Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
1) The printer is capable of "printing" complex compounds using individual atoms
2) The printer is pre-loaded with cocaine, LSD, MDMA...
My point being not everything can be printed...
Similarly, in Daniel Suarez's Daemon [2] he describes how a series of net connected people pass around individual parts that they have no idea the purpose of until they all get delivered to one guy who assembles them into a gun.
1 - http://www.amazon.com/Metatropolis-John-Scalzi/dp/B0058M5ZJ6 - "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood"
> "Criminals are attempting to exploit the international mail system through online networks, but the recent arrest demonstrates that we are one step ahead of them."
Yes, you intercepted one transaction. Congratulations.
tl;dr hidden services are anonymous
Which is actually pretty neat.
For the most part, just go after the weak human links in the chain and use standard anti-network tactics like turning people into informants and isolating everyone via mistrust.
Heck, they could just start scamming folks on the site. Create lots of new sellers, never deliver the promised drugs. BTC aren't revokable, so you can just rob them blind. The marketplace requires trust and there are lots of ways to break that. Yes, they could start building escrow services and the like, but those just create new avenues for attack.
With a little imagination, this could be used by the police as a giant honeypot.
Yea good luck with that!
> Catch & turn real sellers.
How would you do that? This seller got caught because he was a buyer too. People only selling on silk road can't be caught unless they do something really really stupid. And even if you do catch a seller what does that get you? Nothing! You're no closer to closing down Silk Road itself.
> Crapflood it with fake buyers/sellers making it less useful.
You can't be a fake buyer. Buyers must pony up the bitcoin up front and so that only helps sellers. Who cares where the actual drugs went, the seller got his money. Fake sellers are quickly caught out because of the reputation system. Buyers already know which sellers are reputable, they'll just keep buying from them. You can't do anything about that.
> Order drugs & gather forensic info from the packages.
This just targets individual sellers and won't do anything to stop Silk Road. Especially if the sellers are overseas.
> Heck, agree to sell someone drugs and actually send them flour + a GPS/camera if you want to go that route.
Yes buyers are vulnerable and always will be on Silk Road. That doesn't stop anyone and you'll usually only bust small time users which is a waste of resources.
>For the most part, just go after the weak human links in the chain and use standard anti-network tactics like turning people into informants and isolating everyone via mistrust.
Informants are useless. No seller can help you take down Silk Road because no seller knows where it's hosted or who is running it.
> Heck, they could just start scamming folks on the site.
Reputation systems stop this. Buyers only buy from reputable sellers.
> With a little imagination, this could be used by the police as a giant honeypot.
I don't see it.
If you're flooding them with fake sellers, it's going to be hard for new sellers to gain rep. Especially if you're leaving fake feedback, too.
By 'informants' I mean that you take over their Silk Road account and sell with their reputation. Turning people one at a time isn't useless if you make people afraid to use the site or to trust new sellers, then each seller you bust leaves them one less trusted place to turn to.
Reputation systems only work if there's a trusted authority to decide them or if there's more legit feedback than fake. It's not as though there are no ways to create fake accounts en masse. And it's not like a TOR hidden service can tell where the accounts are being spam registered from.
Overall, it's a cat-and-mouse game, but I don't see why it's fundamentally intractable.
That was thwarted by a simple comment and up-vote system.
While the tech is probably secure it's easy for people to make mistakes that leak information; and while NSA or GCHQ probably find it easy to get that information they have no interest in doing so. So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes people make with Tor and Bitcoin?
I met a researcher who did some work on attacking Tor, the results of which were given to law enforcement agencies. He was a bit light on details, but the basic idea of his approach was this:
1. You narrow down the geographic location of your target. Not hard in the case of the Silk Road, since there is a physical package being shipped.
2. You connect to your target's system, and modulate the latency of packets that you send. This is a covert channel.
3. You have a van rolling around the geographic region you believe the target to be in, and listen on wifi frequencies. When the covert channel is detected, you home in until you have located the target computer.
Obviously you can defend against this sort of attack by just not using wifi, although similar attacks at the ISP level are possible. Cover traffic helps with this, assuming the covert channel has low tolerance to noise (this may not be true; again, few details were given). It is also wise to avoid connecting from your house, if possible, and to use a public location where you can quickly shut down your laptop when you see the cops.
Or, you know, you could not sell large quantities of illegal drugs over the Internet, since it is basically asking for trouble.
No law local enforcement agency will known how to even begin step 2, and none will waste the time and resources for step 3.
In the case of the Silk road, the police would probably need to direct the target to another website, and somehow convince the target to leave that website open. Harder, yes, although probably not impossible -- one might, for example, claim to be directing the target to a website where a PGP key is being distributed, and then use Javascript to open a window in the background (one of the many reasons why one should disable Javascript whenever they use Tor). It is generally considered to be good advice not to follow off-site links for something like Silk Road, but the reality is that most people who go there are not experts on computer security and do not understand how Tor might be attacked (consider, for example, this case: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/ ). The police may not be world-class cryptanalysts, but they are pretty good at tricking people.
There are site rules and best practices and distributors are ranked (among other factors) on how well they keep to those. The rules say (among other things) to only communicate through the site, to PGP encrypt any sensitive information, and never to store any information longer than necessary to complete the transaction. I'm not saying there are no possible attacks against that surface, but I don't think the one you've described gets there.
Anyone who breaks those rules puts themselves and their customers at risk. If a distributor got busted because they clicked an off-site link, I imagine the community would say good riddance. And keep trading drugs.
The FBI has an internal "manual" on Bitcoin that leaked a while back and they certainly have the skill to use various pre-existing open source tools to link addresses with names. In this case I wouldn't be surprised if Australian customs did most of the work though.
This definitely is not the first silk rd conviction plenty of ppl have been nabbed by customs around the world if you read the forums just they were smart enough not to say anything without a lawyer
The numbers from the store are unknown, and also I'm pretty sure it is very difficult to get a realistic volume from the sales.
Do people make the argument that freedom is simply intrinsically good? Or do they argue, like with bittorrent, that the possible occasional positive uses outweigh the more common, primarily negative uses ?
I know I'm being a little extreme, but again- what!?!
I'll be a little bit extreme here and agree that there are no voluntary transactions, made between consenting adults, that should be blocked. Any use of force (or threat of force) to try and achieve some social or political end is evil, IMO. Even if the "end" is a noble one, like preventing arson. It's the act of the arsonist which is evil, and intervening to prevent him/her from torching someone else's property is just self defense, which I would consider acceptable.
But, then again, I'm a radical anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist, so I'm a bit biased.
Am I being a bit biased with this idea? Can anybody study human choices by not giving them choices?
I just mean, biased relative to what you might call "the mainstream". Luckily I give about half a shit about what "the mainstream" think.
And while I don't think that taking drugs is a good idea, I don't think paying for fighting them should be compulsory on the part of general population outgunned by the police and brainwashed in public schools.
To say that general rule "do not use violence" does not work in extreme cases, is like saying that medicine is useless because it cannot make you perfectly healthy when you have a heart attack. But it is useful because it helps you to prevent heart attack in the first place. And if you ignored the knowledge and now having a heart attack, then how can you say that it is useless?
If someone sets fire to 3 buildings I expect them to be in prison.
I mean, help me along with this. Bitcoin is like cash, but you need to use a computer. If I'm already using a computer, there are many reasons I might prefer to use another payment system: Traceability, reversibility, confirmability, et cetera. These are generally very useful features that translate directly into me paying less for stuff.
It seems to me like for most people, the only real advantage to cash is that it is anonymous, and the only reason most people need anonymity is if what they're buying is actually illegal, and for most people that means drugs.
So if I'm an average guy with a job, a mortgage, and a credit card, if I pay my taxes, and stop for pedestrians, and I like to drop acid occasionally, what am I going to use bitcoin for?
Also, drugs aren't the only black market trade.
Estimates of the size of shadow economies are between 14% and 22% of GDP in the developed world. [1] I'm just guessing that's significantly larger than the drug trade.
I disagree about the privacy issues as well, in some countries in Europe people still remember governments using records to round people up.
[1] http://www.voxeu.org/article/shadow-economies-around-world-m...