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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
Someone's finally found a good reason to use bitcoin
Obviously, the feds used a narcotics store to shut down Tor.
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
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.
"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.
Except that scientists have studied LSD, for decades, and there has been little evidence of people forming dependences on it. This is in stark contrast to the three most popular legal drugs: caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol.
Palm trees and 8
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.
To be precise, caffeine forms a light dependency, but tobacco and alcohol both create strong physical dependencies which require heroic efforts to overcome.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it hundreds of times.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Reference please?
http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/infofacts/hallucinogens-lsd-peyote-psilocybin-pcp
Most users of LSD voluntarily decrease or stop its use over time. LSD is not considered an addictive drug since it does not produce compulsive drug-seeking behavior. However, LSD does produce tolerance, so some users who take the drug repeatedly must take progressively higher doses to achieve the state of intoxication that they had previously achieved.
I don't have the time to dig up a scientific paper but the article does have sources at the end.
https://www.erowid.org/references/refs.php?S=lsd
Going all the way back to the 1950s, in several languages.
Palm trees and 8
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.
A friend did her dissertation on the long term effects of MDMA ... For people who have done it more than 25 times there is a remarkable decrease in ability to strategize. The 25 times did not have to be in a quick time period, but generally had occurred over 5 years. The population she used was one that was not using other substances (alcohol, marijuana, caffeine, etc). Strategizing in this case was things like skipping a question you struggle with and coming back to it after finishing the other questions. Very interesting. I think MDMA is useful, but should be used carefully.
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
Now if they would just stop this crusade against people who don't choose alcohol as their drug of choice, it would be an even bigger step. Maybe if they stopped driving all this business underground, and stopped putting it all in the hands of major drug cartels....that would be swell too.
Maybe if they let Glaxco-smith-kline put all the major drug cartels out of business? That should take all of a few months for them.
Even dumber is...these sites tend to be pretty small. I doubt many cartels are using them, so its mostly small time dealers who are also techies. This isn't a win, this is more stupid. More lives ruined over a problem the government caused initially by creating the black markets.
Nearly every drug problem they have tried to "solve" with prohibition has only gotten worst. The ones they have driven off the streets completely tend to be the less popular drugs anyway, and just drive the users to even less safe alternatived.
Good job morons. Maybe if they keep banging their heads against the wall, the problem will just go away....clearly they just need to arrest, strip search, and lock up a few more people. That will totally solve the problem!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Narcotic is mostly useless as a medical term, anyway. It originally described sedatives - e.g., "drugs that put you to sleep," hence the 'narc' in the name. It was also used to describe opioids - e.g., heroin, morphine - most of which DO have a sedative effect, but not all sedatives are opioids. Toss in the legal system overloading the term to mean "anything illegal," and you're pretty much left with relying on context to determine what's meant.
DEA is a legal entity, arrests were made; it's reasonable to assume 'narcotic' is being used in the legal sense, rather than the medical/pharmacological meaning.
Actually, a hyphen would fix it:
Feds shut down Tor-using narcotics store.
Only 25 times?
Shit.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
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.
Steve Jobs, Jimi Hendrix, Aldous Huxley...
All dead.. obviously from LSD
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wikipedia states "When used in a legal context in the US, a narcotic drug is simply one that is totally prohibited
The problem is that the in the legal context, it's a made up word. Narcotic comes from the Greek 'narkos' which means sleep. Narcotics are sleep inducing drugs, no matter what a LEO might tell you.
The fact that law enforcement uses "narcotic" to refer to stimulant drugs is an indication that they don't actually care, or know, what these drugs do. They don't think about it. To them, drug = narcotic = bad. We should not promote, or even tolerate such sloppy thought on the part of our law enforcement.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Wrong. Addiction is a physical dependency. If you have physical withdrawal symptoms, it's an addictive drug. Caffiene's withdrawal symptom is headaches. LSD is neither addictive nor does it have habituation (in tobacco, the habituation is almost as bad as the physical withdrawal).
Free Martian Whores!
Yep, ask a tobacco smoker and he will tell you that tobacco isn't addictive at all and he can stop at any time. News at 11.
As a tobacco smoker and LSD user; I can tell you that tobacco is insanely addictive and hard to quit, whereas LSD is something I enjoy from time to time when the circumstances are right (anywhere between 2 and 6 times per year these days) but if I were to never take it again, I'd not feel the slightest "craving" as I do with tobacco (I'd probably miss it a bit, but no differently than I miss good friends who move away).
Tobacco - extremely addictive. LSD - not at all.
Wikipedia backs me up stating it is non-addictive. It also points out the very low harm/risk factor involved in use (also in stark contrast to tobacco, which is very harmful and will probably be the cause of my death).
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan