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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."
Someone's finally found a good reason to use bitcoin
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?
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
"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 you know, they packaged up the drugs without wearing gloves and their fingerprints were in a database somewhere, and they then posted them (with a nice local postmark) to a Fed posing as a customer (how would you know? Their customer will be just as anonymous). Somehow you had to get a physical product to someone else - and that's probably the weak-point. Hell, they could have just offered to drop it off on a street corner as a "one-off" delivery and got caught that way, you have no idea.
It's then only a small step and the simple matter of suspecting they may be a vast drug operation in place, finding out anything you can from the drugs collected by similar methods and narrowing down until you can just tap someone's whole Internet connection (Tor provides ANONYMITY, not SECURITY). Which they seem to have because they have emails of these people talking to each other.
Or maybe they just talked their way into an IRC channel or something that these guys used. You have absolutely no idea how they were caught, or whether they were just incredibly thick.
Using a tool badly does not mean the tool is broken.
wow all this posting over a missing hyphen. If only we could turn our energetic posting into solving cold-fusion then the world would be a happier place. Come to think of it we can skip the cold-fusion and just use the hot air on this forum. Don't mark me Troll - I'm a nice person!
This is what hyphens are for.
You mean they could have shut down Tor using hyphens?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
>> Tor-Using Narcotics Store
I tried Tor once. That shit will fuck you up. One hit and I was running around the parking lot naked, dueling with gnomes (or the Pasadena Police Dept, depending on what astral plane you were on at the time).
You mean they could have shut down Tor using hyphens?
No. That particular vulnerability was fixed a long time ago.
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"
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.