which A will extradite to B and under which B will extradite to A.
> The proper process should be like this: if country A thinks that someone from country B has committed a crime against them then they should come to that country and prove it in a court without being able to add additional charges.
Courts in country B generally have close to zero understanding of the legal minutiae of country A. Ignoring jurisdiction questions, what you're suggesting is that courts in country B have to:
* understand the hierarchy of the legal system in A (what precedent is binding, what precedent is advisory),
* understand what is and isn't a law (e.g. if A is a common law jurisdiction and B is not),
* somehow reconcile legal procedures in A with legal procedures in B (e.g. when are you allowed to ask the judge to dismiss a case? what's an acceptable situation to ask for N more weeks for discovery? how much time is considered reasonable? who do you file paperwork with?)
* somehow decide what constitutes a qualified attorney (e.g. in the U.S., every state has its own qualification process for attorneys to practice in that state, so being admitted to the bar in Colorado doesn't mean you can practice in Florida, and this also extends to the federal govt)
In general it's good to assume that if there are millions of people in a given system, there are _reasons_ (not necessarily good ones, just plausible ones) the system works that way, particularly when it's a system you have zero understanding of.
> understand the hierarchy of the legal system in A (what precedent is binding, what precedent is advisory)
No, I meant the court in country B would follow laws and procedures of country B.
> somehow decide what constitutes a qualified attorney
This can be specified in an international treaty.
See also the Assange case in Britain: "Julian Assange, the 50-year-old founder of Wikileaks, is a step closer to being extradited from Britain to the United States after the U.S. government won an appeal in London's High Court." [my emphasis.]
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/10/us-wins-appeal-over-extradit...
Extradition treaties are supposed to be the law in both countries, and country B is nominally under no obligation to accept terms in a treaty that are counter to its own principles. Asymmetric power and corruption mean that this is not always the case, of course...
In addition, the victims of Y and Z may reasonably consider it unfair if the perpetrator avoids prosecution on this basis. If Y and Z were a crime in in the perpetrator's country, it would not be unfair for him to be prosecuted for them, even if the evidence, or his being in custody, came only from his being arrested for X; this happens quite frequently.
It also sometimes happens that extradition is made conditional - for example, on the condition that the person is not subject to the death penalty. For a couple of obvious reasons, reneging on such an agreement after the extradition would have negative long-term consequences for the country that does it.
Countries have treaties with each other, trying to make extradition treaties akin to slavery is completely absurd.
EU nations have extradition treaties, despite having different laws regarding different crimes. It is compatible with "human rights" cause citizens have rights but also duties established by their respective countries constitutions, and EU nation constitutions acknowledge that a crime committed, physically or remotely, in one nation makes the citizen of one country subject to the law of the other EU country where the crime was committed, period. Is that what you consider "slavery"?
Yes, because a citizen is forcible removed from his native country. And because he can get much more severe punishment that we would get in his own country.
Let's say someone from country A uses a stoled credit card which is punished with 1 year of prison in A and 5 years of prison in B. Also (what a careless mistake), he speaks ill of the Queen and the Party which is not a crime in A, but is punished with 5 years of prison in B.
If he is prosecuted in A, he gets 1 year of prison. If he gets extradited he gets 10 years of prison and gets a punishment for a deed that is not a crime in his own country. How can this be fair? The laws of his country guaranteed that he would be free one year later and that he could speak ill of Queen.
Let's say country A has treaties with 50 other countries. This means that now citizens of A must learn laws of all those countries in order not to break them.
if you think that extradition is fair, would you agree to extradite people to countries like China, Russia or North Korea?
And? As I said citizens have rights but also duties as citizens, and constitutions establish these rights and duties. If a countries constitution acknowledges a supra-national treaty or authority, which is their rights as free and independent countries, then none of the defendant rights are getting violated provided the extradition treaty grants due process to contest that extradition.
So being hyperbolic by claiming it's equal to "slavery", in an attempt at appealing to emotion, just makes your argument sound unhinged, at best. What's next? Extradition treaties are "racist"?
Generally if someone wants to extradite from the UK to the US (for instance) there will be extradition hearings to decide whether the request is reasonable, whether there is a case to answer, and things will be guaranteed in line with the rights of the UK individual - for instance if the crime in the US could be punished with death, the UK will require that be taken off the table before extradition. They would also seek assurances of the treatment of their citizen.
The exact resolution to this -
> for example, 20 years instead of 4 years and additionally he can be charged with crimes that are not a crime in his country and wouldn't allow to extradite him
Is likely contained in the treaties between countries. It seems to me that such a treaty should absolutely have a "that's not even a crime here" provision, but I have no real idea if they do.
The problem with internet crime in particular is the question of where it was committed. If I sit here in my office in Australia, log on to a compromised server in South America somewhere, and from there I compromise an American individual's home PC and empty their bank account, where is the crime taking place? Where the perp is, or where the victim is? It's not that straightforward.
I am surprised that anyone can be fooled by this. If USA cannot sentence someone to death, they still can sentence him to 500 years in prison which is basically the same and doesn't violate any agreements.
> Is likely contained in the treaties between countries. It seems to me that such a treaty should absolutely have a "that's not even a crime here" provision, but I have no real idea if they do
Obviously there is no such rules. The article mentions that if the owner of the server would get extradited from North Korea to USA he could get more strict punishment.
It's not considered the same by countries which (for instance) have indefinite detention for the worst offenders, but do not have the death penalty.
> Obviously there is no such rules. The article mentions that if the owner of the server would get extradited from North Korea to USA he could get more strict punishment.
As I said, that's likely to come down to the individual treaties. But in this case it was considered a crime in his home nation, just not anywhere near as serious a crime.
For what it's worth, some countries do refuse to extradite their own citizens, and will instead try their own citizens for their foreign crimes if they think there's enough evidence and severity. But that's not necessarily a better system. The evidence is in a foreign country, and you can't effectively subpoena people in foreign countries to make them produce documents or take the stand.
As I undertand, that doesn't prevent you from being extradited. Here are quotes from the article which hint at that:
> US prosecutors, including Faruqui, had argued that he [South Korean citizen who owned a server] should be extradited to the United States to face charges in the American justice system, but Korea had denied their request.
> With the help of the Dutch national police, they arrested the site’s alleged administrator in the Netherlands, a man named Michael Rahim Mohammad, who went by the online handle “Mr. Dark.” He faces criminal charges in the US, and his case is ongoing.
> For what it's worth, some countries do refuse to extradite their own citizens
And that is a right thing.
> The evidence is in a foreign country, and you can't effectively subpoena people in foreign countries to make them produce documents or take the stand.
The prosecutors from a foreign country can gather evidence themselves.
United States v. Gratkowski, No. 19-50492 (5th Cir. 2020)
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca5/19...
I'm surprised all the comments here seem to be solely around the technical details with blockchain and crypto. It's HN, I get the technical bent and find it interesting as well, but the human side of this one is pretty rough, and it made me appreciate that there are people -- likely sorely underpaid relative to what they'd make elsewhere -- following these (sordid) threads, often at significant emotional cost to themselves.
I did appreciate the odd bits of relief like 'Bitcoin Jesus' and 'Octopus Guy':
> At one point Faruqui remembers a German official asking him, as they stood in the cold outside the Seoul hotel where they were staying, how the Americans had gotten the Koreans on board so quickly. “Oh, Octopus Guy,” Faruqui had explained. “You don’t have Octopus Guy. We have Octopus Guy.”
But mostly, humor aside, it made me wonder for the 1000th time if I'm making the right career and life choices myself in a comfy, well paid job where I'm probably near the top of the pyramid in terms of professional respect, working on problems that I think have reach and import in my narrow speciality ... but am I really solving the problems that matter? I'm not in advertising (thank whatever god you imagine), more in security lately, so the work isn't meaningless ... but I work with some brilliant people whose technical capacities I admire, and I wonder what would happen if a bit more of that gray matter was directed at solving some of the terrible problems described here?
So much money is invested in understanding the psychology of how to force better engagement and squeeze out every last penny of hapless consumers in whatever social network. What would happen if a fraction of that went into trying to focus on influencing the people making these awful, life-destroying choices and somehow (re)sensitizing them to the costs of their actions and navigating them away from that preventatively, even if the success rate is only 1-2 percent? Or identifying victims of abuse through posting patterns to try to make sure they're potentially being flagged to receive content and help they may not be able to believe even exists? How much is invested in psychological profiling to maximize profit for the most banal advertising ends, when maybe for once some of that gray matter making those algorithms could do something positive identifying patterns indicative of abuse, beyond just the current simple fig leaf approach to pretend the owners of your social network of choice cares about your well being.
I'd love to do better, and I'd take a decent pay cut if I felt I could do something for that, and maybe even get to feel a bit better as a person in this weird world as a side effect. Seems like we not only should but could do a lot more here, before this gets to the criminal investigation level.
But even at an algorithmic level, it seems like there are all kinds of red flags you could pull out of public posts and do a much better job of redirecting potentially victimized people to some organisations doing meaningful work to help victims.
How many categories does my online profile fit in based on all my interests, and how many hundreds of bright people are wasting their lives to discern that I happen to like A + B + C and I'm in financial bracket F, with political leaning G ... to try to show me an advert I'm probably just blocking anyway.
"How do I use this law enforcement surveillance network to commit a crime?" Don't!
It's still potentially leaky because you're relianing on the buyer to not get that traced back to you.
I guess like for several security topics: the process to find my identity is too expensive/impractical/takes too much time. I mean, we know it is possible to use brute force to crack encrypted data, it just takes a trillions of years or trillions of dollars so it becomes practically impossible.
but fwiw with monero they don't know where the crypto came from. Technically, you could have mined it in the early days. So as long as you have to report on sale only and not origination, everyone can party on
To be more succinct, they read like 'current crypto currency solutions like Bitcoins are all bad, and only used by bad people.' The articles are begging for a savior to step in and provide a solution; maybe the government...
[1] from the same author, but he is not the only one of course:
https://www.wired.com/story/hydra-market-shutdown/
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-seizure-record-doj-crypt...
https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-cryptocurrency-theft...
At least they make that part easy.
I would love to see someone attempt a Constitutional justification for the IRS's dedicated police force. That I would dearly love to see.
Federal law enforcement is clearly justified under the necessary and proper clause. Without federal law enforcement, there is no ability to force states to comply with federal law, which the Constitution clearly requires by 1) explicitly saying that federal law is supreme over state law, and 2) prohibiting various practices by the states. Imagine a federal court having to call upon state police to enforce their subpoenas, subpoenas that may target the people who sign the state polices' checks. Or imagine the Department of Justice having to call upon the state militia to arrest a state's governor for the commission of a federal crime. I think it's pretty obvious that federal law enforcement is "necessary and proper" to the exercise of Congress's enumerated powers. There is no sovereignty without the ability to deploy violence to enforce it.
The thoughts of the founding generation do not determine constitutionality, though with regard to the ratifying conventions they can inform our grasp of contemporary understanding of the document's meaning. In fact, the first few presidential administrations illustrate how fraught was their relation to the constitutional structure.
> Federal law enforcement is clearly justified under the necessary and proper clause.
It doesn't have to be justified in that way, because it's provided for in the document. One of the constitutional powers of Congress is "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions." You recommend that I imagine "the Department of Justice having to call upon the state militia to arrest a state's governor"; I have no difficulty doing so. Are there inconveniences attendant on that method of law enforcement? Of course, but my response is twofold: first, it's the "necessary and proper" clause, not the "convenient and desirable" clause. Not everything the federal government might find convenient and desirable lies within their power, because, second, the Constitution was written to make the exercise of federal power inconvenient in cases where it is in conflict with the will of the states.
> There is no sovereignty without the ability to deploy violence to enforce it.
You say this as though sovereignty were a uniquely federal phenomenon. Not only do the states hold a measure of sovereignty, but the ultimate sovereignty in the United States resides in the people, of whose power the state militias were intended to be an instrument. Both these loci of sovereignty are endangered by precisely the distortion of the constitutional order that you approve.
Rewarding for uploads + de-duping is so deeply sinister. This is a game whose primary mechanic was to pay people to go out and actively rape children.
What. The. Fuck.
Huh, usually right-clicking is what you do for NFTs.