How the FBI made the world a more dangerous place by shutting down Silkroad 2.0
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Too, there's something galling about the idea of militating for forbearance for the drug market that serves primarily the wealthiest actors. Before we turn a blind eye to what are in fact gigantic organized criminal conspiracies operated by the kinds of people who will happily slap $70,000 on the barrel for a vanity electric car, maybe we could take a hard look at sentencing laws and early release programs.
Finally: it's an easy sleight of hand trick to suggest that the "darknet" traffic solely in substances, as if allowing them to operate unimpeded would have only the effect of getting some of the drug trade off the street.
I'm not sure which is scarier, as I find myself often wondering whether our governments are barking mad, or know something we do not - or are just deluded by bog standard cognitive dissonance.
Either way, the problem you describe extends far beyond prohibition, and drives much of the world's woes.
You thirst for power is incredible. If people are moving 100 miles away from a country you think it's great to live in, then why do you care so much?
I will never understand this urge to rule over other people.
Absolutely. For example these sites routinely sell guns into parts of the world with strict and popular gun control policies. Ask an average man on the British street if their country is being made safer by sites that let anyone easily buy guns that are delivered to the door, and see what response you get ...
After all, the services that sprang up to take the place of the original silk road soon grew bigger than the original site. Perhaps the same thing will happen now with whatever new services now emerge?
[1]: http://www.digitalcitizensalliance.org/cac/alliance/content....
You would hope eventually we can use this evolutionary process to see completely opaque black markets emerge. Or you may not hope, depending on purview.
Maybe they're running the other three. :-p
It could be the other sites don't have as much traffic, or the FBI hasn't pinched them yet.
I don't think that scrapping enforcement is a viable or useful option but...
Also, you could go the deontological route, and say that by doing their duty they are being moral, for what other measure do you have, in a subjective and self-referential world?
Although frankly I think that you either have to be amazingly naïve or amazingly egoistical (or both) to work in law enforcement and not have moral qualms about your employ.
They are supposed to follow rules (aka, the law), just like everyone is supposed to.
There are quite reasonable bases for being concerned that they too often don't, and that they are less constrained to do so than others, because they receive preferential treatment from the enforcers of the law, being as how that is their own community.
- Somalia has no police
- Somalia is not a good place to be
- therefore those two things must be related somehow
Which is wrong, because if that was the case, Iceland wouldn't have survived 300 years without police in the medieval age.
Instead may I recommend you start here: http://world.intellectualprops.com/liberty/faq-anarchy-in-so...
define "too often." Of the many interactions police offices have with civilians in a calendar year, what percentage of them could be classified as corrupt/evil?
The fact is that drugs have externalized effects, whether you're talking about peer pressure to engage in drug use, crack babies, broken homes, or drug addicts committing crimes to feed their addictions. It's a pretty widely-accepted that society has a right and legitimate interest in policing things that have externalized effects. It may be the case that it's futile to make drugs illegal--that criminalization creates worse societal harms than drug use, but that doesn't make the laws immoral because there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms. Drug laws are in that sense no different than gun control laws or liquor laws. They may or may not have the intended effect, but it's hard to deny that they address real societal harms.
From everything I have read the 100:1 (and the current 18:1) ratio was targeted towards minorities.
I do. Because we know that it leads to increased detrimental effects of abuse amongst those that abuse drugs, as well as vast amounts of violent crime to support the drug industry.
Personally, I consider legislators that continue to support drug laws no better than mass murderers.
> The fact is that drugs have externalized effects
There is however little to no evidence that outlawing drug use has had a positive effect on these, and a lot of evidence that outlawing drug use is directly causing some of these, such as pushing drug addicts into other crime.
Before these effects were understood I would have agreed that drug laws were not yet immoral. But these effects are known. There's no excuse.
> that doesn't make the laws immoral because there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms.
Since when it is a requirement that a law has not positive effect for it to be immoral?
> Drug laws are in that sense no different than gun control laws or liquor laws.
What massive social harm does gun control laws or liquor laws cause? How many people are left dead because of gun control laws or liquor laws?
> it's hard to deny that they address real societal harms.
Yes, they are causing a substantial proportion of them.
The drug laws kill, they kill more people that take drugs than they help. They also cause collateral damage all over the place, fund organised crime on a massive scale and contribute to the undermining of stable governments across the world.
There is no doubt at all that prohibition is horrifically immoral.
But I stand by that.
Still, it stands at 0 at this point, which is quite moderate given how harsh I was.
His argument was not that prohibition wouldn't end immediately, it's that "The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime".
This is a correct statement. Cartels also profit from sex prohibition, but I'm not sure why this justifies anything. Hence my request for a principled argument. Maybe you can help out.
I have an easier time mounting a principled argument against prostitution than for drugs. Here it is:
Adults in western societies compete with other adults in the market (in its broadest sense). You can see this, for example, in every job interview.
Usually, competition is benign.
Some forms of competition are not benign. We've decided for example that the competitive tactic of cornering a market and using that position to fix prices is malignant.
As a public policy matter, we allow the market to operate freely except in those cases where the competition becomes malignant.
As a public policy matter, we've decided that it's malignant to allow the form of competition where the winner is the person most willing to compromise their sexual integrity.
We can do that even while understanding that different people have different notions of what comprises "sexual integrity". That's because we recognize that if you allow competition based on sexual compromise, the market races to the bottom, and we operate at the lowest common denominator of "sexual integrity". The market punishes people for not compromising. That emergent property takes on the coercive force of public policy.
In the same sense as there's no intrinsic moral problem with buying a specific amount of, say, lysine, but there is with buying all the lysine and fixing prices, there's no intrinsic moral problem with exchanging money for sex, but there's an emergent problem with allowing people to compete based on their willingness to sell sex.
Put more simply: legalizing prostitution would be at least in some sense (and I think probably in a very powerful sense) coercive of poor women, and particular poor single mothers who have an extraordinarily powerful obligation to finance the upbringing of their children. Not selling your body would become a luxury. It's terrible public policy that allows that to happen.
It happens, obviously, regardless of the policy levers we pull. But society as a whole doesn't create the expectation that people can/should do that. That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.
Preemptively: you asked for a principled argument, by the way, not a dispositive one.
Mike didn't just shift the goal post, he packed it up, shipped it via fedex, and had it smelted.
You're indeed the one who shifted the goal posts there. You suggested that prohibition is the reason reporters get their heads chopped off in Mexico. I pointed out that it's not the case; cartels do more than just drugs trafficking. You then requested I provide a principled argument for prohibition, as if that's a response to me pointing out a flaw in your own argument.
> That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.
Except that the world has several red-light districts and what you're saying would happen never did and never will.
Look, those prostitutes in the Netherlands making pennies for sex, they still have to sit and wait for clients. During that time they can pick up a book and learn other skills. If they're not doing that it's because they don't want to do something else other than have sex for money.
Saying there are "immoral laws" and "immoral laws" as if to imply a difference, is intellectually dishonest and violates the law of identity in logic. You're simply trying to weasel in some other definition of "immoral". I'm simply identifying the rhetorical device you're using, and that it doesn't fool everyone as perhaps you wished.
Mandatory genital mutilation is immoral, in the end, because no one ones another person's body, and no one has authority over another person's body.
Making drugs illegal is immoral for the exact same reason.
Drug addicts committing crimes that harm other human beings is also immoral for the exact same reason.
Society has no right to police things because only individuals have rights, not groups. If you think groups have rights I'd love to be convinced of that.
> there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms.
This is so easy to deny. There are many ways to go about this. We could say caffeine helps society be more productive and so in the end it may be a net benefit. There are other drugs we could argue are helpful, at least for some people, like lithium, aspirin, etc. Moving on, if you don't accept any of the beneficial drugs, I could argue that many instances of drug use result in neutral societal consequences, for instance, every time I use drugs, there is never a societal harm. I'm taking 'societal harm' to mean violations of the rights of any individual in that society. When I take drugs I do not violate any one person's natural rights. So really, there are so many examples of how drug use does not cause societal harm, that for you to say there's no denying that, is frankly delusional.
The war on drugs may be a bad idea, but that doesn't make drug dealers activities OK. They are after all knowingly and directly funding the gangs and cartels that are murdering people all over Mexico and Colombia. Yes, Silk road sold Cocaine and not just domestic American weed. The law enforcement guys busting those people are doing good work, it's just that the reasons they have to do it are bad. That's on us and our elected representatives more than it is on them as government agents.
This is why I have no time for users of hard drugs claiming they're sticking it to the man and it's a libertarian issue. Yes it is, but that's no excuse for voluntarily choosing to fund murderers.
We all weigh these things out. Maybe the cocaine buyer is funding wars, but it's not his fault, just like it's not your fault that there's a war in the Middle East.
Why do we spend so much time and money chasing fugitives? Why do we risk officers' lives in armed standoffs? Because the government is not a government anymore if you get to win.
The fact that we do not allow crimes on the scale of Silk Road to continue is, in a fairly important sense, what makes the U.S. different from Mexico. Sure, there are lots of small-scale crimes we can't actually enforce, but those don't have the same public visibility, and so don't give the appearance of a government that can't enforce laws anymore. Silk Road does. There is an important sense in which it is the government's job to demonstrate that the rule of law is very much in effect in the large-scale and publicly visible areas where it matters.
Which is, in large part, why the fact that nobody went to jail over the 2008 meltdown is so concerning.
How do you actually get your drugs if you buy them on Silk Road? Do you have UPS bring the MDMA to your door?
Yes. Typically it comes in "stealth" packaging to prevent it being detected en route. If it wasn't for tor being so slow it would be basically the same flow as ordering something off amazon
(or so I'm told)
I think the best we can hope for is that they do the job we asked them to through the laws we put in place without violating other laws we put in place to protect civil liberties. If they're doing that (...) then it seems like this was their only ethical* choice.
Assuming they're following the laws protecting civil liberties (...), the decision on whether or not the upside of shutting down a few markets balances the downside of hardening the others is way above their pay grade.
* where ethical is defined as I imagine the individual law enforcement personnel are obligated to view it
A lot of them would lose their jobs first, but if they were principled enough to take that stand... we'd be in a better place.
Instead, most heinous drug violence happens between cartels and gangs at the levels of production and [major] distribution [pipelines]. These darknet markets are usually filled with well off youth buying drugs for themselves and their buddies who alternatively would have been unable to source the drugs or would have texted their neighborhood dealer to meetup in a McDonalds parking lot.
I mean...I understand using common terms that have become de facto names (like "marijuana" instead of "cannabis") but "weed"? That's like making a list with Morphine, Oxycodone, PCP, and Blow.
I dunno...maybe it just tickled my "one of these things is not like the other" sense since the list wasn't all slang terms but rather more accepted labels with a single street/slang name.
Several academics suggested it was a bad idea because the Mafia kept a lot of the other gangs and cartels in line since they ruled so much territory. By dismantling the larger mafia families, they were unknowingly giving free reign to a lot of the smaller street gangs who openly advocated violence and couldn't handle all the power they were being given.
Which sense is that?
The title is breezed over, as a topic, in the article. Looks more like WP blogger likes to get high and is miffed.