Drug Market ‘Agora’ Replaces the Silk Road as King of the Dark Net
wired.com
wired.com
1. several articles like this one
2. statements from the FBI that it was untraceable
3. the implication in tech media that it was 'safe' to use, with usual caveat emptor verbiage.
A large seller has too many packages to easily avoid leaving a trace. Automated analysis of video recordings near a post drop, for instance, could reveal these patterns.
Apart from that, sellers often mess up on opsec, just because it's so hard to maintain over such a large period of time. That's just how it is.
An undercover cop can ask you to commit a crime without entrapping you. It's only entrapment if the police induce you to commit a crime that you wouldn't commit otherwise. Hence, them offering you the opportunity to commit a crime is permitted by law.
See this illustrated guide to understand better:
http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-wa...
Imagine "rewarding" the new member of your drug ring by giving them a hired escort who has been paid to resist all acts upon them, and then locking the new member and the escort in a room together with some extremely brutal S&M "toys." You'll get lots of false positives--people who don't actually get their jollies from harming others--but it's the false negatives that are important here, so maybe populating your organization with sociopaths is a low price to pay.
On the other hand: is the boss committing a crime just by setting up this "reward?" They wouldn't mention anything about having to harm the escort, it'd just be implicit in the setup that if you're that type of person, the situation is easy to take advantage of.
A large organization would presumably benefit from having hidden away proof of each of its members breaking the law, such that if time comes and that member gets out of line, that can be used against them.
So perhaps an undercover cop would be asked to assassinate someone, or take use illegal drugs and get recorded in the process.
Prosecutors usually break this blackmail ring by offering immunity to one person if they present evidence against others.
http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-wa...
What's against the rules is to make someone commit a crime who is unwilling. But you, the defendant, pretty much have to admit you decided to commit the crime in order to convincingly offer an entrapment defense in the first place. ("I wasn't going to do it, but then the government did A, B, and C ...") So how do you also convince the jury that you did it unwillingly? Basically, A, B, and C have to be so compelling that the jury is convinced they themselves would have done the same thing in those circumstances. Short of "the undercover cop pointed a gun at me and ordered me to do it," it's a tough sell.
In this case, as long as the cops don't actively advertise people probably can't use the entrapment defense. But, if they setup a large ad-words account then in theory that's a problem.
However, If the jury finds that the defendant was predisposed to commit the crime that he committed, the defendant will not be allowed to use the entrapment defense, no matter how extensive police participation was in inducing the defendant to commit the crime on this particular occasion. So, if the prosecution demonstrates someone is a habitual drug user then the cops can advertise freely. But, if they cops advertise and someone that's been clean for a few months/years calls them up that's a gray area that depends on the jury's interpretation.
In the same way that it prohibits all other kind of behavior that is regularly acted by law enforcement. From planting evidence to "cruel and unusual punishment" (e.g whatever sadistic game a cop or prison director wants to play on an inmate).
Selling Humira at $200 USD / dose would be profitable if you were using stock diverted from Abbott Labs, and selling a similar product using a black market supply-chain would still be effective; even if the trust in the product would be less than most sensible people would accept.
Of course it would get not just the regular regulators on your tail, but the full panoply of intellectual property and medical enforcement.
From a customers point of view it's pretty easy to justify paying a tenth of the "list price" for a drug that keeps you alive and functional; so the demand is there.
A flatmate of mine has an immune deficiency disease which requires a drug every week which costs more than 3K/month, which is covered by her healthcare. If she doesn't get it, within a few months she'll be in the hospital with serious infections. She has to fight with the healthcare folks two or three times a year to remind them that this is actually a life-or-death matter for her, and then they grumble and continue paying. It in no way makes sense for her to start paying money out of pocket for questionable drugs from a source that might cease to exist in a month or two. If nothing else, assuming she needed to get it through "legitimate" channels again, they would use the time when she officially wasn't getting it as evidence that she doesn't need it.
The risk around quality and continuing availability mean that there's no good way to use a shadowy market for anything which is actually required for life, if it's even semi-rare.
In WWII they allowed the enemy to sink whole ships to accomplish same.
Whoa, that's interesting if true. Do you have any links you can share about this?
Do you save the ship and let the enemy know you have access to the encryption codes? Or do you let the ship be destroyed and keep listening for the more important info?
This decision is pretty black and white too. Imagine if your mother was on the ship. Or it was half your navy.
Some of the decisions world leaders need to make are horrible.
I'd love to see a project with a real focus on anonymous publishing of content. Tor's original goal was anonymous retrieval of content, with anonymous publishing just added on as a secondary goal.
In order to make anonymous publishing robust against traffic analysis, it may be necessary to sacrifice the "real-time" goal that Tor has.
You can build any number of fake identities by using a tree of accounts, starting with services that don't track who you are (or using them to launder a tree root) and build from there. The tough part is keeping the identities from leaking, eg by stylistic analysis or other patterns. Sometimes when a network authenticates every account you have to hijack some random accounts and tunnel through that in order to communicate over that network. Like intelligence agencies texting "Pizza!" over SMS - although that was a pretty lame example.
Handling the cash may leak DNA or fingerprints.
After that, when I meet someone to exchange cash, that transaction links my identity as well. Making a deposit in someone's account also records my identity via video (and any other leak like fingerprints).
It is prudent to assume that at every transaction, whichever adversary you're trying to remain anonymous from - assume they are the other party.
And even if you assume the party is a good actor, it's not entirely out of the question that a third party could monitor things and try to correlate. It might be computationally infeasible for now, but it'd be folly to bet on that.
In my experiment, I tried to get $300 into BTC. I withdrew $100 notes from the bank, then spent them at small stores to get change. (At which point I found out the bank gave me a fake note, thus losing $100.) I wore gloves during these transactions, and put the change directly into sealed bags. This is obviously super suspicious.
I discovered that mailing things anonymously is also difficult. The stamp machines only accept non-cash payments. Video is recorded at all other points of sale. Priority mail appears to require larger stamps, which are custom printed. With more work, I suppose one could find a small store that sells stamp booklets without recording things.
Obtaining an addressing an envelope also has information leaks.
Only ~33 bits are needed to identify a specific human on earth. Geolocation alone reveals somewhere around 8 bits. Interest in Bitcoin probably reveals another 5 or so. If you're mobile and purchase in multiple cities, that could further reduce things another few bits. Before you know it, you're not that anonymous.
I concluded from my experiment that most people are simply not going to be able to buy BTC and retain strong anonymity. If I was going to use BTC to perform actions critical of a government, let alone do something illegal, I would not feel overly safe. Other people seem to have a different (or missing) assessment.
The best Bitcoin anonymity device I've heard of is ZeroCoin, but I haven't understood the math yet. And it's not getting any traction, it seems, and without significant traction, like Tor, it's not very anonymous.
What I'm interested in is how much money the major sites are making. The much smaller Cannabis Road was recently hacked and robbed of $130k in bitcoin from various escrow and user wallets. I can only imagine what the major players are making.