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Silk Road Shut Down, Founder Arrested, $3.6 Million Worth of Bitcoin Seized
New submitter u38cg writes Ross William Ulbricht, known as 'Dread Pirate Roberts,' was arrested in San Francisco yesterday and has been charged with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing. Silk Road has been shut down and some $3.6m in Bitcoin (26,000 Btc) seized. The question is — how?"
onyxruby submitted a link to the criminal complaint (PDF; coral cache might work better). The court filing indicates that they seized the actual servers and recovered their contents, making numerous references to the private messaging system. Also according to the court filing, the Silk Road was used to sell ~$1.2 billion in illicit goods since being founded in 2011.
I just finished reading Gwern's guide to the Silk Road the other evening. If you weren't familiar with the goods for sale, or how it worked, this is a great article: http://www.gwern.net/Silk%20Road
If I was guessing, I'd guess it was bitcoin, not Tor that did him in. He was moving way too much volume to hide all that. After all, the block chain is public. The FBI only has to lean on the various organizations that turn bitcoin into cash. If it gets the addresses of all their wallets, all their customer account information, and the identity of some coins that were spent on the silk road, it only has to work backwards to see who turned those coins into cash. People think bitcoin is anonymous, but it keeps a record of every transaction. This is probably the beginning of the end for bitcoin. I'm not sure it's mature enough to sustain itself without the black market support.
it seems that the Tor system is compromised by the snoops.
(facepalm)
tor was MADE BY the snoops, FOR the snoops
it started as a us naval research lab project to allow spies and dissidents in hostile countries to communicate with the us spy network without fear of being spied on by hostile governments
let me repeat: tor was made by the american government
of course it's been decentralized since then, but you're an idiot if you don't think they still don't have their hooks in it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#History
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Will the government try to redeem these bitcoins? Wouldn't that be like saying that they accept that bitcoin is valid? (Of course they could be hypocrites and say that bitcoin is completely invalid and redeem them anyways.)
It would be neat if all the seized bitcoins could be identified and recorded as being worthless now.
...a canadian routine postal search? sounds a bit of fabrication(you know, finding evidence illegally and then fabricating something for a bust). I seriously doubt they have fakeid smelling dogs.
but was he really hosting the operation from san fransisco? why, why on earth? why have anything tying him to it at home??
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
That is an enormous logical leap. Silk Road was running a high-profile, long-running Tor service, which is inherently dangerous and certainly more dangerous than many other applications of Tor. Is there evidence that suggests they were particularly skilled in doing so safely? There are also a number of well-known (and nearly-unavoidable) attacks against the Tor design. They are difficult, but then, they've been running a high-profile site for a long time, which makes it a lot easier to be targeted by even difficult attacks.
Finally, there are plenty of ways for an operation that large to be undone that are much more likely compromise of Tor itself. Most of these things are solved by conventional police work because (a) "real" evidence looks a lot better in a trial and (b) people are a lot better at making mistakes than most security technologies.
It depends. Do you make money from the prison industry?
I don't know if Tor is compromised or not, but according to the complaint they were on to him since 2011. He used an account called "altoid" on the regular net to both promote the launch of the site, and elsewhere to solicit IT help directing people to his personal Gmail address (with his name right there in it).
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I find myself ambivalent to Silk Road actions when I think of the losses to over 30 million American home owners of their homes to outside factors that they had no control over. That those involved in attacking the U.S.Economy got less regulation, and squandered, then profited from it. I believe the "Robo Singers" should be in prison, with restituion for damages caused. And yet, they walk more free than everyone else.
With the fact that every transaction in the block chains are easily traceable, I've wondered if Satoshi Nakamoto is really some crypto-savvy law enforcement group. Had Bitcoin been designed to be truly anonymous, it would be designed along the likes of Chaum's currency (Digicash) which is truly anonymous with blind signatures.
I am not going to be surprised if other people end up winding on the wrong end of a kicked-down door when their use of BitCoins for something gets them charged with something, perhaps years later.
BitCoin is quite a "cool" technology, but with the fact that anyone can see what was purchased combined with the fact that early adapters are the ones who actually make the cash when it is trivial to mine blocks (generate value from nothing) while people coming in later have to bring something of value to trade for BitCoins, it just reeks too much of a pyramid/Ponzi scheme for my tastes.
As for me, I'll just stick with PayPal. Only the usual LEOs and such can see my purchases when I use conventional Euros or dollars. Not everyone who has access to the block chain.
Wow, if people read the criminal indictment there's one, possibly even two murder-for-hires in the wings linked to (allegedly posted by / conversation with) this guy.
-Matt
correct, TOR is owned. look at this screenshot of prism:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/166821334/FlyingPig
right tab...
Tor was released by the Navy.
DPR was caught because he acted foolishly. See this excellent summary of the technically relevant parts of the criminal complaint. Thanks to YesIAmAScript for submitting the link.
DPR did nearly everything wrong, mixing his IRL and hidden identities.
Obviously. And of course he had to have fake IDs to show godaddy to rent a server. Nobody can get servers without showing ID these days, I hear it's just like renting a car.
My inner paranoia says the feds broke tor and knew who he was but couldn't prove it with real evidence so they sent some guy to canada and mailed a package of fake IDs with an "open this box please" sticker on it for the canadian mailman (and/or us customs, if the canadians were asleep) to find.
You perspective is common, but I think flawed. We need to have law and order in a civil society, even when there are great injustices also taking place. As a thought experiment, imagine that you are living in South prior to the Civil War. Women can't vote and people are actually enslaved right in your very own town. Now you find out that a guy in town is passing off counterfeit money. Do you arrest and prosecute the guy, or do you let him go because what he is doing is a trivial crime because one of the most unspeakably horrible crimes that man has ever perpetuated upon man is occurring at the same time?
Anyway, my 2 cents...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
One of the more significant recent revelations is that the govt uses "parallel construction" in building a cae. If possibly illegal surveillance is used to catch you, they -- after the fact -- construct a legal scenario for how they MIGHT have caught you that will pass muster w/ a judge.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
If he's an ally in the fight against slavery, you're damned right you don't do anything about it. And in this case, what we're talking about is a modern equivalent to the underground railroad. DPR enabled the oppressed to live freer at great personal risk. That's worthy of respect.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
> Legalization of heroin or other highly addictive drugs would be disastrous.
I hear this a lot; but what is it even based on? I used to be just a "legalize pot" guy, but the more I looked at it, the more I found that drug prohibition didn't solve, or even help, a single problem.
Do you know what percentage of people in burn units in the US (ever been to a burn unit btw? not a fun place) are there for cooking meth? Its about half. Yes....HALF the people in burn units. How the hell did we get here?
Meth has been around since the fucking 1930s. Never before in history could you say half of the people being treated for severe burns came from meth cooking, why now? The answer is fairly simple.... the DEA pushed other drugs off the market, and in the vacuume, people looking to make a quick buck or get their fix, asked "What is the easiest stimulent drug I can make at home" turns out...meth was the winner.
So they took a problem...and made it worst. They did that with fucking everyting. Would we have IV drug use without prohibition? Sure, a few. However, I doubt it would be nearly as popular. I mostly doubt it because, people were using other drugs before meth became so available.
Krokodil or however they spell it.... is desomorphine. Everything I read about it indicates it would be a fine drug for opiate addicts. Its fairly short acting, it produces less respiratory distress (ie its safer). However.... its also cheap to produce in your kitchen from codiene. Why are people doing it? Because they can't buy anything cheaper! Who the hell would whip up something in their kitchen and inject it, if, for a similar price, they could buy it?
Look at the swiss heroin study, allowed users cheap, fairly priced heroin and gave them a safe place to shoot up. Quickly the subjects of the study ceased illegal activities and got jobs.
Frankly the claims of problems with legalization sound no different and are based on no more sound evidence than claims that accepting homosexuality is going to turn children gay.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"