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Feds Shut Down Tor-Using Narcotics Store
Fluffeh writes "Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront called 'The Farmer's Market' that used the Tor anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses. Prosecutors said in a press release that the charges were the result of a two-year investigation led by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Los Angeles field division. 'Operation Adam Bomb, ' as the investigation was dubbed, also involved law enforcement agents from several U.S. states and several countries, including Colombia, the Netherlands, and Scotland. The arrests come about a year after Gawker documented the existence of Silk Road, an online narcotics storefront that was available only to Tor users. The site sold LSD, Afghani hashish, tar heroin and other controlled substances and allowed customers to pay using the virtual currency known as Bitcoin."
Why does Slashdot even bother to hire and pay an editor? They clearly don't do anything. That headline is so misleading. They didn't shut down the entire Tor network, they shut down a store that was USING the Tor network. Fix it!
K Man
Hyphenation is your friend. The title is extremely misleading. "Feds Shut Down Tor-Using Narcotics Store".
Where does it say Tor was shutdown because of this bust? The title seem to indicate so..
most confusing title ever
Someone's finally found a good reason to use bitcoin
Clearly there is a market for this, and no amount of government bullying will stop it.
Note the difference between: "Feds Shut Down Tor Using Narcotics Store" and "Feds Shut Down Tor-Using Narcotics Store".
(In the first headline, the feds have used a narcotics store to shut down Tor. In the second, the feds have shut down a narcotics store that uses Tor.)
When using an adjective that consists of multiple words (a.k.a. a multiple-word adjective), hyphens connecting those words make the meaning much clearer.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Obviously, the feds used a narcotics store to shut down Tor.
Feds Shut Down Tor Using Narcotics Store http://t.co/HqsOjzQx that saysd the feds have shut down the tor network using their narcotics storage or a narcotics storefront. i used to enjoy /. the headlines were slightly offbeat, but now their a complete fabrication. the onion is more straight forward than this crap...
Feds Shut Down For Using Narcotics Store.
Hooray I thought.
I should lay off the Narcotics......
Usenet is roughly get to8ugh. I hope morning. Now I have
The last thing government wants is to "solve" the "problem" and eliminate the black market. After all, they created the black market. They created it specifically to justify the expansion of their business (i.e. by "solving" the "problems" which they themselves created). Notice that I quite deliberately called government a business.
If you need proof, simply follow the money. Prohibition has justified hundreds of billions in spending, and the kicker is that the "tougher" they get (i.e. the more they spend), the more sophisticated the black market becomes, and therefore the more money they need to "solve" the "problem". It's a cycle of WIN for government, and a cycle of LOSE for everyone else (at least the ones who can see through the smokescreen and admit the truth).
When it comes to government, ALWAYS follow the money before listening to a word they say.
Palm trees and 8
It's not just the headline that is odd. The stroy itself has "more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics". Neither LSD nor ecstacy is a narcotic, so this is obviously nonsense. If they had said "other drugs" or "other controlled substances", that would have made some sense to me, though I suspect a lawyer might have a more recise meaning for "controlled substabce".
LSD and extasy (i.e. MDMA) are two of the least addictive drugs. In fact, LSD isn't addictive at all. And the side effects are very mild to none in either case.
But yeah, good job federal agents of the USA, your work is making the world a better place.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"Narcotics" sounds scary, so we should call all drugs narcotics! This is not a new propaganda strategy; marijuana was first called a narcotic in the 1930s during the hearings on banning the drug.
Palm trees and 8
Now we've won the war on drugs right?
Or did we just expand it... Cyber-drugs! We need more money, more laws, more power, more people or the evil cyber-drugdealers will kill your kids!
Just another example of the job killing regulations enacted by the Obama administration. When will the federal government get out of the way of small business owners and job creators?
This is what hyphens are for.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The point of the war on drugs is to imprison people, create excuses for violating civil rights, militarize the police, and fatten corporate profits (especially pharmaceuticals, light arms producers, and prison operators). Nobody wants it to stop; it would not be possible for it to stop even if we tried, because human beings use drugs, period. People drink tea, people use tobacco, people take antihistamines, people drink alcohol, and yes, people smoke marijuana, snort cocaine, and use LSD. If everyone stopped using illegal drugs, we would just make more drugs illegal to continue the arrests.
Palm trees and 8
From the article, emphasis mine:
I'm willing to bet that money transfers and the transfer of goods sold are still far more discoverable than individual Tor users but any assurances of that would certainly be welcome. I hope the Tor Project will be forthcoming with some as soon as some technically useful info is available.
On LSD side we have:
Steve Jobs, Jimi Hendrix, Aldous Huxley, Francis Crick (DNA), Kary Mullis (PCR), Jay Miner (Atari & Amiga) & the BSD unix developers
On the alcohol side:
The crews at Enron, Bear-Stearns and the whole Gulf War command. 40,000 deaths a year from traffic accidents. Who can even guess how many rapes and assaults?
http://www.ustream.tv/occupiedair
That none of the various "anonimizer" services out there, from HotSpotShield to Tor, actually give you any kind of tangible identity protection in the "real world" of the current internet. Hell, maybe these services were even setup expressly to lure people seeking "increased anonimity" for various reasons to make use of one these services, so it becomes that much easier to identify, tag, track & monitor them. Maybe some or all of these services have been electronically monitored 24/7 from the day they were born, but we are still told, over and over, and quite falsely, that these services magically "hide your identity" and give you some "online privacy"... In the increasingly Orwellian online and offline world we live in, precisely that being done by the powers-that-be would make a lot of sense, no? Tell all sorts of gullible internet users that using "Service X" magically "hides your identity on the internet", then monitor precisely that service 24/7, to get your hands on the data of a subgroup of internet users who seek to be "more anonymous" online. ... If your organizational mantra consists of "People who try to hide themselves online must have something important to hide, and must be monitored carefully", then you would to precisely that, no? You'd set up a dozen or so "anonimity services" under a variety of different names and front companies, then monitor the f__k out of the people who use those services, on an around-the-clock basis.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Given the nature of Bitcoin, the feds would probably have to rely on tracking the shipments of illicit goods back to their source to try and bust Silk Road. But as I understand it, Silk Road does not sell the drugs themselves; they simply act as an eBay-like service for others to sell their drugs. So even if the feds do find the initial source of a package, the most they've accomplished is to remove one seller from Silk Road, and not the site itself.
They can't spell either.
Many ISPs dropped USENET after several state's AG decide it was a haven for kiddie porn, nearly crippling it.
Megaupload was shutdown because SOME files on it were considered pirate files.
The idea that the government might shutdown other services on the internet if only because some of the activity on that service is illegal doesn't seem so far fetched.
They are the government. They are legion. They may or may not remember but they don't care. They don't forgive even if they are wrong. Expect them.
"Feds shut down narcotics store that had been a TOR user" could be taken that the store used TOR a little bit. A better rewrite would be "Feds shut down narcotics store that had used the TOR network for anonymizing distribution"
I for one, think this is a HUGE step for the Feds. For once it seems, they're attacking the lawbreakers rather than the neutral network that is utilized, like Andrew Cuomo did with Usenet or Craigslist strong-armed into getting rid of the Adult section.
Feds Shut Down, Tor Using Narcotics Store
Feds Shut Down Tor, Using Narcotics Store
Silk Road is an "online anonymous person to person sales network for anything". The fact that drugs are sold on it is indicative of the "anything goes" nature of the network. As per the wikipedia article, you can also purchase freshly baked (no, not that kind of baked) cookies on it, too. Since most things are illegal to sell (cookies baked in your basement [no health inspection], "legitimate" goods and services that you don't charge tax for [how many private sales do that?], drugs, guns in many places [especially without paperwork]) does it come as a surprise that a completely free sales network would attract illicit usage?
May as well say "pagers exist so drug dealers can meet up with their clients".
It's not a easy job, but the Feds have better resources.
What I imagine as workable
- Monitor up/down time of such website.
- Match them with provider related or internet related troubles.
Eventually when identifying the provider, you can tune it done by provoking a temporary connection failure. A connection failure on the right bottleneck will even make TOR traffic unreachable for the rest of the world. This should lead you to the ip of the TOR webserver
Comment removed based on user account deletion
the real use of bitcoin. why do you think the creator tried to be anonymous. in this age of drugs and terrorism, not only bitcoin should be illegal, but printed currency, coins and bills, as well anything of inherent value such as gold, silver, recyclable materials, basically anything you could trade for money that doesn't have a trail of who bought it. things should have a serial number and be registered to a credit card or debit card at the point of sale. s off
It works, no-one can tell where a Tor connection comes from as long as you don't leak that information in some other way
There are a number of well-known attacks on Tor that can compromise your anonymity, especially if your location can be narrowed down to a small geographic area. Suppose that I can narrow your location down to a small town, and I can make a reasonable guess that you are using WiFi. Here is an attack:
Easy to pull off? Not at all -- this is something that would only really be done for a high-value target, a priority target on which resources can be spent. This attack has already been used in the past, not when dealing with Tor but when dealing with legal barriers to wiretapping. It is not unreasonable to think that the Chinese government might try something like this to crack down on political dissidents.
Obviously there are some assumptions here that are hard to meet in the general case. How do I narrow down your geographic location? How can I be sure that you use WiFi? In the case of a drug dealer, narrowing down the geographic location is not terribly hard, since packages have to be shipped; the dealer might make long drives to far away post offices, but with enough packages one could get a good idea of where the deal is physically located (again, we should assume that this is a large-scale dealer, someone who would ship large numbers of packages -- someone the police could order a large number of packages from). WiFi is just a good guess, but it is not strictly necessary; an ISP could identify the covert channel too, and I would not be surprised if that was ruled legal by the courts.
At the end of the day, Tor cannot protect you from a concerted, well-funded attack. There are other systems that offer a higher security level (Mixmaster comes to mind) but which are less flexible than Tor, and thus less popular. Tor makes several trade-offs to achieve low latency, and nobody should claim that it could protect you from an intelligence agency or a military force (the DEA comprises both).
Palm trees and 8
Bitcoins aren't even slightly anonymous. All these sellers were outed by the feds simply buying some drugs with bitcoins and watching the bitcoin transactions through block explorer. A few tracked bitcoins wound up passing their way through a legitimate exchange like Mt Gox. Voila, the feds start tracing the transaction history back up the chain. It's actually less secure than old fashioned money laundering.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
What the lesson should be:
- We already have the resources and abilities to tackle real crimes using new technologies. no new laws are required.
What lesson law enforcment/government will likely spin on this one:
- Criminals are now using new technologies, we need more draconian laws to allow us to catch every single one of them.
I think it speaks volumes that you all missed the fact that they were shutdown EVEN THOUGH they were spoofing their ip addresses with TOR. This, in my mind, should make the question of 'is TOR any good?' the primary subject matter.
to increase government revenues through liquor taxese
Sounds more like an excuse to sweep the real reason under the carpet: the victims of prohibition (the people) finally realized they were being scammed. Bottom line is that alcohol prohibition was imposed because they calculated the reward to be greater than the risk, and in turn, prohibition was finally repealed because they later calculated the risk to be greater than the reward.
Again, follow the money.
A single missing semicolon at the end of a class declaration compiled but generated a linker error.
Stupid mistake, several hours locating.
Anonymous, cause programmers never make mistakes!
The indictment, which cited e-mails sent among the men dating back to 2006, didn't say how investigators managed to infiltrate the site or link it to the individuals accused of running it.
For all we know, they slapped a GPS tracker on some customer or employee. Or a drug-sniffing dog alerted while driving by the location.
Have gnu, will travel.
Try "TOR-using", not "TOR using"
Panda enters a restaurant. Eats, shoots, and leaves.
Dude, this is not about silkroad, but an other site. Find out what it is yourself.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
For bloody hell's sake! Who wants to edit for a pond of vicious piranhas anyway? I advise having not coffee, but something more like whiskey or laudanum before such daring, daunting tasks. There be much wickedness here.
Ars Technica is also at fault: neither LSD nor ecstacy are narcotics; they're psychedelics.
Narcotics put you to sleep, y'know....
mark
More wasted time and taxpayer dollars throwing people in prison over things that shouldn't be illegal to begin with...
You guys are all wrong about why they were busted. Read the federal indictment, it goes way more in depth.
TOR was NOT why they got busted. It originally started as an email address at hushmail. The idiots thought hushmail was secure, but they gladly hand over information to the fbi. Next they didn't use any encryption with emails til the end, when it didn't matter.
The main reason they got busted was they accepted PAYPAL and WU. That is the stupidest payment processor you could ever use. A mole infiltrated the inner circle, as the owners of the site were also the ones selling the drugs. They were sloppy and its their fault. It operated since 2006 though.