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
Obviously, the feds used a narcotics store to shut down Tor.
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
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.
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.
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"
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.