Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Obviously, the feds used a narcotics store to shut down Tor.
Reminds me of "The importance of commas".
"Lets eat, Grandpa!" and "Let's eat Grandpa!"
A comma makes the difference between a family supper and... a family supper. Hmmm...
Hyphenation is your friend. The title is extremely misleading. "Feds Shut Down Tor-Using Narcotics Store".
Real writers re-write to avoid the problem: "Feds shut down narcotics store that had been a TOR user". But you're right the standard of English grammar used today leaves a lot to be desired. Samuel Johnson, the Merriams and Noah Webster can be heard spinning at very high revolutions.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Feds Shut Down For Using Narcotics Store.
Hooray I thought.
I should lay off the Narcotics......
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".
The reverse classic is obviously
Panda: Eats, shoots and leaves.
Putting commas in without thinking about them can be just as bad as leaving them out. Thus they *are* a vital part of communication.
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
Real writers re-write to avoid the problem: "Feds shut down narcotics store that had been a TOR user".
Or even the more catchy "Feds shut down Tor-based narcotics store"
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!
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.
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.
Ambiguous headline. A hyphen would have helped, but so would rearranging the headline.
Read as "Tor-using narcotics store shut down by Feds".
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.
Yep. And pretty soon ISPs will be asked to identify customers using Tor at this rate.
Utilizing Tor will become probable cause for a search and seizure of all interesting data processing devices, in order to search for evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Samuel Johnson, the Merriams and Noah Webster can be heard spinning at very high revolutions.
Maybe we could hook their corpses to a generator. The way Slashdot is going, we could probably power a small city!
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
"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.
just how high are their revolutions, mein fuhrer? I was taught to consider six feet under relatively low.
p.s. "Feds Shut Down Tor-based Narcotics Store"
Capitalization is even more important.
It's the difference between helping your uncle jack off the horse, and helping your Uncle Jack off the horse.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
The same can be said about capitalisation. The example I use is "While working on his farm, I had to help my Uncle Jack off a horse."
Now switch the J to lowercase. o_O
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Except that there are rules in English writing that say that headlines must omit as much sentence elements as possibly to be as short and possible, and the ambiguity is welcome as publicity can never be bad, right? Seriously, you'd want to deprive us of such marvelous headlines as "Iraqi Head Seeks Arms", "Prostitutes Appeal to Pope", "Include Children When Baking Cookies", "Miners Refuse to Work After Death", "Eye Drops Off The Shelf", "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim", "Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant", "Queen Mary Gets Bottom Painted", "British Union Finds Dwarfs in Short Supply", "Hospitals Sued by Seven Foot Doctors", and many others?
Ezekiel 23:20
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
Actually, usenet is much better now that everyone on earth doesn't have access. All you have to do is filter the google groupers, and it's almost like going back in time. :)
Caveat Utilitor
Actually, a hyphen would fix it:
Feds shut down Tor-using narcotics store.
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.
Or the importance of knowing apostrophes/spelling as in:
Understanding the difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit.
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.
Dude, this is not about silkroad, but an other site. Find out what it is yourself.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
Steve Jobs, Jimi Hendrix, Aldous Huxley...
All dead.. obviously from LSD
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This is true. If I were a cop, when faced with something like TOR, I'd just ask myself if I actually needed to break the network to get the information I needed to make an arrest. It may well be trivial to monitor TOR users (and that would be real news for nerds), but unless it was, they'd probably just use an old-fashioned sting operation or following the money to get to the source.
However, if they *did* figure a flaw in TOR, it could be a much more *efficient* way of locating the dealers and their customers. Particularly since the TOR users may well take fewer precautions while using the protocol.
That said, nothing here indicates that they have found any way of directly breaking the TOR network. If they did use the actual network to locate the subjects, they probably tricked the users into leaving Javascript enabled or some other way of forcing the subject's computer to give up the identifying information that sidesteps TOR. There's a whole list of things you have to disable when you run TOR to ensure that you can't be tracked via what your own browser gives away or exposes.
Ars Technica is also at fault: neither LSD nor ecstacy are narcotics; they're psychedelics.
Narcotics put you to sleep, y'know....
mark
Samuel Johnson, the Merriams and Noah Webster can be heard spinning at very high revolutions.
Frequency, not revolutions, unless YOU are high, in witch case you can revolve as you wish.
More wasted time and taxpayer dollars throwing people in prison over things that shouldn't be illegal to begin with...
Or the importance of knowing apostrophes/spelling as in:
Understanding the difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit.
Aren't they the same thing? ie you have to know your shit to know you're shit
No they aren't. Jeez do I really have to explain the joke? Is American education really that bad? I know you guys like to mangle things like spelling, but really?
To "know your shit" implies you have a great understanding of something.
To "know you are shit" implies you're a low life.
Whilst not mutually exclusive, they are not the same thing at all.