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.

Comments

HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

PRISM.

Duh.

Re:HOW??

[i kan reed]

Or more specifically, monitoring known(or complicit) tor entry nodes, looking for quantity of activity corresponding to activity by roberts, back tracking to the origin IP address, getting a warrant for a full-on-monitoring of that address, verifying their target, then going for a bust.

Encryption and anonymyzing technology only works in as much as no one with any resources actively wants to figure out who you are. You might be able to hide your message, but you'll never hide your existence.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. NSA -> FBI -> Parallel Construction Filter -> Arrest.

Tor was not designed to protect against an adversary that has a global view of all traffic.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more specifically, monitoring known(or complicit) tor entry nodes, looking for quantity of activity corresponding to activity by roberts, back tracking to the origin IP address, getting a warrant for a full-on-monitoring of that address, verifying their target, then going for a bust.

Encryption and anonymyzing technology only works in as much as no one with any resources actively wants to figure out who you are. You might be able to hide your message, but you'll never hide your existence.

You had me sold on this theory, right up until you said "warrant".

Then I knew it was bullshit.

Like our government feels the need to recognize the legal process anymore.

Re:HOW??

[Dunbal]

Yeah it's only the metadata. Keep telling yourself that so that you believe it.

Re:HOW??

[Rinikusu]

I'd like to see how he implemented his back-end. Did he rely upon tor's anonymity and get lazy in the private messaging system? Were the logs/messages unencrypted and left in RAM? The new methods of catching computer crooks basically entail that the FBI sends in an IT team and nothing is touched or powered off (meaning mounted encrypted drives are live and they can run through them at will, etc).

Also, I remember reading an article by Schneier about the possibility for a well-funded attacker to effectively add tons of nodes, exit and internal, and then DDOS the non-controlled nodes to shape traffic in a manner where a good majority of the packets flow throw their own nodes, enabling them to track and compromise users and end service locations. We know the US .gov can fund an operation that large...

Just goes back to the old saying: when it comes to gang warfare, Uncle Sam has the biggest gang of them all...

Re:HOW??

[i kan reed]

You had me sold on this theory, right up until you said "warrant".

Then I knew it was bullshit.

Like our government feels the need to recognize the legal process anymore.

You know that he's going to have a trial, right? And that the FBI won't want him to get off because there was no warrant for the evidence the prosecution presents in that trial, right? There might very well be unconstitutional monitoring in this process, but to bring it to court and get a conviction, a warrant is necessary paperwork.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

No. http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf has more info. DPR got extremely sloppy with keeping his identities separate. The Tor part worked fine.

Re:HOW??

[jandrese]

It didn't stop them from abusing the crap out of the law when they got Kim Dotcom. That said, Kim might walk because there was so much prosecutorial misconduct.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem with tor is that the longer you use it from the same endpoint, the easier it is to find you through correlation of traffic. It is possible to find you as soon as you start sending traffic into tor but its more difficult. If a government entity (or anyone with alot of resources) throws a tonne of nodes into the mix, they can quite easily hunt the users/servers down.

All you need to take away from this is TOR is not safe when used alone.

I believe its best to route like: you -> TOR -> VPN -> internetz. (VPN before TOR is just as good as not using a VPN at all)

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah?

Re:HOW??

[mattsqz]

that was across borders, sir. US law doesnt really apply outside the US, and im sure our govt gives no fucks, zero, about other nation's laws.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

You're feeding a troll. He just wants to be negative and bitter. He doesn't know how to feel any other way.

Re:HOW??

[vivaoporto]

Actually, considering what was revealed on a previous article (DEA Program "More Troubling" Than NSA)

"The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated"

it is more likely than not that a very clear paper trail will be shown that it all happened by good old fashioned police investigation as you described.

It doesn't mean it was not obtained with an illicit program to begin with, only that they were able to cross the "t"s an dot the "i"s later.

Re:HOW??

[Joce640k]

I'd like to see how he implemented his back-end. Did he rely upon tor's anonymity and get lazy in the private messaging system?

Tor won't help you much against an enemy that has many global taps into the Internet as the NSA has. They'll soon know exactly where messages originate and remove any "anonymity".

There's every reason to believe they can break the encryption, too.

http://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-can-probably-break-tors-encryption-keys-1273299782

Re:HOW??

[tnk1]

The US Government cares, but only so far as they need to make sure they get reciprocal privileges in that country. Obviously, US power makes it easier to get things done without having to horse trade for it, but ultimately, it only works if there is not too much abuse.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

They just need to come up with an alternative story about how they got the information legally. For example the official story is that they happened to notice fake ids in the mail - just by accident. No one can say if that was really by accident - the knowledge that they needed to look at that particular package might have been from an illegal source. This is standard practice in US law enforcement, even though it's supposed not to happen by the principle of fruit of the poisonous tree. Of course, the defense won't have the ability to make that legal argument if the true source of evidence is illegally concealed.

Re:HOW??

[LifesABeach]

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.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Or having backdoors in some of the systems, the tor nodes or even unknown backdoors in the servers themselves...
Also chances are when setting this system up, they discussed it online via email or other third party services where the nsa could eventually find the information.

Re:HOW??

[jonbryce]

Any evidence they want to present in court has to be backed by a warrant. Of course they almost certainly did other surveillance first to figure out where to target the search warrants.

Re:HOW??

[ttucker]

They just need to come up with an alternative story about how they got the information legally. For example the official story is that they happened to notice fake ids in the mail - just by accident. No one can say if that was really by accident - the knowledge that they needed to look at that particular package might have been from an illegal source. This is standard practice in US law enforcement, even though it's supposed not to happen by the principle of fruit of the poisonous tree. Of course, the defense won't have the ability to make that legal argument if the true source of evidence is illegally concealed.

And this back-fabrication of probable cause has been happening for the past 75 years to, "protect confidential informants".

Re:HOW??

[noh8rz10]

I'm not going to cry about criminals going to jail. it's people like this that help the govt justify the NSA, etc. they need all these tools because people who use encryption / tor / bitcoin / etc are criminals! thanks silk road for ruining it for the rest of us.

it's like the shoe bomber guy who gave the gov't authority to tell me to take off my shoes, and the underwear bomber guy who convinced the govt to fondle my nuts every time I went through security (although secretly they always wanted to do that). Now because of the boston bombers NSA will be collating my online profile to look for "suspicious activities" that may make me a potential terrorist.

I think in 1984 the Goldman terrorist guy actually didn't exist, and was just a gov't front to justify their behaviors and scare people. maybe that's what's going on here?

Re:HOW??

[Razgorov Prikazka]

If you are a journalist in a 'not so democratic' country you are probably working for the state press telling people exactly what the nice mister Dick-tator wants the people to believe. Journalists who use TOR to get the real message out are CRIMINALS! And once found, put in a cage and shot. Only criminals use TOR!
If you are a student in economics you would probably only read books because something interesting and practical like bitcoins are only for CRIMINALS! And they should be shot. Actually, money in any form is used by criminals and should be avoided! Right?
If you are a human you would only drink mercury because water, or hydrogendioxide as you will probably call it, is used for making drugs! Kill the waterdrinkers!

You must have a rather complicated life I guess...

Re:HOW??

[noh8rz10]

i dont' understand your point?

Re:HOW??

[i kan reed]

No, not necessarily. Conjecture is conjecture.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me sold on this theory, right up until you said "warrant".

Then I knew it was bullshit.

Like our government feels the need to recognize the legal process anymore.

You know that he's going to have a trial, right? And that the FBI won't want him to get off because there was no warrant for the evidence the prosecution presents in that trial, right? There might very well be unconstitutional monitoring in this process, but to bring it to court and get a conviction, a warrant is necessary paperwork.

That's right. Each defendant is entitled to a fair and impartial conviction.

Re:HOW??

[noh8rz10]

I believe the "Robo Singers" should be in prison, with restituion for damages caused.

I agree - they suck! like those xmas albums with the barking dogs at different pitches.I want my $9.99 back!

Re:HOW??

[bugs2squash]

Indeed, robo singers like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber are annoying. But there have been many egregious products of the recording industry over the decades and it seems harsh to throw them in jail.

Re:HOW??

[PRMan]

Look up "Parallel Construction". Regardless of how much they originally had on him through NSA channels or whatever, I assure they have a clean paper trail with enough to take him to trial for stuff he did after they already had warranted phone taps and e-mail, etc.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

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...

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

I really hate parallel construction.

Re:HOW??

[NettiWelho]

SR shutdown fallout discussion. (self.SilkRoad)

Now, onto how he got caught... An agent involved in the investigation ("Agent-1"), found the first few references to SR on the internet from somebody only identified as "altoid", attempting to promote the site in its beginning days, in January of 2011.
In October of the same year, a user also going by the name of "altoid" made a posting on Bitcoin Talk titled "a venture backed Bitcoin startup company", which directed interested users to "rossulbricht at gmail dot com".
That email address is what led to DPR's downfall.
---
After identifying "altoid", they started connecting the "DPR" identity to Ulbricht pretty quickly.
Ulbricht's Google+ page and YouTube profile both make multiple references to the a website dubbed the "Mises Institute". DPR's signature on the SR forums contained a link to the Mises Institute.
DPR cited the "Austrian Economic theory" along with the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, all of which are closesly associated with the Mises Institute.
Server logs show that someone logged onto the SR administration panel from San Fransisco around the same time that Ulbricht was staying in San Fransisco.
Multiple fake IDs were intercepted by U.S. Customs & Border Patrol while on their way to an address which Ulbricht was living at the time.
These IDs all carried photos of Ulbricht but had false names and details. This was around the same time that DPR stated in a message that he was acquiring some fake IDs to buy new servers.
When questioned by Homeland Security about the fake IDs, he refused to answer any questions but then stated that anyone could purchase such things using "Silk Road" and "Tor".
The address which Ulbricht was staying at was being rented in cash and he was living with housemates who knew him under a name which corresponded with one of the fake IDs.
He posted on StackOverflow using his real name, inquiring about how to use curl/PHP to grab things off Tor, before quickly changing the name to "frosty" (with a fake email: frosty@frosty.com)

Thought my money is on NSA and parallel construction.

Re:HOW??

[wordsnyc]

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.

Re:HOW??

[kju]

This is what they claim. You might remember from the NSA documents that it appears standard procedure to cover the source of information by creating a plausible lie.

Of course they would never tell if they have enough metadata and surveillance to identify Tor users and hidden sites. It would be in their interest to keep us using a network they can penetrate.

Re:HOW??

[MarkvW]

Trial? Heck no. He'll plead to whatever the feds want, and he'll like it! And he'll probably have to provide information and testimony as well to get that deal.

Looks like he'll never make it to the Pablo Escobar level. He'll probably respawn in about twenty years, or so.

Re:HOW??

[Hatta]

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.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Really? I'm having trouble swallowing the concept of abandoning law and order in the face of evil. Society becomes impossible, IMHO.

Re:HOW??

[osvenskan]

I believe the "Robo Singers" should be in prison

I don't like Autotune either, but your solution is a bit harsh.

Re:HOW??

[X0563511]

You're not alone. That made zero sense.

Re:HOW??

[Hatta]

What value does law and order have to the slave? Law and order is nothing more than a tool, and when that tool is wielded by evil, it serves evil. A society where injustice is enforced by the government and cheered on by patriots is no society that is worth having.

Think about it, if you were the slave in your scenario, would you really care that an abolitionist had counterfeited currency? Hell no! If you thought that counterfeiting would lead to your freedom, I bet you would run the presses yourself.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

She's Hot!

Re:HOW??

[houstonbofh]

You had me sold on this theory, right up until you said "warrant".

Then I knew it was bullshit.

Like our government feels the need to recognize the legal process anymore.

You know that he's going to have a trial, right? And that the FBI won't want him to get off because there was no warrant for the evidence the prosecution presents in that trial, right? There might very well be unconstitutional monitoring in this process, but to bring it to court and get a conviction, a warrant is necessary paperwork.

That's right. Each defendant is entitled to a fair and impartial conviction.

"You promised me those men would be decently treated."
"They were decently treated. They were decently fed, decently clothed, and then they were decently shot. Those men are common outlaws, nothing more."
The Outlaw Jose Wales

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Think about it, if you were the slave in your scenario, would you really care that an abolitionist had counterfeited currency?

My example wasn't from the slave's perspective, but then I don't see myself as a slave currently. If you do, then we can go down that path. Are we talking about an emotional response or a rational response? Emotionally, I probably wouldn't give a shit. Rationally, whether or not you care about the counterfeiter would depend heavily on how it would affect your current life. Even slaves had it good or bad relative to one another. For example, a slave that is currently lashed every night and raped by the master might love it if the counterfeiter ruins the master's day a little. A slave that is in a house position or an overseer might want to protect their position and might view the counterfeiter as a threat. The analogy is a bit stretched at this point, but hopefully I can bring it back home.

So back in today's world, you might see yourself as analogous to a slave, but presumably your life could still get worse. Emotionally, you may not give a shit about law and order, but rationally you probably should. I don't know your situation, but I suspect that there are a whole lot of fellow "slaves" in much worse shape than you, who would love a shot at your stuff.

Re:HOW??

[nospam007]

It's pure BS.
Since the eighties, everybody knows that Roberts is not one man, but a series of individuals who periodically pass the name and reputation to a chosen successor. Everyone except the successor and the former Roberts is then released at a convenient port, and a new crew is hired. The former Roberts stays aboard as first mate, referring to his successor as "Captain Roberts", and thereby establishing the new Roberts' persona. After the crew is convinced, the former Roberts leaves the ship and retires on his earnings.

Re:HOW??

[Hatta]

My example wasn't from the slave's perspective

Yes, those who preach law and order tend to be unable to empathize with the oppressed.

For example, a slave that is currently lashed every night and raped by the master might love it if the counterfeiter ruins the master's day a little.

Whether I'm a slave or not, I am completely in favor of the assassination of such a monster. Law and order is worthless if it allows atrocities to happen.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Didn't the Confederates actually work on counterfeiting Northern currency as a way to try and destabilize the Northern economy?

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the leaders of the US Revolution were smugglers and war profiteers. That's one of the reasons that the Revolution actually worked!

Re:HOW??

[cbiltcliffe]

What the rambling poster was saying was this:

"Criminals use Tor" is not the same as saying "All Tor users are criminals."

Admittedly, it was a little long, and there wasn't a car analogy in there, but really? You couldn't figure that out?

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Yes, those who preach law and order tend to be unable to empathize with the oppressed.

I'm not sure why I deserve such a dig, since I clearly made an effort to go with the other side of the analogy.

Law and order is worthless if it allows atrocities to happen.

And yet I provided an example of why it is not, from the perspective of the oppressed. Why is my example invalid?

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Yes, well, I'm certainly not going to defend the drug war!

Re:HOW??

[j-turkey]

Whether I'm a slave or not, I am completely in favor of the assassination of such a monster. Law and order is worthless if it allows atrocities to happen.

Reading through this thread, I find your sense of ethics to be bizarre. It sounds to me like you're suggesting that if you don't agree with one law, everything else goes out the window. Given a large enough society, there will always be injustice. Justice is never perfect and it would be naive to assume that it can. A good society does its best to recognize injustices and and correct it where it exists...but there will always be different perspectives on what qualifies as injustice. Having a perspective that's different from the mainstream, or even being ahead of the historical curve on what qualifies as injustice that doesn't give one license to break every law. That would be stupid and that person would be an asshole - or at the very least, a criminal.

Re: HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Right you are!

Re:HOW??

[MrKaos]

You had me sold on this theory, right up until you said "warrant".

Then I knew it was bullshit.

Like our government feels the need to recognize the legal process anymore.

You know that he's going to have a trial, right? And that the FBI won't want him to get off because there was no warrant for the evidence the prosecution presents in that trial, right? There might very well be unconstitutional monitoring in this process, but to bring it to court and get a conviction, a warrant is necessary paperwork.

His name was Kevin Mitnick.

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

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...

Were white guys enslaved right in my own town? Because I'm white...

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

If it helps the analogy, then go for it.

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

This is what they claim. You might remember from the NSA documents that it appears standard procedure to cover the source of information by creating a plausible lie.

Of course they would never tell if they have enough metadata and surveillance to identify Tor users and hidden sites. It would be in their interest to keep us using a network they can penetrate.

Creating plausible lies was one of the first things I learned as a kid. I found that my mum could usually tell when I was lieing and that detecting my lies made her feel really good about herself. So I developed a technique of 'sacrificial lies'; a lie that she could easily see through and get all puffed up about having 'found out' and then follow this with another, more plausible lie that she would accept as 'the truth' because she 'saw through me'. I was about 9 years old at the time.

I'd be surprised if the NSA weren't using techniques like this with, eg, congress...

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

therein lies the problem, i guess

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Kim might also walk because of that little detail of him NOT BEING IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM UNDER THEIR JURISDICTION.

And if all he gets is to walk, but not compensated for the billions of dollars in losses he suffered by having his business stolen by jack booted thugs with no legal process whatsoever in effect, it'll be a gross miscarriage of justice.

And no, he's not my favorite person. But if this kind of shit can happen to him just because he's not everyone's favorite person, then we may as well entirely give up on that whole rule of law concept entirely and stop splitting hairs about it.

Re:HOW??

[LordLucless]

If your government can infringe your rights because of the actions of others, you never really had any rights. Your government was just temporarily overlooking their ability to screw you.

Re:HOW??

[CodeBuster]

This guy, Ross Ulbricht, made a number of critical mistakes irrespective of his use of TOR. For example, he posted on the shroomery.org forums using the user name "altoid" and then again a few days later on bitcointalk.org with the same user name. The court documents aren't clear on whether or not he was using TOR at the time he made those posts or when or how he created those accounts in the first place. Apparently, these were some of the earliest public posts promoting what would ultimately become the Silk Road. Eight months after that, the "altoid" identity was used again on the bitcointalk forum to advertise for an "IT pro in the Bitcoin community" to hire for a job with a "venture backed Bitcoin startup company". This was critical because the email address for the job posting was rossulbricht at gmail. So this guy used his real email address (which contained his real name) posting as "altoid", the same account that had earlier promoted the Silk Road concept on both shroomery and bitcointalks: epic fail. . From there it was proverbial cake for the authorities to monitor his Google accounts and trace the IP address of his logins to an Internet cafe in San Francisco. They also found that he had an account on the Mises Institute website (an Austrian Economics organization) under Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road website also linked to the Mises Institute website. Yet more evidence, albeit circumstantial, that Ulbricht was the one behind Silk Road. Game, Set and Match to the the 3 letter agencies and the USSS. Have a nice day.

Re:HOW??

[CodeBuster]

I agree - they suck! like those xmas albums with the barking dogs at different pitches.I want my $9.99 back!

Hell, I'd be happy if the stores just agreed to give "Jingle Bells Rock" a rest this year.

Re:HOW??

[ifiwereasculptor]

It depends on the law. Slavery is pretty bad. The only reason why it endured was that, because it was race-based, you, white man, knew your ass wasn't going to be on the line. Think more along the lines of that Braveheart thing where the local nobleman was supposed to have sex with your wife. That was very much a reason for saying "fuck everything, let's fuck those fuckers". So I don't think his ethics are off, he's merely saying that money counterfeiting and the murder of a slave trader are more moral than depriving prople of the most basic control over their lives and submitting them to capricious torture. Seems about right.

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

I have to say I think that "one of the most unspeakably horrible crimes that man has ever perpetuated upon man" is just so blatantly false, there are a LOT worse things than that which people inflict on one another.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with you Americans is that you invent some proof-of-concept grade technology and then generalize from that rather crappy technology.

Let a real engineer from Germany work on anonymizers and then again draw some conlusions.

Like we did with missiles.

Hint: Constant bitrates between nodes make correlation attacks impossible.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

A high-sec TOR hidden service would be using TrueCrypt and booby-trapped physical security and power lines. When the federales come into building, service goes down forever. Backup is buried in the woods at a secret location.

Obviously the SR guy was one of the stoned muppets who can code some PHP.

Being stoned != being a proper covert operator/soldier.

@66MI group and USMC: don't worry about me; I am just doing the job you are supposed to do. Now get off your fat asses and go after the NY and London finance criminals who will reboot our political system, if left undisturbed.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Slavery involves a lot of those. I'd be curious to know what horrors you think weren't a part of slavery.

Re:HOW??

[TapeCutter]

I'm all for recreational drugs but the silk road guy has been charged with advertising and paying for a hit on his employee. In this scenario the silk road owner is the alledged "dick-tator" who is ordering the whistle-blower's assassination.

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

Slavery involves a lot of those. I'd be curious to know what horrors you think weren't a part of slavery.

Slavery doesn't require any horrors in its implementation.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Are we going to venture into speculation of a humane form of slavery, or shall we stick to reality?

Re:HOW??

[ozbon]

Potentially I'd say it was related to this story ( http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/ ) about the FBI having control over a number of Tor servers. Initially they were aiming for Freedom Hosting, but if that can do it for one site/service, I'm sure they can do the same for others...

Re:HOW??

[stealth_finger]

What, so was silk road hosted on US servers? Seems like a bad idea if there ever was one,

Re:HOW??

[ultranova]

We need to have law and order in a civil society, even when there are great injustices also taking place.

But if great injustices are taking place, then the society is not really civil, now is it? You can't act like a ruffian and expect to be treated like a lady.

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?

What if the counterfeiter is actually an agent sent from the North to undermine Southern economy, specifically to weaken it prior to the inevitable war? And even if he isn't, his actions still serve to help undermine the system that's perpetuating said crimes. If you arrest him, you are strenghtening it and therefore taking part in its crimes.

Also, why go that far back? We have more recent examples. For example, imagine you're a guard at Auschwitz. You notice a prisoner trying to escape. Should you do your legally mandated duty and sound the alarm, or should you tie your shoelaces for the next five minutes?

Re:HOW??

[ultranova]

Slavery doesn't require any horrors in its implementation.

A particularly misguided libertarian who thinks forbidding slavery means the government is unjustly restricting economic activity, or a religious nut who thinks because the Bible mentions slavery it is therefore an institute approved and perhaps even mandated by his god.

Any bets?

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the "loss" of the home they didn't really own anyway? Remember that the bank held the mortgage on nearly all of those properties. I would guess nearly all of those "owners" refi'd their properties over and over pulling tax free money out and spending it on stuff. The real losers are the one's that didn't refi and spend, or had paid their homes off. Now, their homes are worth half what they were and they have no toys to show for it. A neighbor sent their two kids to law school with refi money and then walked from the house and let the bank foreclose. Is that fair to the family that bought a house they could actually afford and made their payments and didn't recklessly refi and spend over and over? Their kids have to go to community college.

Spare me the misty eye'd lament over those "poor homeowners" who lost their homes. The responsible people in the country are the one's who are now having to pay for the party those "homeowners" had.

Re: HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

it was a fonzworth who counterfeited northern currency.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

But if great injustices are taking place, then the society is not really civil, now is it? You can't act like a ruffian and expect to be treated like a lady.

Civil society doesn't spring form a vacuum. The US Republic built upon the British Parliamentary system, which built upon hereditary monarchy, and so on. The idea that anarchy will somehow make an injustice go away is not credible IMHO. The best way to correct an injustice is to work within the current civil system. If we were in a dictatorship, that might not be the correct path - but our starting condition is a republic.

What if the counterfeiter is actually an agent sent from the North to undermine Southern economy, specifically to weaken it prior to the inevitable war?

I think the answer is pretty straightforward - it depends on your goal. A slave would probably encourage the counterfeiting. But I'm struggling to see the analogy to Wall Street... do you consider them agents of a foreign power?

And even if he isn't, his actions still serve to help undermine the system that's perpetuating said crimes.

He's not only undermining the system - he's also undermining regular people's ability to use money and participate in commerce. Burning down the local cotton gin will certainly hurt the slave owners, but also the non-slave cotton farmers who depended on the gin for their income. It's like burning down your house to solve a mouse infestation.

For example, imagine you're a guard at Auschwitz.

I was going to use a Nazi example, but I didn't want to Godwin this thing :)

Should you do your legally mandated duty and sound the alarm, or should you tie your shoelaces for the next five minutes?

That is far too easy, and the escapee is not guilty of any "crime" other than being the wrong religion or having the wrong gender preference. Allowing the prisoner to escape does not harm anyone except the corrupt regime. Silk Road seems to have involved organized crime activity like extortion and (new information today) contract murder. I'm not going to defend the war on drugs, which I find absurd, but I will defend arrests for fraud, theft, extortion, tax evasion, attempted murder, etc.

In short, yes, of course I would prefer if bad actors could not hide behind the facade of corporate protection and limited liability. To get there, I support reform and not a period of anarchy. It's like the old meme:

1. Anarchy!
2. ???
3. A truly just society

Re: HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck society, I've had my fill of it.

Re: HOW??

[White Jesus]

it's really sad that there are still people in this world that conflate legality with morality. maybe there were some people on SR doing things that actually hurt someone, you can have distaste for them all you want, surely. but don't be so ignorant as to assume that everyone that breaks the law should be dismissed and scorned as worthy of punishment. the law is all too often a malfeasance, or have you not heard of regulatory capture? or things like ya know, slavery? Jim Crow?

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

Are we going to venture into speculation of a humane form of slavery, or shall we stick to reality?

I think you should definitely stick to reality. This whole "unspeakably horrible crimes" piece is just political theater. There are way worse crimes, way worse treatments than enslavement itself; forget about the things that enslavers have then gone on to do and just think about slavery itself. If you start to imagine all the nasty things that slavers have done you are thinking too deep.

For example, good old Abraham Lincoln wasn't so against slavery itself; he used it for his political theater which then allowed him to do all kinds of things. For Lincoln, slavery was just a tool.

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

Slavery doesn't require any horrors in its implementation.

A particularly misguided libertarian who thinks forbidding slavery means the government is unjustly restricting economic activity, or a religious nut who thinks because the Bible mentions slavery it is therefore an institute approved and perhaps even mandated by his god.

Any bets?

There have been a lot of slaves who benefited greatly from their condition. There have been a lot of slaves who suffered. Slavery itself isn't the problem. Guns don't kill people; physics kills people.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

This whole "unspeakably horrible crimes" piece is just political theater.

What political theater are we in? This is not Civil War Reconstruction. Rapes, murder, beatings, splitting of families, etc. were all part of slavery in the American South. This is not controversial stuff here. There was zero recourse - zero - for a slave caught in such a situation.

In reality, the atrocities and the slavery go hand in hand. I'm not sure what you have in mind with bloodless slavery, but it is a fiction in any event.

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

All this stuff goes on in war as well. Is war worse than slavery? equal to slavery?

Its this statement that slavery is one of the WORSE crimes that irks me. There are far far worse crimes. Rape outside the context of slavery is itself already a worse crime than slavery without rape. Torture outside of the context of slavery is already worse than slavery without torture.

To say that slavery starts out as the worse crime puts the cart ahead of the horse.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

. Rape outside the context of slavery is itself already a worse crime than slavery without rape. Torture outside of the context of slavery is already worse than slavery without torture.

Goodness, are we arguing about semantics? Slavery automatically includes things like rape and torture. When one refers to the horrors of slavery, they mean as it is practiced - which in the American South included rape and torture. Even individually, those are some of the worst crimes one human can commit.

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

. Rape outside the context of slavery is itself already a worse crime than slavery without rape. Torture outside of the context of slavery is already worse than slavery without torture.

Goodness, are we arguing about semantics? Slavery automatically includes things like rape and torture. When one refers to the horrors of slavery, they mean as it is practiced - which in the American South included rape and torture. Even individually, those are some of the worst crimes one human can commit.

No. It doesn't *automatically* include all that.

Its used as a cover and pretext for crimes, just as war is used. You can use the phrase 'horrors of war' in the same way as 'horrors of slavery' without war itself being a crime. If war were, in and of itself a crime, the USA could be in some big trouble...

Calling slavery one of the "one of the most horribly unspeakable crimes" devalues the real crimes that take place UNDER slavery.

Like saying "administering date rape drugs is one of the most horribly unspeakable crimes" when the real crime is the rape and is much worse than merely administering a sedative.

Re:HOW??

[ultranova]

There have been a lot of slaves who benefited greatly from their condition.

Who, and in what way?

Slavery itself isn't the problem.

...

Well, I guess the rest of us must just hope you'll never have any power over anyone or anything, least you'd get a chance to act on your beliefs.

Also, I'm leaning towards the "religious nut" now - such arguments were used prior to the Civil War, and never admitting being wrong is the core tenet of too many denominations to count.

Re:HOW??

[ultranova]

Civil society doesn't spring form a vacuum. The US Republic built upon the British Parliamentary system, which built upon hereditary monarchy, and so on. The idea that anarchy will somehow make an injustice go away is not credible IMHO.

Except that both of those cases include an outright rebellion as the driving force for change. So you're actually lending the idea credit here.

The best way to correct an injustice is to work within the current civil system. If we were in a dictatorship, that might not be the correct path - but our starting condition is a republic.

The example you gave - American South - was a rebublic, but one that disenfranchised a large percentage of its population from the political process, and in fact allowed those who perpetuated injustice against them to vote in their name. That is just as bad as a dictatorship, and has the same potential for peaceful change.

But I'm struggling to see the analogy to Wall Street... do you consider them agents of a foreign power?

They're a parasite that perverts the rest of the society to maximize their profits, and part of that is jailing as many people as possible in private for-profit prisons. Why?

He's not only undermining the system - he's also undermining regular people's ability to use money and participate in commerce. Burning down the local cotton gin will certainly hurt the slave owners, but also the non-slave cotton farmers who depended on the gin for their income. It's like burning down your house to solve a mouse infestation.

It's an act of (covert) warfare. Economic ruin is the intended outcome, just as it would be with sending bombers to do so. It's not burning down my house, it's burning down the house of a lunatic who's kidnapped people and is holding them hostage.

I was going to use a Nazi example, but I didn't want to Godwin this thing :)

Godwinning is about claiming someone is a nazi, not about making thought experiments set in Nazi Germany. Since we have a real-life example of cartoonish supervillainy, why not use it?

That is far too easy, and the escapee is not guilty of any "crime" other than being the wrong religion or having the wrong gender preference. Allowing the prisoner to escape does not harm anyone except the corrupt regime. Silk Road seems to have involved organized crime activity like extortion and (new information today) contract murder. I'm not going to defend the war on drugs, which I find absurd, but I will defend arrests for fraud, theft, extortion, tax evasion, attempted murder, etc.

Silk Road customers are not guilty of any "crime" other than wanting to get high, and the sellers are not guilty of anything except providing that for a price. Silk Road was the victim in the alleged extortion case, and I find this accusation of contract murder extremely suspicious - it comes from the same regime that arranged for Assange rape charges and would be an extremely stupid thing for DPR to do, since it would undermine SR's reputation even if succesful. And you can hardly blame someone for not paying taxes when it's not possible to do so.

Re: HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy living inside the walls society has built without your consent. I and others shouldn't have to feel sorry for our personal choices. It's legal to posses child pr0n in Japan, provided it was owned when the ban on production, sale and transfer of it came into place. Do you agree with that too just because it's "law"?

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the "Robo Singers" should be in prison, with restituion for damages caused. And yet, they walk more free than everyone else.

When I think of all the damage and hearing loss caused by their robotic, off-key, tuneless singing, I can't help but agree...

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

No. It doesn't *automatically* include all that.

Look at the context. I was talking about slavery - as it existed - in the American South. It may very well be that you can have slavery implemented without horrible crimes (though I can't imagine how this is the case and you haven't provided an example), but that is not relevant here.

Re:HOW??

[myowntrueself]

No. It doesn't *automatically* include all that.

Look at the context. I was talking about slavery - as it existed - in the American South. It may very well be that you can have slavery implemented without horrible crimes (though I can't imagine how this is the case and you haven't provided an example), but that is not relevant here.

Yeah and I'm sure war can be implemented without horrible crimes as well. These things are just backdrops, covers, excuses for horrible crimes, not horrible crimes in and of themselves.

Unless you'd argue that war *is* a horrible crime?

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Except that both of those cases include an outright rebellion as the driving force for change. So you're actually lending the idea credit here.

Both of those rebellions were fights among the elite.

The example you gave - American South - was a rebublic, but one that disenfranchised a large percentage of its population from the political process, and in fact allowed those who perpetuated injustice against them to vote in their name. That is just as bad as a dictatorship, and has the same potential for peaceful change.

Slavery was doomed. The rest of the world had pretty much given it up, and the South was the last holdout. Even if they had won the Civil War, slavery would not have persisted forever.

They're a parasite that perverts the rest of the society to maximize their profits, and part of that is jailing as many people as possible in private for-profit prisons. Why?

So then, no, they aren't like a foreign power? I'm having trouble seeing the analogy between Wall Street and a saboteur. The comparison to a parasite makes more sense.

Economic ruin is the intended outcome, just as it would be with sending bombers to do so

Well, we agree that lack of law and order would lead to economic ruin. We may even have a common goal. But I'm not in agreement with you scorched earth methodology. If you look at the Great Depression, it did not ruin the filthy rich - or at least not enough of them to change the social order. Yet, the poor were absolutely hammered and the middle class vaporized. And at the end of it all, there was no revolution. The elite remained in control. I don't see a historical event where your plan worked out in the way you intend.

Silk Road customers are not guilty of any "crime" other than wanting to get high

Like I said, I cannot defend the drug war. Silk road customers were also criminals buying fake IDs (including the operator) - it was not limited to sin crimes, though I grant you that most of the sales were drugs. The drugs don't bother me, but the organized crime does.

and I find this accusation of contract murder extremely suspicious - it comes from the same regime that arranged for Assange rape charges and would be an extremely stupid thing for DPR to do, since it would undermine SR's reputation even if succesful.

I am not as dubious. First of all, the state of MD has nothing at all to do with Assange. Second, people involved in organized crime cannot rely on courts to resolve their disputes and so this kind of thing is the inevitable result. This is exactly why we have civil courts - so people don't resort to ghetto justice.

And you can hardly blame someone for not paying taxes when it's not possible to do so.

I'll concede that it is possible he was paying taxes on the laundered money.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Unless you'd argue that war *is* a horrible crime?

Only for the loser. For the winner it is glorious and inspiring. It's one of man's most vexing talents.

The difference is war has two sides. When one side loses, it's no longer war. If it continues at that point, it is oppression, not war.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

I re-read that and realized it is not clear that I'm being cynical with the first paragraph. That was meant to be tongue in cheek.

Re:HOW??

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! At the risk of sounding self-righteous here, I'd like to point out Ulbricht's biggest mistake: he blatantly broke serious laws, ones that most respectable people I know consider good, useful laws.
Since the Breaking Bad jokes have all been made, let's liken this to Walter White. Heisenberg just "manufactures" meth, right? So he's not pushing it. But he feeds the grass-roots a pure, highly addictive, dangerous product that breeds all kinds of concomitant vice and suffering. It's a point of general agreement among those of us with children that illicit drugs are bad. Dread Pirate Roberts, as he liked to call himself, was also helping feed the grassroots. Let's not forget that, please.
I hate what the NSA is doing as much as anyone can. It's illegal, unconstitutional, in fact. It's immoral, dangerous, and undermining of the public trust. But neither the NSA, weaknesses in TOR, nor the Canadian Postal Service were responsible for Ulbricht's current status. He was, because instead of applying his intelligence to a respectable business strategy, he chose to traffic illegal and dangerous substances to the public. I read some time ago that Facebook was approaching market saturation. Zuckerberg is one of the richest people in the world. Yet how many times has he been arrested? (Yes, I know, he's been hit with some legal actions, but not for running Facebook per se.) How many times have Amazon's servers and assets been seized? Or, since we're on about privacy and security, what criminal actions are being taken against the personnel of companies like Norton and McAffee, or Abine? How about regular businesses? Wal-Mart? AT&T? These are not perfect companies with absolutely clean hands. They occasionally make mistakes for which they pay. But none of them is so stupid as to continually, deliberately run afoul of society and government the way "professional" criminals do. All I can do is throw up my hands and quote the immortal words (word) of Thomas Watson: "THINK."

Re:HOW??

[ClintJaysiyel]

It wasn't a dig, it was an accurate statement.

Re:HOW??

[MightyYar]

Do you have anything to add, or do you just randomly insult people?

Tor compromised

[MetalliQaZ]

I think it can be argued that Silk Road practiced the use of Tor as well as anyone could have. They still got pinched. Although it may come out that an insider turned informant, it seems that the Tor system is compromised by the snoops.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

*(Maybe. We don't know really.)

Silk Road, however, is exceptionally well known as an illicit enterprise, so despite anonymity of packet data (or not...) they're targeted anyway.

If known to be engaging in criminal activity, Tor is not really going to save you or be the critical flaw in your plan, either.

Re:Tor compromised

[Bulge Temptingly]

Nope, apparently Canadian authorities turned up some fake ID in a routine postal search.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

If this goes to trial, I expect that it will be the classic blend of Good Old Fashioned Policework actually supported by high-tech information gathering. The former will be the one presented to the judge and jury; the latter will form the actual basis for the evidence.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Its likely that this is the case. If the NSA records and keeps all encrypted communication, and it gives information to the FBI, then it was only a matter of time for them to run some network analysis to find the most popular tor hidden sites, look up who bought server time at those ip addresses, and then search their purchase history (though their credit cards) for larger purchases then they could afford on their official jobs.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few potential problems they could have ran into.
Especially since they probably do a lot of physical good distribution, which would be rather easy to follow.

Re:Tor compromised

[i kan reed]

Tor isn't a magic bullet. It's still fundamentally putting your trust in someone else. There's always a human element to relay communications. Any complicit person can yield some useful information. You can encrypt what you're saying, but someone has to know who you're talking to.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

we still don't know how they got to him, maybe they broke into the server, or they tracked him by other means (ex: not too savvy bitcon transactions).
TOR manages only the network layer, I'd like to know if and how they 'peeled the onion'

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

it appears that agents found Ulbricht after Canadian border authorities routinely checked a package intended for his San Francisco home and discovered nine fake identification cards within, which Ulbricht allegedly was seeking to obtain to rent more servers to power Silk Road as it massively expanded.

source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/10/02/feds-shut-down-silk-road-owner-known-as-dread-pirate-roberts-arrested/

Re:Tor compromised

[Drachs]

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.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

On reddit it was reported that a parcel containing fake IDs (presumably to buy servers) mailed to DPR was intercepted at the Canadian border, and this is what lead to the arrest.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf
TLDR version:
A user named altoids advertised SR on various forums very early on.
Later the same user wanted some dev work done, used a gmail address as contact.
Same gmail address leads to a LinkedIn profile ... and a name and address.
Seize that dudes computers.
Find keys to the kingdom for the SR servers.

Re:Tor compromised

[interkin3tic]

Assuming that's the case, can anyone venture a ballpark estimate as to how much taxpayer money went into breaking the scourge of Tor and Silkroad? How many dollars were used to make sure I was safe from roaming crackheads on their smartphones trying to loot USBs with bitcoins from corpses to save up for their next fix?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Source? Not in TFA...

Re:Tor compromised

[cultiv8]

The sealed complaint from the U.S. Attorney suggest that, "As of July 23, 2013, there were approximately 957,079 registered user accounts reflected on the server." This information comes from an image of the "Silk Road Web Server" made by the FBI on that date.

Interested to find out how they got the server image.

Re:Tor compromised

[alen]

your cereal box wonder wheel encryption is no match for the NSA

Re:Tor compromised

[phantomfive]

It's was almost certain that Silk Road would be shut down from the moment it was started. Money has to trade hands, eventually you'll be able to trace it to the source.

Re:Tor compromised

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:Tor compromised

[Dunbal]

it seems that the Tor system is compromised by the snoops.

The safest option is to assume that EVERYTHING is compromised nowadays. Your OS. Your security certificate server. Your ISP. Your VPN. SSL. Your webcam. Everything.

Re:Tor compromised

[gl4ss]

...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??

Re:Tor compromised

[root_brewski]

From Forbes: "Agents found Ulbricht after Canadian border authorities routinely checked a package intended for his San Francisco home and discovered nine fake identification cards within, which Ulbricht allegedly was seeking to obtain to rent more servers to power Silk Road as it massively expanded." Link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/10/02/feds-shut-down-silk-road-owner-known-as-dread-pirate-roberts-arrested/

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Naturally That's why I use the code wheel that came with SSI's Pool of Radiance.

Re:Tor compromised

[blueg3]

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.

Re:Tor compromised

[jovius]

Bitcoin is not an anonymous system, so the transactions should be trackable. I'd guess that's one of the weak links. Probably most of the users don't anonymize their Bitcoin usage. Silk Road may have accepted Bitcoins as a tip for example - it anyway gets a percentage of the transactions, and from all of the BC traffic a couple of hotspots can be identified.

The owner himself probably created a noticeable trail of real money. An Infomant is a good guess - when money and drugs are involved some of it is real enough for somebody to get busted (they accuse the guy to have dealt 1kg of mixed narcotics himself). They have probably been on the owner himself for a long period of time.

They also accuse him of hiring an assassin to eliminate somebody "who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users or the site"...

Re:Tor compromised

[Maxo-Texas]

I'd guess it was being too big which did him in.

Greed and hubris-- always risky when doing illegal activities.

In fact- if I were doing something illegal- when regular articles about the silk road started being posted, I'd shut things down and take my profits.

If nothing else, those articles are embarrassing for law enforcement so they focus on that issue to stop the embarrassment.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. As much as people want to point to some kind of conspiracy, the real issue is that the guy who ran SR left an easily followed paper trail, and the feds used this to catch him. If you're going to run a multimillion dollar black market empire, you need to make sure that you don't do anything to create a personally identifiable link to yourself. That's much easier said than done.

Re:Tor compromised

[girlintraining]

Silk Road practiced the use of Tor as well as anyone could have.

No, they didn't. They pretty much put a flare up saying where the servers were, ran unpatched servers that got infected with malware and compromised its users, and ... ready for the big surprise? ... The government then used the locally-installed malware to communicate outside Tor, after which it was pretty trivial to match realworld identities to bitcoin wallets and to forum posts and purchases through Silk Road.

Tor wasn't compromised; The systems running on top of it were. You can't blame the protocol for the stupid decisions of the people using it... this is like saying SSL was compromised when someone gets arrested for posting child porn on Facebook. "But... it was secured!" Yeah... and there's your picture, name, and address.

Tor anonymizes your IP address. It doesn't keep you from leaking information out via other means... like I don't know, say, making drug purchases online? They had to be shipped somewhere and you can't Tor your mailing address.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

tor is compromised. It is easy to do if you have the resources. Guess who has the resources.

Re:Tor compromised

[TheSpoom]

Wait, so after all the NSA bullshit, he was caught by Canada? Oh, the irony.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why services like Silk Road can only really work under socialism.

Re:Tor compromised

[phantomfive]

That's why services like Silk Road can only really work under socialism.

How can Silk Road work under socialism? Do you think the Soviets were unable to track purchases?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you live in you mom's basement, obviously none of YOUR tax money.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA procedure is to blame all constitutional violations on Canada, because they automatically say "sorry" when accused of anything.

Re:Tor compromised

[goodmanj]

Wow, what a coincidence that the Canadian authorities happened to open just the right package. A lucky break for them!

Re:Tor compromised

[root_brewski]

Looks like he got sloppy. Paragraphs 33 to 39 in the criminal complaint are of interest here, specifically 34 and 38. Looks like he used the same handle to advertise SR on Shroomery as he did to post a job opening on Bitcoin Talk which was linked to his real email. Of course, this and the Canadian post inspection could both be parallel construction, but that's the official story for now.

Re:Tor compromised

[amicusNYCL]

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).

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more likely the US authorities could not touch him because information was obtained improperly. When this happens you launder a little evidence with a "random" search.

Re:Tor compromised

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I buy a lot of stuff online, and always look for postal delivery. Every few months I will get a package that has been opened by Canada Customs. Since my purchases are all legal, it is not a big deal, and they even tape the container closed with "Inspected by Canada Customs" tape.
So it is possible.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

..a canadian routine postal search?

Yes, Canada has a postal system.

sounds a bit of fabrication(you know, finding evidence illegally and then fabricating something for a bust).

You realize that packages crossing a country's border are often searched, and that it's generally considered legal by any nation with a clue?

I seriously doubt they have fakeid smelling dogs.

No. But as stated, packages crossing a country's border are often examined. They've got these things called x-rays, and they've also got the legal ability to pop open the package and take a peek at the actual contents.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Your brain is compromised. Shoot yourself now.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, just ignore the fact that these crackheads are financing drug barons.

Re:Tor compromised

[Minwee]

Sorry about that.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

If they do, that's not how they caught DPR: https://medium.com/p/d48995e8eb5a

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

So you feel it is ironic that the NSA didn't catch something that the NSA has publicly stated they are not looking for? NSA isn't law enforcement, they may sometimes help them out or give them info they have found, but it isn't their job to collect data for busts like this.

Re:Tor compromised

[h4rr4r]

Yeah, getting that big is not good.
  Shut it down and start a new one. Heck, start several. Just don't keep going once Forbes and other not in the know folks start talking about it.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a surprise, they routinely open whatever packages the NSA tells them to.

Re:Tor compromised

[jeffmflanagan]

Pretty sure you're not going to get an answer to this that makes any sense outside ACs head.

Re:Tor compromised

[jeffmflanagan]

Do you have any evidence that this happened, or are you confusing Silk Road with Freedom Hosting?

Re:Tor compromised

[fa2k]

Even if Tor was compromised, I doubt they would use it for something relatively "minor" like this case.

Unless, of course, someone was about to leak how Tor was compromised anyway -- we will see if this happens in the near future

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Tor compromised

[Beardo the Bearded]

It's not a "lucky coincidence". I'm Canadian and I buy some stuff online. Here's why they tend to open packages:

1. Canadian Border Services gets $5 for every package they open. (I call this the "putting their dick in it" fee.) You can not appeal this fee.
2. As you have more stuff sent to you, they tend to open more of your packages. My ex-wife ordered lots of stuff online (mostly knitting supplies) and towards the end of her interest in her hobby, they were opening 90% of her packages. Mine were rarely opened.
3. They get a little more openy when you're doing your own brokerage. FedEx and UPS charge about $40 for brokerage, so some people do it themselves for $10. This requires you to go down to the border (or quasi-border), which in my city is the airport.

So it wasn't a tip-off, it was just CBS looking for extra cash.

Re:Tor compromised

[Beardo the Bearded]

Don't forget the $5 they get for an "inspection fee". This was bad luck + CBS grubbing for cash.

Re: Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the for system was created by spooks in the first place

Re:Tor compromised

[lgw]

I wonder how much of the pot traffic on SR is from sellers who can sell legally in their own state. Most of the problems for the seller vanish if you're also selling legally. We might find out if there are follow-on busts.

Re:Tor compromised

[Beardo the Bearded]

In fact- if I were doing something illegal- when regular articles about the silk road started being posted, I'd shut things down and take my profits.

Or sell it off for legit cash and move somewhere offshore. But yeah, once /. started talking about it, it was clear that they were going to get busted at some point. I guess he thought he could keep it going.

I don't know why you couldn't run this operation from outside the US. Just FedEx the packages to the US, and anything that gets stopped at the border is part of the cost of doing business.

Re:Tor compromised

[interkin3tic]

I'd argue that's a problem caused by prohibition in general, and that revenue from silkroad is probably insignificant compared to more traditional drug trade routes.

Then again, given how much money we waste fighting the war on drugs, how much they spent on silkroad might be a gigantic number but could still be proportional. We've spent 30 billion on fighting drugs this year, if silk road was 1% of the drug trade, $300 million spent on busting it would still be proportional.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that RTFA is hard, but start at page 24. He used an online alias of "altoid" to post announcements about SR, one of which had his real name gmail account in it. The other big red flag was posting to stackexchange using his real name with snippets of code from SR. He did NOT maintain good hygiene online and paid the consequences.

Re:Tor compromised

[MarkvW]

I bet you the investigation cost much less than what the yield of the forfeited assets will be.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

shut the fuck up, you are a paranoid idiot

Re:Tor compromised

[Beardo the Bearded]

I know my webcam isn't compromised because I have a piece of black electrical tape over the lens.

There's also a fault in the microphone design that makes a buzzing noise when it's on. I'm not sure if I should damn or praise Sony for that.

Re:Tor compromised

[jonbryce]

The main thing is that you have to turn your stash of illicit bitcoins into real cash for most things. Someone trying to sell a load of bitcoins is going to attract attention from the authorities, and from that, they can figure out if you got them from selling drugs, which is definitely illegal, or from running a massive mining rig, where arguably legal, and it would be financial services regulators that would consider it rather than drugs enforcement people.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bitcoin IS anonymous.
It's not Bitcoin's fault if you're an idiot and exchange illegal bitcoins to other currencies VIA traceable methods.

Re:Tor compromised

[jonbryce]

The NSA is not permitted to spy on Americans. The Canadian equivalent is not permitted to spy on Canadians. So they spy on each others citizens and exchange information.

Re:Tor compromised

[lgw]

I dunno about socialism, but Communism is so rife with corruption that black markets flourish as long as everyone gets paid. Any "tracking" done was to ensure that no one was trying to avoid giving the authorities their cut. I don't follow the logic for socialism.

(And, please fellow /.ers, spare us the "no true Communist" reply)

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not ironic. It merely proves yet again that mass surveillance and an over-reliance on bleeding edge technology is ineffective and a waste of taxpayer money.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

...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??

There is nothing illegal about it unless they somehow obtained the tip-off via an illegal wiretap or other violation of 4th amendment rights (or whatever the equivalent is in canada) since the search itself was perfectly legitimate, it is actually the job of customs officials to identify illicit goods so this is perfectly within their wheelhouse. They probably used it as a cover story to reduce the number of eyes cast on their process, it could have been anything form bitcoin wallet tracing to a plant at the fake id factory (neither of which they want to expose).

Re: Tor compromised

[smaddox]

You made me choke on my drink haha

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

your cereal box wonder wheel encryption is no match for the NSA

Be sure to drink more Ovaltine...

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone sell pot legally yet? I know Washington is still making the rules up, so at the moment it's legal to own but not yet sell.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

correct, TOR is owned. look at this screenshot of prism:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/166821334/FlyingPig

right tab...

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Money? Not to worry. Ben will just print up some more when needed!

Re:Tor compromised

[93 Escort Wagon]

So you feel it is ironic that the NSA didn't catch something that the NSA has publicly stated they are not looking for? NSA isn't law enforcement, they may sometimes help them out or give them info they have found, but it isn't their job to collect data for busts like this.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

We already know the NSA is sharing information about illicit drug trafficing with the DEA, and asking the DEA to obfuscate where the information is coming from.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you can read how they pieced together the information on him in the criminal complaint starting on page 24 under section 33.

Nathan

Re:Tor compromised

[gregor-e]

Or, that's just what the Feds want you to think. If the FBI has tor cracked wide open, they'd probably make the first few busts look like the result of good ol' gumshoe work so they'll be easily able to bust whoever comes along with "Silk Road Reloaded" to replace it.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

But not my one time pad program:

96308 96101 56995 04582 74980 20265 55421 11367 39031 26208 77298
35291 88737 36227 92994 19944 24316 07246 36639 28515 11001

Re:Tor compromised

[93 Escort Wagon]

Incidentally, this case shows exactly why all this invasive, unconstitutional NSA monitoring is actually unnecessary. By all accounts this guy was nabbed using good old-fashioned investigative work by the various authorities.

It can be done. Sure, it's just harder that way - but our personal liberties are worth that cost.

Re:Tor compromised

[SIGBUS]

But yeah, once /. started talking about it, it was clear that they were going to get busted at some point.

My first reaction when the site hit the news was, to quote Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap!"

If nothing else, it was only a matter of time before he got nailed. Really, running an online black market? You're asking for trouble.

Re:Tor compromised

[girlintraining]

Do you have any evidence that this happened, or are you confusing Silk Road with Freedom Hosting?

You mean besides the criminal complaint posted in the article you were supposed to read before shoving your foot in your mouth?

Page 6: "as well as forensic analysis of computer servers used to operate the Silk Road website that have been located and imaged during the investigation"

Page 11: "... instructs vendors to 'vacuum seal' packages containing narcotics, in order to avoid detection..." "use a different address from the user's own address to receive shipment... friend's house or P.O. box"

"Since November of 2011, law enforcement agents participating in this investigation have made over 100 individual undercover purchases..."

Thanks to the Silk Road taking a percentage of all proceeds, they've been able to locate the ledger for the entire website; Every transaction made, as well as the so-called "tumbler" used to anonymize bitcoins used to make purchases on the website... as the transaction logs for "tumbled" bitcoins was also amongst the items recovered.

When you dig into the complaint it becomes painfully clear how sloppy this guy was: He had a Google+ page, a LinkedIn profile, youtube, etc., -- there is considerable captured traffic between the Silk Road webserver sent outside the Tor network, including e-mails and other accounts authorities are now using to collect the realworld identities of many of the administrators and regular contributors to the site. He didn't encrypt anything on the servers -- they didn't even need a fucking password to get this information.

Backup servers which had SSH keys to login to were also recovered, so what little was encrypted... well, let's just say the root password of the Silk Road might as well have been "1234".

Every PO box, every ship-to address... he kept it all. There was no data retention policy this guy used... he was a data hoarder, and the only reason it took the government this long wasn't because of how hard it was to track him down in real life, but because of the sheer crapflood of forensic data bogged down their entire cybercrime division. And get this... they bought the malware later used to infect Freedom Hosting off Silk Road!.

Someone should built a monument to this guy's stupidity... Tor might anonymize your IP address, but this guy fucked over the privacy of everyone that visited with gross incompetence and greed all on his own. The government didn't need to go the extra mile... all that stuff with Freedom Hosting getting infected (Hey, check out that malware sometime; It records which Tor sites you visit and when. Can't think of how Silk Road might have been affected there!) was just testing out their toys. It wasn't necessary, but you know... if you're gonna do it, might as well overdo it.

Re:Tor compromised

[kermidge]

From reading an article on this before coming here, I'm still flabbergasted that he was using servers in the U.S. Color me naive but I don't see where that made sense.

Second thing, after reading more, is why the blazes did he have anything to do with SR sent directly to himself?

I realize 20-20 hindsight and all, but c'mon, seems to me that's all 'security 101' stuff, no?

Re:Tor compromised

[TheCarp]

> Or sell it off for legit cash and move somewhere offshore.

Previous interviews with Roberts indicate that, just like his namesake, he indeed was not the founder but a guy who became involved and later purchased it from the founder. If the stories are to be believed, he was the first person to break their security and then, played ethical hacker and told them how he broke in and helped them fix the problem.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/

Re:Tor compromised

[PCM2]

Can anyone sell pot legally yet? I know Washington is still making the rules up, so at the moment it's legal to own but not yet sell.

In California there are plenty of "pot clubs" that sell everything from buds to hashish, where you can choose your flavor of each, to "edibles" that come in wrappers like any other candy bar that you'd buy in a store. And yes, it's legal.

Re:Tor compromised

[spire3661]

Anything that you want to keep secret cannot pass over public infrastructure. This is the new reality. TOR is dead and we need to remind people to stop using it.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an old strategy.

Re:Tor compromised

[zmod3m]

The NSA is not permitted to spy on Americans. The Canadian equivalent is not permitted to spy on Canadians. So they spy on each others citizens and exchange information.

I believe you are thinking of the CIA, who is not suppose to operate on domestic grounds. A simplified view is that the NSA is basically the domestic branch of the CIA.
Articles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_the_CIA_allowed_to_spy_on_Americans

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was guessing

You are, the article says how they caught him.

I'd guess it was bitcoin, not Tor that did him in.

Nope. He had some fake ID's mailed to his home address, of all places.

People think bitcoin is anonymous, but it keeps a record of every transaction.

If you want to be anonymous, you have to go through a broker who will promise to hide your identity. It's not easy to find a reliable one, and a lot of governments have been shutting them down for reasons related to money laundering and tax evasion. Even if you find one which is legit, you're still trusting them with your data.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Replying to myself, it was mostly social media that nailed him.

Word to the wise, stay away from social media.

Nathan

Re:Tor compromised

[TheCarp]

I think we have a winner. Even when you take it to the cause of murder.... what scenario can you even imagine where this guy contemplates taking out a hit on someone if not for.... the millions of dollars and decades in jail he was personally facing if discovered?

All of that...100% is caused by prohibition. drugs would barely be a profitable business to a few big companies and maybe a small number of mom and pop farmers if not for prohibition

You give people lots of resources and then put them in a position to be facing violence and years of incarceration and what the fuck do you expect people to do?

And all the while.... they haven't even touched the addiction rate, so what is is the fuking point of creating these situations and putting people in situations to want to kill eachother?

This is just more lives ruined by prohibitionists.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Not bad luck at all. I live overseas and my Canadian mail is regularly opened as well. The funniest thing is that they ALWAYS open my tax correspondence. Why would they open their own mail coming from Revenue Canada, when they can just pull up my tax file on computer?

Re:Tor compromised

[strength_of_10_men]

He was a total fool. He should have purchased a car wash to launder the bitcoins, exchange it for cash then store the cash in a self-storage unit. What was he thinking?!

Re:Tor compromised

[Hatta]

When you dig into the complaint it becomes painfully clear how sloppy this guy was: He had a Google+ page, a LinkedIn profile, youtube, etc., -- there is considerable captured traffic between the Silk Road webserver sent outside the Tor network, including e-mails and other accounts authorities are now using to collect the realworld identities of many of the administrators and regular contributors to the site. He didn't encrypt anything on the servers -- they didn't even need a fucking password to get this information.

That's good news. That means someone competent can fill the vacuum left by the takedown of Silk Road.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as well that there's no corruption in Capitalism.

Re:Tor compromised

[filthpickle]

"putting their dick in it" fee.

I know her!

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who receives international packages on a semi-regular basis, I can assure you these random searches happen.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick search suggests that only medical maruana is legal in California, other uses of it are still illegal albeit very minor.

Re:Tor compromised

[FilmedInNoir]

I don't get charged the $5... I have been "tapped" (like a Maple Tree eh*) before though.

*That's our word! You Americans don't get to use it! We only say that to each other to lessen the sting of it.

Re:Tor compromised

[BlackPignouf]

Maybe the "good old-fashioned investigative work by the various authorities" came after NSA monitoring.
Maybe the NSA doesn't want you to know that it's been involved in this case.

Re:Tor compromised

[lgw]

And get this... they bought the malware later used to infect Freedom Hosting off Silk Road!.

I may not be the biggest fan of government these days but I have to say: that's freaking awesome. Good to know someone has a sense of humor.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL! You put tape over your webcam? What a bunch of fags on this site.

Re:Tor compromised

[TheCarp]

Are you sure that is the truth? For all we know that IS how he was found, and information gained in that manner was then used to create a new evidence trail for public release and indictment. This is not a new technique and is one the DEA has been known to use. There have been several cases based on drugs "found" at "traffic stops" that were really the result of DEA special operations tips.

Re:Tor compromised

[onyxruby]

Just remember whoever fills in the vacuum left by this raging idiot (and I am being kind in calling him a raging idiot) is just as likely to be FBI, Interpol or another like kind government agency. You see the problem with having black markets is they don't attract the most ethical of people, you know the ones that practice their due diligence?

The server that is set up correctly is the one that is likely the one made to withstand attacks from competitors from the Russian mafia on down. That site has to last long enough to gather evidence that can be used to take down an entire series of drug dealers all over the world. That means the site needs to be secure enough and well built enough to withstand competitors. That site is going to require professionals that won't make sloppy mistakes and a team of professionals isn't cheap.

What's your appetite for risk? Do you want the well built site that's professionally run and might be a front for the FBI or the half ass site that is probably run by a raging idiot or the mafia? Pick your poison.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

What we can learn from this as well as history, is they can take down the silk road site all they want, there will be 5 more to take its place and learn from its mistakes before you can say drug war.

Even after all these years I find it hard to accept that so many people have a problem with people they don't even know doing things they never would have heard about had it not been for the theft and abuse of their own rights and money. Strange world we live in...

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno about socialism, but Communism is so rife with corruption that

In a Communist system, you don't have private property at all. Nobody gets paid because there's no need for money because everybody already owns everything, and just uses whatever they need whenever they need it. You're thinking of Socialism.

(And, please fellow /.ers, spare us the "no true Communist" reply)

Communism has a specific definition, if a system doesn't fit that definition then no, it's not true Communism. You seem to be confused as to what makes the "Scotsman" fallacy an actual fallacy. Hint- it hinges on the lack of a well-defined meaning of the term "Scotsman".

Re:Tor compromised

[lgw]

When I diable my (Windows) laptop mic in the device manager, it's only pretending to be off - you can see in the Silverlight settings that it's still on. I'd go with "praise".

Re:Tor compromised

[sosume]

Didn't the guy give an interview to Forbes in August? These dates don't match up.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be very interested to hear how your anecdotal experience explains the fact that CBS openned a package apparently leaving the country.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that's what I got out of it as well. This guy is a fool and deserved to get busted.

Re:Tor compromised

[girlintraining]

Just remember whoever fills in the vacuum left by this raging idiot (and I am being kind in calling him a raging idiot) is just as likely to be FBI, Interpol or another like kind government agency. You see the problem with having black markets is they don't attract the most ethical of people, you know the ones that practice their due diligence?

Actually, this isn't without precidence. We've been replacing arms dealers and drug cartel leaders with plants for years. Replacing a website would be far less risky, for similar gain.

You see the problem with having black markets is they don't attract the most ethical of people, you know the ones that practice their due diligence?

Those are separate issues. That said, you'd be surprised what a gun to your head can do for both your ethics and your desire to practice due diligence. Black markets have the same competitive pressures as regular ones -- in that the stupid, incompetent, and untalented, tend to be eaten up by people who lack those faults. But quantity has a quality all its own, as Stalin once said... and it's true in economics too. A large organization can tolerate a lot more fail than a small one, and drug cartels and mafias are no exception. I rather imagine managers in crime syndicates throw people under the bus to cover their own ass too... just they do it literally, not figuratively. :3

What's your appetite for risk? Do you want the well built site that's professionally run and might be a front for the FBI or the half ass site that is probably run by a raging idiot or the mafia? Pick your poison.

Truthfully... the ideal solution would be distributed. Nobody runs it; it's just a distribution platform. Decentralization has been a powerful antidote to law enforcement and governments alike for centuries. You make it all about one man, and you make it as easy as pulling a trigger to make it go away. Make it about a million men, and now you've got a problem.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

The engineers, computer scientists, and cryptos of the world need to unite and fix the internet. That or create a new network structure with anonymity in mind; with it all being open-source and liable to scrutiny.

Re:Tor compromised

[Shaiku]

Probably to check for ricin and anthrax.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

"drugs would barely be a profitable business to a few big companies and maybe a small number of mom and pop farmers if not for prohibition"
Yes there is no money in alcool and cigarettes.

I am for the legalization of cannabis, but strangely enough, there are problems that are real problems with no easy solutions. Legalization of heroin or other highly addictive drugs would be disastrous. Hey, let's sell crack to kids and ruin their life ! (my definition of kids includes a lot of over 18 people btw)

Re:Tor compromised

[Goat of Death]

This! After Enigma was cracked in WWII, the allies went to great length to make sure it remained cracked. They would fly fake recon flights near the locations of subs they knew about. This would make it appear as though the subs where found through conventional means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra#Safeguarding_of_sources

Re:Tor compromised

[onyxruby]

I think it can be argued that Silk Road practiced the use of stupidity as well as anyone could have. The fact that they used TOR as a front door when they were completely sloppy with the rest of their practices does not mean they were somehow brilliant.

What they did was the rough equivalent of buying a Medeco lock for the front door of the house while leaving the patio door open with only a screen door blocking the entry and the windows all cracked open an inch. They then handed out Medeco keys to anyone that wanted one.

They then threw a two year long kegger with all the drugs you could afford where everyone recorded everything, deleted nothing and pretended nothing could ever come back to haunt them since they used a tumbler to hide their bitcoin trail. Your going to see a lot more warrants issued in any number of jurisdictions as a result of this case.

Read the warrant, it's a case study in sloppy security and I've got to imagine a number of white papers will be written about the sheer idiocy of the Dread Pirate Roberts. The /only/ reason it survived as long as it did was to allow law enforcement to catch more and more drug dealers.

Re:Tor compromised

[runeghost]

Why was he even in the U.S. at all?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

They also open packages to spot check for people lying about the value of the goods shipped. Especially when you do your own brokerage. Buy something on-line, fill in the transport forms as "batteries - $10" and ship hundred dollar video cards? People do it all the time, and get caught all the time.

The normal punishment is a fine of the brokerage fees you should have paid, since it generally isn't illegal, just dishonest.

Re:Tor compromised

[Charliemopps]

Well, I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy but...

My experience with customs is that they don't exactly "Randomly" select packages on their way through. They X-ray them and look for obvious things... weapons, etc.... a lot of contraband comes in packaging that's easily identifiable via Xray. Then, and here's the key, if they find an address that has something rather innocuous getting sent to it, they'll let it go by or just send a one of their red letters. But then you're on their watch list, and they open everything going to your house for months. I'm guessing this guy ordered some stuff, got himself flagged and then customs waited until they had something good before nailing him. Happens all the time.

Re:Tor compromised

[MarkvW]

His accomplices are pretty nervous now, I reckon.

Re:Tor compromised

[JesseMcDonald]

You can encrypt what you're saying, but someone has to know who you're talking to.

Actually, no. Someone has to know who you are, and someone has to know who's being talked to, but they needn't be the same person. The way Tor works is that there are at least two "interior", routing-only nodes. Let's call the sender A and the receiver D; the interior nodes are B and C. A opens an encrypted connection to B, and tells it to connect to C. A then opens an encrypted channel to C using B as a relay, and yet another encrypted channel to D relaying through both B and C. B knows about A and C; C knows about B and D; and D knows about C. Unless the nodes are sharing information, none of B, C, or D know that A is communicating with D.

Note that this bust didn't result from compromising Tor; the SR operator was discovered through old-fashioned customs inspections.

Re:Tor compromised

[interkin3tic]

Portugal decriminalized drugs, including hard drugs. The problems with drugs went away.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

It's fine to hypothesize whatever, but from what I can tell, hard evidence suggests there are easy solutions. I have yet to see any case studies that show prohibition working, in contrast.

Re:Tor compromised

[Brianwa]

Yesterday I installed the latest version of Skype on my laptop. It turned on my webcam, took my picture, and tried to set it as the profile image for my Skype account.

Of course, it's crazy to expect to be pseudonymous on skype but that was still a little unsettling.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

$5 from whom? Canadian Dollars or American Dollars?

Re:Tor compromised

[HornWumpus]

Silkroad was generating too much traffic and was subject to traffic analysis. Don't extrapolate too far from that though. Crypto still works 'in general', just some of it doesn't. Crypto does nothing to stop traffic analysis.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that does not explain the Canadian customs opening outbound packages. They can't tack on a 5$ charge to a non canadian recipient. If you read the complaint you'll see many referrals to "forensic analysis of the Silk Road web server". So the investigators seem to have access to the server. The question is how long have they had access. If they had access for a long time it is not unreasonable a tip was sent to Canadian customs to look out for parcels from/to certain addresses.

Not saying TOR was broken. Maybe there was a SQL injection in the Silk Road site or something like that.Or a whistle blower.

(lol, CAPTCHA is "Habeas")

Re:Tor compromised

[Zero__Kelvin]

Because they aren't called the "Canadians Without Borders Service"?

Re:Tor compromised

[ftobin]

This time it's appropriate to Blame Canada!

Re: Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

man that would be a fun episode of storage hunters!

Re:Tor compromised

[tlhIngan]

Don't forget the $5 they get for an "inspection fee". This was bad luck + CBS grubbing for cash.

Cheapest by far.

FedEx charges $25. UPS I've seen anywhere from 20% to 200%. $5 for mail? hell yeah. (And yes, even if it goes through FedEx or UPS it may get inspected). The 200% was from when they wanted $20 on a $10 item. But they tack on so many bogus fees and other crap you can easily look forward to a $50+ bill.

And sometimes they don't even ding me.

Re:Tor compromised

[spacefight]

Could as well be parallel construction at its finest....

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the wheel that came with Star Control. It has funnier words.

Re:Tor compromised

[mrspoonsi]

A connects to B, B to C and C to destination (D).

Well if a well funded org is looking for (D) all it has to do is put up a critical mass of tor relays, then when it has B and C all on its own systems, they can find D, all they need is relays with logging of all data in and out. (I thought Tor uses 3 relays between source and destination, but the same applies).

Re:Tor compromised

[PCM2]

A quick search suggests that only medical maruana is legal in California, other uses of it are still illegal albeit very minor.

An even quicker search of basic common sense suggests that most of the "medical" marijuana being used did not require a legitimate medical diagnosis. But since you obviously don't live in California, please continue.

Re:Tor compromised

[swb]

Was SR like eBay, where they just provided the marketplace, or was it an actual clearninghouse for physical goods? I always assumed it was just a marketplace and the goods moved between the actual buyers and sellers with SR taking a fee.

If it was just a marketplace, you would think it would be fairly simple to move it among zillions of global hosting sites and just run the whole thing by remote control, from anywhere.

Re:Tor compromised

[cayenne8]

...and discovered nine fake identification cards...

Hmm...since when did it become illegal to just possess fake ID cards?

Is it really against the law to call yourself whomever you wish, as long as it isn't lying to a federal officer or maybe a state policeman?

Is mere possession of fake ID or just going by an alias now illegal? What laws are on the books about this?

Re:Tor compromised

[JesseMcDonald]

I thought Tor uses 3 relays between source and destination

Perhaps they do. You need a minimum of two to implement onion routing, but more relays offers better security; more nodes have to be compromised to link the endpoints.

And yes, someone controlling enough nodes to put together the pieces, or monitoring enough of the network to achieve the same end through traffic analysis, are the major threat models against onion routing. This is why it's best to have a wide variety of relays, to make it more difficult for one organization to take over the network.

Re:Tor compromised

[neurovish]

Nope.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf

That was a fairly interesting read, although the "Based on my training and experience, I know...." phrase got a little redundant. Federal agents must have that setup as a macro, or have a script that just replaces the beginning of every sentence. It sounds like the dude was generally pretty careful, but he basically slipped up by logging into gmail and leaving clues on social networking (linkedin).

Re:Tor compromised

[TheCarp]

> 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.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

The availability of MM doesn't mean that pot is legal.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if the person had no morals he could have run the operation on a million zombie pc's around the world.

This guy though was a moral person, even though what he was doing was highly illegal, not a lot of people would consider what he did actually wrong. (except for the getting caught part)

When a countries laws do not match up to their morals, it is the laws that should be ignored, not the morals.

Re:Tor compromised

[evil-osm]

I seriously doubt they have fakeid smelling dogs.

You have to come to visit us some time my friend, our dogs smell of all sorts of things.

Re:Tor compromised

[gblfxt]

complacency, after years of realizing how incompetent the authorities are, people grow more lax with their operations. maybe by design by the authorites? naw....

Re:Tor compromised

[bill_mcgonigle]

Legalization of heroin or other highly addictive drugs would be disastrous

Sorry, this experiment has been run (Portugal) and decriminalizing and getting people treatment drops the usage rate by more than half in just a couple years and greatly reduces crime.

Ignorance like yours is what keeps the level of addiction up as well as the crime rate. You should feel bad.

Re:Tor compromised

[mdecerbo]

> I'm still flabbergasted that he was using servers in the U.S.

He may have used some servers in the U.S. but the server the FBI grabbed was overseas. From the complaint, page 14, item 22:

In particular, the FBI has located in a certain foreign country the server used to host Silk Road's website (the "Silk Road Web Server"). Pursuant to a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request, an image of the Silk Road Web server was made on or about July 23, 2013, and produced thereafter to the FBI.

There's a list of U.S. Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties here. Who's got a guess?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on the exact model of laptop you have, there may be an option in the BIOS to disable built-in devices such as microphones and webcams.

Obviously it's not convenient if you occasionally need to use those devices, but worth considering.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

The dude sounds like a bit of a thickie.

Re:Tor compromised

[lgw]

Thanks - good advice. I'll have to try that and see if it really works.

Re:Tor compromised

[ancientt]

He promoted the website using his real name attached to a gmail account with his real name as part of the address. They may not have found that out until they were ready to make a bigger case against him, but as I was reading the criminal complaint and saw that, I was dumbfounded that anyone could actually be that dense about security. Reading an older article, I see where he was asked if he was worried about law-enforcement agencies trying to track him down. He said "I have confidence in our security measures."

Re:Tor compromised

[lgw]

That's totally different! In capitalism, the government is corrupt because markets exist, but in Soviet Russia the markets exist because government is corrupt.

Re:Tor compromised

[rhazz]

Even after all these years I find it hard to accept that so many people have a problem with people they don't even know doing things they never would have heard about had it not been for the theft and abuse of their own rights and money. Strange world we live in...

Except the site isn't just about drugs - one of the linked articles indicates the site was also used to advertise "murder for hire" services. I think that is a very significant line being crossed.

Re:Tor compromised

[suutar]

Is a fake ID not by definition a forgery of a government document?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

HUBRIS.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

>You mean besides the criminal complaint posted in the article you were supposed to read before shoving your foot in your mouth?

Maybe you should keep your issues your own, rather than take them out on whoever asked you a simple question.

>Thanks to the Silk Road taking a percentage of all proceeds, they've been able to locate the ledger for the entire website; Every transaction made,
>as well as the so-called "tumbler" used to anonymize bitcoins used to make purchases on the website...
>as the transaction logs for "tumbled" bitcoins was also amongst the items recovered.

That's stunningly incompetent for someone as highly educated as this guy seems to be, though considering he didn't shut down as soon as the site got too popular,and even worked the media, something is not right with his thinking. It could be a case of someone that's smart in a narrow area thinking they're smart in general.

>Every PO box, every ship-to address... he kept it all.

How? Addresses were encrypted to the dealer's GPG keys, not Robert's. It would be possible to MITM attack this, but it would be really easy for a dealer with the right level of caution to catch this, and at least one out of that many dealers has to be smart.

>all that stuff with Freedom Hosting getting infected (Hey, check out that malware sometime; It records which Tor sites you visit and when. Can't think of how Silk
>Road might have been affected there!)

Based on what people are saying around the web, it appears that the malware used to expose TOR users was not installed on Silk Road. It could have exposed some SR users that are also sickos into kiddy-porn, but they got Roberts by unsophisticated means because he didn't take his millions of dollars in very serious crimes all that seriously.

One thing really icky about this is that even if Roberts is a psycho that solicited murders, he didn't allow weapons on SR, other black market sites that just became much more popular do.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

the root password of the Silk Road might as well have been "1234".

That's the combination to my luggage!

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA isn't capable of jack shit. It's 99% bark and 1% bite. As long as they can continue to scare people into thinking the NSA is omniscient, then most will pretend as if they are constantly being monitored - but they're not, far from it.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if it is a proper ID, then forging it (that is what a "fake" is) would be illegal. If it's a forged privately produce ID then probably not.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he probably should have moved the SR address around more frequently. I can recall the .onion address for that site changed only twice in the last 2 years. For a site such as SR, I think it would be prudent to change the site address every four to six months (if not more frequently), notify registered users of the new address through PGP private messaging or in the forums, and just keep moving the login page around to different .onion URLs and re-direct users to the main site at yet another randomized URL to make tracking him more difficult. Of course, granting an interview to Forbes could have been what tipped off the FBI in the first place.

Re:Tor compromised

[Synerg1y]

be careful in saying that, LEOs are trained to fabricate stories to mask how they actually work.

Re:Tor compromised

[khallow]

Because Canadian packages are so much harder to open than foreign packages?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I see, so the CBS openned an outgoing package to make some cash even though there is no one to charge? FYI, the inspection fee can only be charged to Canadian recipients of inspected packages entering the country. There is no conceivable way they openned this or any other outgoing package as a "Cash Grab."

So I guess you didn't read or didn't understand the previous comment. Surprising.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

it seems that the Tor system is compromised by the snoops.

The safest option is to assume that EVERYTHING is compromised nowadays. Your OS. Your security certificate server. Your ISP. Your VPN. SSL. Your webcam. Everything.

Not Everything.

My ass has not been compromised.

A PhD-singed packet was detected one time after uptime surpassed 14600 days, but other than that, zero breaches detected in the default install since inception! (yes, that's right, my ass can claim a better security record than even OpenBSD.)

Undetected? Not likely. One would likely be acutely aware about certain breaches of security. IDS tripwires are so sensitive they're one-time use.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

God damn, I wish I had mod points.

Re:Tor compromised

[fafaforza]

Weren't mod chips made illegal a few years back? IE: even possessing them? I wouldn't be surprised if mere possession is a crime.

Re:Tor compromised

[oreiasecaman]

lol mod parent 'funny'

Re:Tor compromised

[ProzacPatient]

One alternative would be to buy a car wash

Re:Tor compromised

[Zero__Kelvin]

No. You're not a troll at all. Your assumption that the only reason they would open a package was to get $5.00 is consistent with your ability to hide your trolling.

Re:Tor compromised

[gweihir]

Looks very much like an incompetent that felt far too safe, just because he was running on a hidden service. And looks very much like the hidden service was not the issue at all.

On the other hand, I have never understood the stupidity of people buying drugs via mail-order. I mean, tracing mail is a centuries old thing for law-enforcement, they really should know how to do that by now.

Re:Tor compromised

[TheCarp]

Yes and no. There are easy solutions in terms of....its easy to stop making it worst.

The problem, I think, comes down to problem definition. What is the original problem? Yes, there are people who will use drugs to the exclusivity of other activities, to the exclusivity of responsibilities. There are drug users, there are acute abusers, and there are people who don't even have a drug of choice, their choice is fucked up whenever possible. Shit, when I was a landlord, I lived with a couple of different kinds to varying degrees of problem. (of whom I was not the first to give the boot from an apartment)

I think the problem really is in the logic chain between some people have problems with drugs, and even that many problem causing people use drugs, into drugs being the problem. I don't think drug use really, in and of itself, indicates major problems. How many people do you know that have a few beers after work? Yet none of us can deny there are people who wake up drinking, still drunk from the night before, and are determined to spend the rest of their waking hours in a stupor.

I honestly think that sort of out of control use is more symptom than original problem. Its not just a bad habbit, people choose their habbits because in some way, on some level, it is what works best for them that they know. That is a deep personal issue that goes beyond drugs.

I mean krockodil says it all. When getting fucked up is so important to you as a lifestyle that cooking up dirty substances to inject doesn't just look like a good idea, but is a habbit that you get into long enough to destroy your limbs.... how do you restrict access to a person that determined? How do you look at that and say the drug is the problem. The drug didn't do that on its own. Plenty of users stick where they started or wander only a little. Plenty never get into IV use at all (the majority don't) so its really not the drugs, these people have been broken in some way.

Honestly I bring up the gay thing because... many of these drugs make me cringe. Heroin? You mean nausea and intense itching, all for....a strong opiate bliss high? It doesn't even appeal to me and I have had opiates, they feel great. Fucking amazing. Yet, I still have no desire to do them. I imagine most people reading this feel that way too.

This idea that there will be an epidemic of this drug or that if its legal, I think, are unfounded because they forget that people are not the same and most of us, have no problem either not becoming addicts, or keeping our addictions minor and controlled.... and even the so called "best" drugs don't appeal to everyone and don't even feel good to everyone. I know lots of people who refuse to smoke pot because they don't enjoy the feeling it gives them.

Shit I have tried coke a couple of times (yes, because of a girl whose pants I was trying to get in). It felt ok, I guess. I mean, it worked, it just, didn't do that much for me. I could see how people could want to do it, hell I could see how people would want to do it at work; just like that old commercial. However, It wasn't the feeling that my brain craves. I have had several offers since then, turned down every one.

Only drug I can say I stuck with over the years is pot. I still have a drink or two...a month (though that may go up with a mead brewing )...even that stopped being fun after a while (and a few visits to the porcelain god).

Though in fairness, I really did enjoy GHB and would probably choose to do that again in lieu of drinking if it was available. The high is very similar to alcohol but less of the toxic effects, and less mentally clouded....and its out of your system in all of 45 minutes to an hour tops. Though, I couldn't see doing it often (and I think the old bodybuilding study is likely bunk)

Actually there was a doctor a while back who was advocating using benzos instead of alcohol. The idea being you could dress up drinks around them like alcohol, get smashed and party.... then take another drug (I forget which) that counteracts the effect and bang.... sober and ready to drive. BTW in my experience, doctors like to PAR-TAY

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no. That is not even close to the truth. I didn't bother clicking the articles but if they actually say that the NSA is the domestic CIA they were written by badly misinformed people (not uncommon on wikipedia).

The NSA was not founded for that purpose, and, like the CIA, is (or was) theoretically barred from domestic spying. The reason for it to exist in addition to the CIA is that it was (and still is) hyperspecialized in "signals intelligence", which means listening to electronic communications. Intercepting radio signals, tapping telecommunications, breaking crypto, etc. The CIA uses very different methods of intelligence gathering, such as running spies, or flying aircraft or satellites over hostile territory and taking lots of photos. And, of course, the CIA has notoriously been involved in rough stuff -- think assassinations, covertly arming factions in foreign conflicts, attempting to invade a foreign nation, and so on. The NSA is pretty much exclusively about listening in and providing the resulting information to other agencies.

Note that this doesn't mean the CIA does no signals intelligence of its own. Lots of federal TLAs (three letter agencies) have somewhat overlapping responsibilities, and engage in turf wars over who gets to do what. But the NSA is the premiere signals intelligence agency, and as far as anybody knows that's all they do.

All that said, the situation we are in today is different than it used to be. The Bush II administration overturned the longstanding tradition of the NSA spying only on foreign soil, on foreign nationals. I'm not naive enough to believe that the NSA never violated those principles before then, but it would've been along the lines of "So, citizen X who is under investigation by the FBI for money laundering made a phone call while on vacation in Europe? How convenient that the NSA has assets in place, and (insert probably-bogus argument about the legal technicalities of spying on a US citizen while they're outside the US)".

In other words, it was the exception rather than the rule. They were trying to keep the fig leaf on, and they didn't have much infrastructure in place for domestic spying. I'm pretty sure that the current shameless "well of course we're spying domestically, and it's for your own good" NSA situation only came about as a consequence of 9/11 paranoia, enabled by the passage of the Patriot Act.

Re:Tor compromised

[gl4ss]

what I meant with fabrication was that they "randomly" selected his mail so that they could get something on him to bust him. parallel process.

yeah my packages get examined too.. after I open them at the customs or pre-pay the customs amount and have them do it. reasons to just grab it off the line would involve a tip, a drug dog tagging it or something similar.

(not living in canada or usa, but that's how it has been with mail coming from usa)

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes....HALF the people in burn units. How the hell did we get here?

Maybe because the most popular television show on basic cable glamorizes cooking meth.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't recall ever being billed for customs opening my parcels, and they did it plenty. Maybe the individual just gets paid that? Having done plenty of my own brokerage, I'd notice if I had to pay anything more than the standard duty on the items.

Re:Tor compromised

[circletimessquare]

that's also the moral to the movie "zero dark thirty":

all the torture yielded nothing

classic gumshoe following the leads caught bin laden

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet. Knew there would be at least on BB comment on here.

Re:Tor compromised

[phantomfive]

FWIW Soviet Russia was socialist, not communist. They were working towards becoming communist. The difference is this:

Communism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Socialism: "To each according to his contribution."

The Soviets weren't entirely sure how to switch from socialism to communism, but the general idea seemed to revolve around making the ideal 'soviet man.'

Re:Tor compromised

[Dunbal]

Same here, lol. Wait - algorithm? Compromised the minute you strayed from random numbers :)

Re:Tor compromised

[gizmo2199]

Also known as: using the postal service(s) for illegal activity, innit.
Arguably if Silk Road was truly underground and you had to know people who know people and use
dead drops to get your molly, as opposed to, you know, fedex, DPR probably wouldn't be in jail now.

Re:Tor compromised

[Soporific]

It's not illegal to issue cayenne8's cool club card ID's, but to create a fake government issued ID isn't legal. Otherwise what's the point of having a government issued ID if people can just start selling nearly perfect or perfect copies openly? Might as well print your own $100 bills.

Re:Tor compromised

[psithurism]

seems to me that's all 'security 101' stuff, no?

Criminal Security 101, yes, but unfortunately I don't know what university offers that course and people tend not to have a proper credentials in that particular area of the market.

However he did provide a number of suggestions to his users and sending stuff to friend's houses, etc were among them, so it is surprising that he didn't listen to his own site.

I've known (not many, not long) local 'criminals' and frequently they didn't realize when they crossed the line from shady stuff that a lawyer could easily get them out of, to really being a criminal. The justice department rarely sends you a note to let you know that you've crossed over from, "not worth our time to prosecute" to "bonuses to all agencies involved!" So I'd guess that Ulbricht didn't realize that he had passed the point of shady business to actually going to jail for a long time and losing all his bitcoins. He probably meant to encrypt and move everything over seas when he realized he was at that point.

Re:Tor compromised

[Applehu Akbar]

That the Lotto ticket with the GPS location of his server farm could not be traced?

Re:Tor compromised

[lennier]

Black markets have the same competitive pressures as regular ones -- in that the stupid, incompetent, and untalented, tend to be eaten up by people who lack those faults.

Ah, that would explain why the entire banking sector collapsed a while back in a heap of unverified, falsified and fraudulent financial instruments. All the incompetent players got competed out of existence during those years of hurly-burly open competition and now only the smartest, most ethical people in the industry remain standing, right?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the first time I've seen someone write about a drug that EATS YOUR FACE in a positive light.

That is quite something.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, the NSA also sponsors research in the arts and sciences, and almost every field of research common to US universities.

For those who are interested in a grant, the application #orm will be mailed to you without delay. Simply call your mother and let her know you are interested.

Re:Tor compromised

[theshowmecanuck]

The $5 is a brokerage fee. I have ordered stuff from the states plenty and have never heard of anyone having to pay $10 for doing their own brokerage. I have only ever paid a $5 fee. And that is why I only have stuff shipped via USPS and Canada Post if I am buying from the U.S. It beats the $50 dollars and higher "broker fees" that FedEx and UPS rip you off with (it seems to be based on the value of your package with a minimum of around $50 to $60). And I don't give a rat's ass if they open the parcels I order, but I doubt they do that much. They don't have the kind of manpower to open every package that comes across the border. They would need far more people. Note that whenever I have lived really close to the border (like within a half hour drive) I sometimes get things shipped to a company that will receive packages for you on the American side and then bring it back myself. But that is only if it is time dependent or they won't ship using USPS. And when I live further from the border it is USPS or nothing.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

precisely..

Re:Tor compromised

[Robert Goatse]

Not only that, the site owner himself solicited a member to kill another because the owner was being extorted for 500K with the release of users' identities.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

To play devils advocate - couldn't this be proof that the NSA doesn't abuse their power as this isn't a case of "National Security"?

Re:Tor compromised

[kermidge]

Serves me right for not reading the whole thing. Thank you.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to work on your understanding of how comment threads work. Seriously.

Re:Tor compromised

[PCM2]

The availability of MM doesn't mean that pot is legal.

I'm serious, man. Come to California, see how we do it, or just fucking grow a brain and stop talking about things you don't understand. There are countless people who legally sell pot here. Hundreds of thousands of people in California thank them for it.

Re:Tor compromised

[StikyPad]

Depends who you believe, I guess. This says the FBI was able to identify the first "ad" for the site, and build from there, both by other posts made by a user with the same name, and a gmail address they were able to subpoena.

Re:Tor compromised

[ultranova]

However he did provide a number of suggestions to his users and sending stuff to friend's houses, etc were among them, so it is surprising that he didn't listen to his own site.

It wouldn't really help. LEO have finite resources, so they can only spare so much for a single case. However, Silk Road was basically making a mockery of them, and even more importantly disproving the notion that every drug user is a junkie living in the streets - because you could hardly buy from there unless you were functional enough to have an Internet connection, manage Bitcoins, etc. - so once "Dread Pirate Roberts" was tracked down, it was just a matter of time. Humans aren't perfect, after all, so so one can avoid slipping up all the time.

Sucks for Ulbricht, but buyers and sellers will simply go to a competing site. The War on Drugs isn't winnable because people have an innate need to feel changed modes of consciousness, and legally available alcohol is terrible for that. Altough I suppose a good enough brain-computer interface or sufficiently advanced mental training techniques could make chemical substances obsolete.

Also, this proves that Bitcoin does/did not derive most of its value from Silk Road: it lost about 1/10th of its value, after which prices stabilized and seem to be climbing back to the normal range of around 100 euros/BTC.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

you can do bitcoin via TOR

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait for the Great Alexander to request credit for "busting the criminal, TOR-based site Silk Road. See why we need dozens of billions per year ?".

My personal guess is that operational security and all kind of exploits of the SR servers were used by the feds.

Whatever it was, this will fuel Security Engineering (of the proactive, not reactive kind). TOR is still rather primitve compared to what is theoretically possible with mixnets.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Either you are a gov shill or you are chicken little.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Try living in a town with a meth or crack problem and see how many days you can go before someone mugs you.

I am not a hardcore anti-drug person. I support the legalization of marijuana.

Shit like meth and crack take a toll on society at large, not just on the people who use them. This manifests itself in their direct actions to harm others and also the high cost of dealing with a disfunctional human being (even with our rapidly disappearing social safety nets).

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds SR security was about as good as Lockmart and RSA "security".

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you mean "Sorry aboot that?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall a news piece I saw a couple years ago where some stores were selling something in between. They were careful not to claim they were real state IDs, but IIRC they did have the name of the state, a picture, birthdate, address, etc....

They were generally located in areas with a high percentage of Hispanics

I can't seem to find anything on it right now. All I'm turning up is results for actual fake IDs. Apparently they weren't actually illegal since they didn't claim to be state IDs, but it was clear the intent was to make something that looked official enough to at least fool the people buying them. I'm certain they wouldn't fool law enforcement or even a bouncer at some skeevy dive bar.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

"Try living in a town with a meth or crack problem and see how many days you can go before someone mugs you."

which is a DIRECT result of those substances being illegal; *most* illegal drugs are cheaper than dirt to produce, it is their illegality which makes them black-market expensive... ...and, i bet i *do* live in a town that has a meth/crack 'problem', yet i've never been mugged, not even close, don't know ANYONE who has been mugged/robbed...
hmmm

"I am not a hardcore anti-drug person. I support the legalization of marijuana."

oh, a soft-core anti-drug person, i get it...
like so many other 'problems', this boils down to: do i own my own body, or not ? ? ?
if i do, then why can't i ingest what i want without interference from moral scolds and busybodies (who doubtless have there *OWN* poison, which is -of course- perfectly fine and good, not like *MY* poison, which is 'bad'...)

"Shit like meth and crack take a toll on society at large, not just on the people who use them. This manifests itself in their direct actions to harm others and also the high cost of dealing with a disfunctional human being (even with our rapidly disappearing social safety nets)."

shit like drones and surveillance and unrestrained imperialism take a toll on THE PLANET at large, not just the people they target...
etc, i think you get the point: we have -roughly- a MILLION issues which have more of a deleterious impact on society, but since they benefit the power elites, they dare not be spoken of in a serious fashion...

again, it is the war on (some) drugs itself which CAUSES the problems FOR SOCIETY, NOT THE INGESTION AND EFFECTS of the substances by individuals who may or may not have the ability to constrain their usage to 'appropriate' levels...

not to mention, liquor, cigs, blah blah blah...

Re:Tor compromised

[TheCarp]

It isn't the drug that does it, the drug is (relatively, compared to other opiates) safe. Its the impurities in the drug, which are a result of the process used to create it in kitchens from codeine.

The point is, without prohibition, there would be no advantage in price, in fact it would be more expensive, getting codeine and cooking it up in your kitchen, vs buying it at the store, made by a pharmaceutical lab up to USP standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desomorphine

everything you need to know on this one is right there:

"fast onset and a short duration of action, with relatively little nausea or respiratory depression compared to equivalent doses of morphine"

and

"Since the homemade mix is routinely injected immediately with little or no further purification, "krokodil" has become notorious for producing severe tissue damage"

These are societies addicts, these are societies addicts on prohibition. Any questions?

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Moral people order other people killed? You live in a strange world.

Re:Tor compromised

[Minwee]

Let's stick to stereotypes that have some basis in reality.

Re:Tor compromised

[goozer321]

Yeah - have an A1 day.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice Breaking Bad reference

Re:Tor compromised

[dataspel]

One alternative would be to buy a car wash

Thanks, this made my day.

Re:Tor compromised

[lgw]

The next time you fell this obsessive-compulsive need to point out that the USSR is "No True Communist", even in response to an "in Soviet Russia" joke: don't. Just don't. You're seriously not adding to the conversation.

But you should have a conversation about "communism" with someone in their 40s or older who left the USSR or one of its satellites when they were young. People who are still emotionally scarred and bitterly angry. You'll realize you sound much like the guy who says "I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, I'm just pointing out some inconsistencies", except Communism has killed so many more people.

Re:Tor compromised

[phantomfive]

ok, hello idiot who takes himself too seriously.

I will additionally help you by pointing out the reason you are a fool. Not only do you fail to understand, you don't even realize it when knowledge is given to you directly. There was wisdom given to you directly from my fingers. Feel free instead to stew in your cesspool of self-admiration.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that's not very accurate. If we made every drug here in the US legal we would be in a lot of trouble. We'd have a ton of new addicts and most of them would be under 20 years old. The reason it "worked" in Portugal is because they had nowhere to go but up, they hit rock bottom worse case scenario with drug use.

Re:Tor compromised

[kbx911]

this is the beginning of a new beginning for bitcoin. Sure it is going to crash, sure lots of speculators are going to run away with their tails between their legs. What will remain is the fundamental concept of bitcoin within the negativity of a drug-enabling-mechanism, and the people that will remain will be the true believers of its power. I will buy it in volume when it hits rock bottom after this. Jai Bitcoin!

Re:Tor compromised

[kbx911]

not "within" i meant "without the negativity of...", /. please put edit comment option

Re:Tor compromised

[AnnaZed]

If they had stuck to selling drugs I think most people would feel sympathetic to them, but start trafficking in stolen identities and weapons and I think I have as much interest as the government does in taking you down.

Re:Tor compromised

[TheCarp]

And they got there by having everything legal to begin with? Oh wait no, they participated in the drug war and ended up there anyway.

Would you like to try again?

Re:Tor compromised

[g0bshiTe]

You said drug war, please post your 5 new links to the replacement sites.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you might be mistaken about the "ship-to" addresses in particular. I never purchased from the site, though I found it extremely interesting and viewed it out of curiosity multiple times. I also inspected the transaction model. Address information would not be sent to SR. It was sent directly between the buyer and seller and almost all sellers, and particularly the major ones required the use of PGP to communicate anything, particularly things like the shipping addresses. They would only post their public key. Those communications should be protected at least by PGP (FWIW). From the criminal complaint it sounds like hundreds of thousands of people did purchase from the site. From the information I've seen I'm not sure that they are all compromised. I don't think it is responsible to panic them at this point.

Re:Tor compromised

[mgcarley]

Too soon.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, give me the name and address of a shop where I can legally buy pot and I'll go there.

Re:Tor compromised

[uninformedLuddite]

Are you saying that you send something and if it is inspected then you are billed for the cost of the inspection?

Re:Tor compromised

[lgw]

Perhaps your fingers are less wise than you suppose.

Re:Tor compromised

[phantomfive]

That's definitely true.

Re:Tor compromised

[die standing]

This internet is inherently unsecure; what the definition of is is, in this case, is immaterial.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

"Every PO box, every ship-to address... he kept it all. There was no data retention policy this guy used... he was a data hoarder, and the only reason it took the government this long wasn't because of how hard it was to track him down in real life, but because of the sheer crapflood of forensic data bogged down their entire cybercrime division. And get this... they bought the malware later used to infect Freedom Hosting off Silk Road!"

But this is not how Silk Road worked at all!! Ive never actually purchased anything with the site, but I looked into it out of curiosity. The buyer never gives his shipping address to the website in cleartext, and Silk Road never knows your address. This was one of the central points of the whole platform!! Instead the seller gives out a public encryption key, and the buyer first encrypts his address using using this key and encryption software on his computer, and then submits the encrypted text to silk road. So the only person who can decrypt the address is the seller, and it doesnt matter if LEO has a backdoor on Silk Road and intercepts the encrypted text. The only way buyers address can be revealed is if the **seller** has been compromised, not the site itself. This was one of the reasons people trusted the site enough to use it for such risky activities. It didnt matter if silk road itself was a government honeypot, in theory it would still be safe to use it.

Re:Tor compromised

[eriqk]

Dude, I can't even get ovaltine where I live.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

You are comparing apples to oranges.

A commercial web site (even if it exists behind some walls of electronic anonymity) is not the same as a terror organization.

Re:Tor compromised

[fatphil]

Citation needed for those quotes.

The fact that workers owning the means of production wasn't mentioned implies to me they're probably pulled out of your arse.

Re:Tor compromised

[phantomfive]

Heh.....use Google and you'll look less idiotic.

Re:Tor compromised

[kestasjk]

Then again since anyone can be a tor node, and there are never enough tor nodes, and tor nodes are more likely to be used for shady activity, it just takes a decent percentage of tor nodes to be compromised and you can pretty quickly build a picture of who common clients are and who they are talking to. For a server it can't be too difficult, with government resources, to track someone down through tor nodes. I'd say with a decent sized botnet and enough time you'd be able to chip away at anonymity without much difficulty.

Re:Tor compromised

[fatphil]

There are many sources for both quotes. Pre-communist texts contain your "communist" quote, for example (each part individually goes back millennia). The lines when used by Marx later were not contrasting Socialism with Communism. Marx's use of your "communist" quote was even refered to as "scientific socialism".

Re:Tor compromised

[phantomfive]

Well at least you sound like you have some knowledge now, so that's an improvement.

Re:Tor compromised

[JesseMcDonald]

While that is theoretically possible, by their own admission the NSA has had no luck tracking down specific users on demand.

With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user in response to a TOPI request/on demand.

Re:Tor compromised

[PCM2]

OK, give me the name and address of a shop where I can legally buy pot and I'll go there.

OK, fine, start here. It's a list of marijuana dispensaries in the Bay Area that's maintained by the local free weekly newspaper. These are not "drug dens," they are licensed businesses, and if you're capable of a little logic, you will put two and two together and realize that you can't get a license if there is no law governing it. Since there is a law, that makes it ... with me so far?

You will need a recommendation from a doctor, which might set you back a couple hundred bucks. That's between you and your doctor. To get one, you may be required to be a California resident. Once you have a medical marijuana card and a valid picture ID, you can legally -- yes, legally -- buy marijuana in various forms from any of these places. Thanks to the California Compassionate Use Act of 1996, you may also be able to grow a fairly generous amount of marijuana for your own personal use, depending on which city you live in. Exact laws regarding the amounts you are legally allowed to possess and grow vary by municipality. You're welcome.

Re:Tor compromised

[Anonymous Coward]

So by your reasoning any prescription drugs are legal because if you lie to a doctor you can get a script written?

Re:Tor compromised

[ClintJaysiyel]

You use the term "Rock bottom" without defining it, making your argument hollow and lacking substance. Define rock bottom.

Billion ... with a B

[Wh1t3Rabbit2084]

So this begs the question - Are we winning the war on drugs yet?

Re: Billion ... with a B

[jsidhu]

What's winning got to do with it?

Re: Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

What's winning got to do with it?

Why don't you ask the drug agencies fighting that war. They're the one who keep beating that "winning" drum, but I think it's rather obvious as to why they do it. They need to convince us they're winning in order to justify their very existence. Even they must know a portion of their job justification is complete and utter bullshit supported by failed policy.

Of course, justifying expenses would also imply that the American people actually have a say in tax spending anymore. We don't, hence the reason the war rages on.

The largest issue with the war on drugs is including cannabis. It's insane what we spend out of the overall drug war budget trying to eradicate a plant from the earth while filling privately funded prisons with "criminals". They also keep cannabis illegal in order to ensure that alcohol and prescription drug addicts don't convert to cannabis use and affect profits for those massive industries.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Threni]

No it doesn't.

Re: Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they need to convince us that the drugs are a terrible and frightful enemy that only they are capable of defending us from, they don't need to win, winning would actually eliminate their jobs.

They do a much better job if they just make us think they can maybe win, if we keep pouring money down their drains.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[TheP4st]

No it does not beg the question "Are we winning the war on drugs yet?". The war on drugs cannot be won as long as there exist people creating demand for illicit products since these very same people will find a way to obtain it. The only way to win that war is by exterminating humanity as a species and that would be the definitive Pyrrhic victory.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Raises the question.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Richy_T]

It depends. Do you make money from the prison industry?

Re:Billion ... with a B

[gandhi_2]

War on Drugs? Don't know.

The War on Incorrect Usage of "Begs the Question" however, we are obviously losing.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

The US govt seized my bitcoins which silk road kept for me. I am not a US citizen. I have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens. Will I be able to reclaim my bitcoins? I was actually keeping them there as a safe haven.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[c 0xFF]

It means the same thing, for all intensive purposes.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[NoImNotNineVolt]

*head asplodes*

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we winning the war on drugs yet?

Definitely. The people who enforce the laws are getting paid. The cartels' monopolies are being (mostly) protected, keeping profit margins high, and safe from the free marketers (including the efficiency gods, such as Wal-Mart). The lobbyists are still getting all the results that they want.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

The US govt seized my bitcoins which silk road kept for me. I am not a US citizen.

so?

I have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens.

That may or may not be true, but the guy you trusted your property to did, and it got seized.

Will I be able to reclaim my bitcoins? I was actually keeping them there as a safe haven.

Don't count on it.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[lgw]

You meant "for all intensive porpoises".

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it doesn't, since "begging the question" was a mistranslation of petitio principii ("seeking the principles") and has nothing to do with begging or questions.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Valdrax]

It's "intents and purposes!"

I don't even want to know what an intensive purpose is, but I bet you'd probably want to keep that kind of thing on Tor and out of public sight.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[demonlapin]

That was really fucking stupid.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[CaseCrash]

Irregardless, that war's been lost for a while.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[bunglebungle]

Don't you mean "loosing"?

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

We're winning it just about as much as The War Against Terror, a.k.a. TWAT.

<charliesheen>WINNING, DUH!</charliesheen>

Re:Billion ... with a B

[SleazyRidr]

Sometime I wonder if I'm being trolled by you grammar guys. The question "Are we winning the war on drugs yet?" has been answered (in the negative, due to the high volume of trade on Silk Road) without anyone asking it. Thus the question has been begged, rather than raised.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[SleazyRidr]

The face that you don't know what an intensive purpose looks like is irregardless of the fact that you're being grammar-trolled. (By me as well as c++0xFF)

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Archangel Michael]

One cannot have a "war" against an inanimate object or an idea/concept. War on drugs, war on poverty, war on terror all "wars" that we cannot win.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[iggymanz]

the CIA trafficks $50 billion a year from Afghanistan alone

Re:Billion ... with a B

[h4rr4r]

Or to make the drugs legal thus ending the War.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Valdrax]

Oh, I know you know, and I know you know I know, but do everyone else out there know we know or even just know, you know?

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as there is demand there will always be supply. It's part of the economic reality. Laws don't eliminate problems, they enable the government to prosecute transgressions (like making a lot of money without paying taxes). Why do you think they bust people continually and yet the problem persists? Statistically speaking not many people get caught.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Begging the question is an informal fallacy similar to circular reasoning.

In this instance, there is nothing circular. There is the question, "are we winning the war on drugs yet?" There is the answer, "no, silk road does big business." But there is no circular reasoning (i.e. "we know silk road does big business because we are not winning the war on drugs."), not even in the implicit sense (begging the question is a form of circular reasoning where one of the claims (one that would make the circular reasoning more apparent), is not explicitly stated). We know silk road does big business because a large sum of money was seized in this bust. This claim is totally independent of our success in the war on drugs.

"Begged" in this context has a very specific meaning. One that doesn't apply in this situation. The question is raised. The question ought to be asked. The question springs to mind. The question follows. The question is not, however, begged. The etymology of the expression "begging the question" might shed some light on this issue. Begging the question, or petitio principii in the original Latin, means literally "assuming the premise" or "assuming the original point". In this context, "begging" is a reference to the "beginning" or basis of an argument. It is not synonymous with "requesting" or "asking for" or "demanding".

I'm sure this response is inaccurate in some way(s), and a true logician or philosopher will shit all over it. It's been over a decade since I last sat through a philosophy class. My previous post, however, was half-troll. "Begs the question" is so frequently misused today that there's really no point in correcting people. Really, there's little need for English vernacular to discriminate between begging the question and other forms of circular reasoning. I'm confident that as language evolves, "circular reasoning" will be "circular reasoning", and "begging the question" will be synonymous with "raising the question".

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Flere Imsaho]

Woosh

Re:Billion ... with a B

[runeghost]

Who's 'we'? Big Pharma and Big Brother have indeed won the War on Some Drugs, while the American public have lost it.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[idontgno]

Nonsense, it's lunchtime at the shoreside campground at the dolphin sanctuary.

"Food, for all in tents, and porpoises!"

Re:Billion ... with a B

[alexo]

Irregardless, that war's been lost for a while.

... and you could care less.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[TeknoHog]

For all intestinal purposes, this thread makes me [sic]

Re:Billion ... with a B

[scarboni888]

WE aren't but the drug cartels and law enforcement win large from it each and every day.

And anyway they're the people that matter so it's ok that way.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

and a true logician or philosopher will shit all over it

Don't worry guy, there's no such thing as a true logician or a true philiosopher...well as long as they aren't Scottish I guess.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll save your comment for prosperity.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[squiggleslash]

It was only 36 Billion at the time the submitter submitted the article. Since then, because of fluctuations in the value of Bitcoins, it's gone from $36B to $17T back down to $3,000 and then up for a bit to $256M.

It's now $5.23

Re:Billion ... with a B

[JakartaDean]

I agree. I can be a real pedant, but the modern use of "begs the question" clearly fills a need to express an idea which is not as easily expressed in other ways. Circular reasoning already is in the common vocabulary, so having an obscure rough equivalent serves no purpose. In this case the modern usage is superior, and will win out, deservedly.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[Baki]

Please stop calling it the war on drugs. It is a war on people that want to decide for themselves what they ingest, instead of letting lawmakers decide over my own body. It cannot be called a war on drugs, it is a war on people owning their own body.

I for one, will never accept that I am "allowed" to ingest alcohol but not other substances that I prefer and know to be less dangerous.
If justice wants to regain respect of the population at large, they must stop this.

Re: Billion ... with a B

[buck-yar]

Just look at Hank from Breaking Bad. Sure he's a fictional character, but he's exactly how most agents are. These DEA people are psychopaths bent on ruining the lives of normal people who use drugs (seeing all the online activity post-SR bust tells me a lot of the people who use drugs are just avg people). They demonize them, despise and have contempt for the drug user, all while sitting around drinking adult beverages. I hear about how drugs ruin people's lives... Not nearly as often as govt does.

Re:Billion ... with a B

[thewolfkin]

Irregardless, that war's been lost for a while.

... and you could care less.

...alot less

Drugs are bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be happy.

I mine bitcoin and...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I am absolutely fine with this.

The Private Federal Reserve...

[Anonymous Coward]

...wins again!

Wait what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're telling me I can't run an online marketplace for illegal items on the internet? Next thing you know I won't even be able to post naked pics of my ex in revenge for dumping me.

Re:Wait what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you can run an online marketplace for illegal items on the Internet, as SR staying up as long as it did demonstrates. The people who ran Atlantis shut it down as soon as they suspected that investigators were getting close, and SR should have done the same. Instead Roberts was trying to be some kind of celebrity.

There are other black market sites on the deep web that will become much more popular with SR gone. There is huge demand for the products being sold, and people who live in repressive countries like the United States that have gotten this taste of freedom aren't just going to go back to living like slaves.

Didn't expect this...

[SgtKeeling]

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

Re:Didn't expect this...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to talk to gwern, I know he hangs out on #reddit-nootropics on freenode

Re:Didn't expect this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's a great article.... oh wait, no, it's a massive explosion of wordy guff and is the most epic example of tl;dr I have ever seen in my life.

tl;dr: don't bother unless you're having trouble falling asleep.

Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

The only surprise here is why this arrest and seizure took so long. I hope all these evildoers and drug pushers realize now that they can't hide behind anonymity and the authorities can prosecute and punish these dastardly bastards.

Congrats to the FBI, DEA, and government for taking this hooligan down.

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

The only surprise here is why this arrest and seizure took so long. I hope all these evildoers and drug pushers realize now that they can't hide behind anonymity and the authorities can prosecute and punish these dastardly bastards.

Congrats to the FBI, DEA, and government for taking this hooligan down.

Sounds like you need a mushroom session.

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope all these evildoers and drug pushers

capitalism is evil. selling a product to a willing and interested buyer is evil.

"Drug dealers don’t really sell drugs. Drug dealers offer drugs. I’m 30 years old. Ain’t nobody ever sold me drugs. Ain’t nobody ever sold nobody in this room some drugs. Was you ever in your life not thinking about getting high and somebody sold you some fucking drugs. Hell, no!

Drug dealers offer, “Hey man, You want some smoke? You want some smoke?” If you say “no,” that’s it. Now Jehovah’s Witnesses on the other hand. Shit. Yo man, drug dealers don’t sell drugs. Drugs sell themselves. It’s crack. It’s not an encyclopedia. It’s not a fucking vacuum cleaner. You don’t really gotta try to sell crack, OK? I’ve never heard a crack dealer go, “Man, how am I going to get rid of all this crack? It’s just piled up in my house.”"
- Chris Rock on drugs

Re:Long Overdue

[bunratty]

I see your brainwashing has been 100% successful. Congratulations on having no ability to think for yourself. You earned it!

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

Good goy.

Re:Long Overdue

[Tokolosh]

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

— John Stuart Mill,

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't agree more. We've seen so many times how small business has been destroyed by large corporations, so let me re-iterate:

Support your local dealer!

Re:Long Overdue

[inking]

Just because you disagree with him on the legality of drug trafficing doesn't mean that he is brainwashed.

Re: Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

not advocating for either side here, but how is your reaction any different from his? from the outside i see two people reacting with the same level of blindness in opposite directions

Re:Long Overdue

[doconnor]

Using the word "evildoers" in a context other then a Saturday morning cartoon means that he is brainwashed.

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

What people do with their body is none of your business. Fuck you and all the other puritans like you.

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>/pol/

Re:Long Overdue

[bunratty]

His claim seems to be that every single individual that breaks the law is an "evildoer". That's an incredibly simplistic and immature view of morality. In fact, with a healthy view of morality you can understand that sometimes to moral thing to do is to break the law. It's the idea behind the Heinz dilemma.

Re: Long Overdue

[bunratty]

Because I am telling him what his statements say about himself. I am not simplistically overgeneralizing about the behavior of thousands of people I have had no connection whatsoever with. By doing so he is placing a blanket judgement on all people who break laws without regard for their individual reasons for doing so. He's essentially being a Nazi by being so rigidly judgemental.

Re:Long Overdue

[clonehappy]

Yes, "drug pushers". They "pushed" TOR onto everyone's computer. They "pushed" everyone's browser to the onion URL that points to Silk Road. Then they "pushed" everyone to buy bitcoins and "pushed" them to use those bitcoins to buy contraband. Yep, "pushers" indeed!

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

Not "dastardly?"

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

No I specifically use "evildoers" to troll nitwits like you and you got trolled, boy.
It shows that it is you who is brainwashed because some words and phrases just enrage idiots like you.

I win, 2-0. Checkmate.

Re:Long Overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

but we live in a free society so all of that needs to be immediatly punished... wait a minute.

Re:Long Overdue

[inking]

Well, no, he doesn't. If you read his post, which is most likely trolling to begin with, he specifically refers to the "evildoers" from SR as discussed in this post and not to all who break any kind of laws, a la highly moral, romanticised tax evasion through Robert of Locksley. If you do not think that the individuals trafficking drugs are harming the society for personal benefit and are thus what most people would consider to be "doing evil", that is your personal opinion. Claiming that any dissenting view is a result of brainwashing only hints at your own dogmatic attitude regarding the matter.

strange summary FTA

[schneidafunk]

"U.S. law enforcement authorities raided an Internet site"
How'd they get in the front door?

Re:strange summary FTA

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't. They used their backdoor.

Re:strange summary FTA

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't. They used their backdoor.

Giggidy

Re:strange summary FTA

[bobbied]

Well played sir... LOL

Re:strange summary FTA

[GameboyRMH]

Bring in the logic probe!

N$A now player in US domestic war on drugs

[Anonymous Coward]

But they only spy on foreign terrists. And blacks.

Re:N$A now player in US domestic war on drugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Now?

They have been a part of the drug war since the drug war started.

There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[gallondr00nk]

It'll drop like a stone.

Only kidding, I imagine a lot of the smarter users moved on the very second the site was mentioned in the media./p

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[thevirtualcat]

It's an excellent opportunity to see what happens when 26,000 BTC suddenly vanish from existence.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Anonymous Coward]

You kidding? That's when the value initially spiked! Nobody gave a fuck about buttcoin until the media picked up on SR, but after that it went from 0.05 USD to 35.00 USD in three weeks.

Bitcoin: a currency backed by COMEDY GOLD

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Dunbal]

Vanish? I'm sure they'll be exchanged for cash on an exchange, and the cash will be kept by the Feds and spent as they please. Because the law says that any cash they seize when there is suspicion (not proof - suspicion!) of drugs/money laundering is theirs to do with as they please.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Agent ME]

Just because all SR users use Bitcoin doesn't mean all or even a significant amount of Bitcoin users use SR.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Anonymous Coward]

The way has just been opened for some teenagers from some country without US extradition to make their own new version of the site. Someone will use their OLPC to create it by the end of the month. Millions of dollars looks real good when you are living in some backwater village.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing more than what happened when they came into existence from nothing.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[jonbryce]

It is not entirely clear that bitcoins are legal. Obviously the feds will seize any criminal property regardless of whether it is otherwise legal criminal property such as cash or precious metals, or illegal criminal property such as unsold inventory of drugs. The illegal criminal property will be destroyed, and the legal criminal property will be sold to help fund their operations. If bitcoins are held to be illegal criminal property, then they will have to destroy them, but probably they will keep them as evidence for now.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if it's so, reality agrees with GP. Check how it dropped in last two hours since the news hit the net.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[xvan]

They can't cash it, because that would mean that at least some part of the US government believes that BC exchanges are legal.
That might be counterproductive when the US & friends finally decide to step in, regulate this shit and take their piece of the cake.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[PRMan]

Actually, it took about a $30 hit today.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[lgw]

It's very clear that bitcoins are legal - no different than any other collectable. Many uses of them aren't, of course. The only alternative currency I've ever seen outlawed per se was "liberty dollars", because they were called dollars - don't do that.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't cash it, because that would mean that at least some part of the US government believes that BC exchanges are legal.

Why would they use an exchange to trade them (there's no such thing as cashing them in)? They'll auction them off like they do with every other non-liquid asset. Bitcoins aren't special magic. They're no different than securities, which have no cash value either.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Millions of dollars look pretty good no matter where you live.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[tftp]

The illegal criminal property will be destroyed

It's evidence; it won't be destroyed until after the trial. The LEOs will probably convert BTC to USD to capture the value. With SR dead, there goes the first and the last real reason to own BTC, so BTC exchange rate may drop quite a lot.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not entirely clear that bitcoins are legal. Obviously the feds will seize any criminal property regardless of whether it is otherwise legal criminal property such as cash or precious metals, or illegal criminal property such as unsold inventory of drugs. The illegal criminal property will be destroyed, and the legal criminal property will be sold to help fund their operations. If bitcoins are held to be illegal criminal property, then they will have to destroy them

Well then... if they seize enough of it, at least one little part of the government now has some motivation to support it as being legal.

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Anonymous Coward]

do you have stairs in your house

Re:There goes the value of Bitcoin.

[Dunbal]

Cars are not a legal currency, yet the US government has no trouble "cashing" those in at auction. Why would bitcoin be different? Lot #4612 65,000 bitcoin starting bid at...

Might not be via TOR

[EMG at MU]

This guy had to convert some of the bitcoin into real $ at some point, he had to eat and live somewhere right? Money laundering investigations might have been the vector through which he was compromised instead of a computer based trace.

Re:Might not be via TOR

[Drachs]

They probably traced the bitcoin transactions he used to extract good old American cash.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity

Re:Might not be via TOR

[stewsters]

At least, that's what the "Parallel Construction" will say. Remember that TOR was released by the NSA. Perhaps it was released because they believed that only they had enough of a surveillance budget to monitor all the messages in route.

Re:Might not be via TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

The first version of Tor was published by researchers funded by the US Naval Research Laboratory, not the NSA. Onion routing had been researched by DARPA before that.

Re:Might not be via TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that TOR was released by the NSA.

Eh? You mean the Naval Research Labs.

Re:Might not be via TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Might not be via TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

+4 Insightful, lol wut

The concept of onion routing was developed by the Office of Naval Research. Tor itself was written by Roger Dingeldine and a couple of others, who later set up the Tor Project. Unless your belief is that NSA has infiltrated basically every communications-related project out there (ok, to be fair, you probably do), the NSA has nothing to do with this.

Re:Might not be via TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

Tor came from the Navy, not the NSA ( https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec04/tech/dingledine.html )

It was designed to facilitate either undercover agents or assets remaining anonymous and thus able to carry out their business despite the presence of "unfriendly" regimes. Naturally, if everyone on the Tor network were involved in the military, it'd kind of defeat the whole purpose of anonymizing such activity (as you can tell a person is using Tor fairly easily...or at least could, until the advent of obfsproxy, but even that is anything but bulletproof), so it HAD to be opened to the public at large to be able to carry out the purpose for which it was created, and the costs of doing so (making criminal activities easier being the big one) were deemed acceptable considering the payout. Ill informed conspiracy theories about all this are growing pretty damn tiresome.

Re:Might not be via TOR

[buck-yar]

And you believe that? After all the lies regarding the existence of PRISM? Try googling "SOD NSA parallel construction"

Very likely IMO they caught him using PRISM or other illegal techniques and put together this fake ID as a front to protect the true source. If you read the pdf of the court filings, it says not all information is presented, just enough for probable cause. SOD/Local police have lied to the courts about the source of information in the past, why would they stop?

The article:
-http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/05/sod_squad_found_feeding_nsa_surveillance_info_to_drug_enforcement/
"But part of the deal for getting this data is that the DEA and others should cover up the information's source by setting up a fake investigation trail – a process known as "parallel construction". For example, the police could say the arrest was made during a routine traffic stop or on the word of an informant.

"It's just like laundering money you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008.

One federal prosecutor told how he was dealing with a drug case in Florida when a DEA agent lied about the source of information that led to an arrest, saying it had come from an informant. When pressed, the agent admitted the data had come from SOD.

"I was pissed," the prosecutor said. "Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you're trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." He later dropped the case.

Law enforcement agents said that the practice was not uncommon in drug cases. Often a suspect will plead guilty and there's no need to examine evidence in court, but in some cases where the defendant has fought their corner, legal actions have been dropped rather than expose SOD to public scrutiny."

Federal Reserve Notes Used to Sell Illicit Goods

[cervesaebraciator]

Can we arrest Ben Bernanke?

Well now.

[Black Parrot]

That's an odd way for the editors to keep bitcoin in the headlines.

Got nailed by USING Silk Road, not RUNNING it

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the complaint, they tracked him by intercepting fake id's he sent to his actual home address. Whether they breached TOR and just set him up, or just hit the stupid mistake of a lifetime by him using his actual address I doubt we will ever know. In any case, they traced things back to him in the end it seems.

Re:Got nailed by USING Silk Road, not RUNNING it

[Anonymous Coward]

Where else are you going to have things delivered so you can pick them up?

Re:Got nailed by USING Silk Road, not RUNNING it

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it sounds like he was just sloppy in keeping his identities and email addresses separate. Seriously amateur.
http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf

Re:Got nailed by USING Silk Road, not RUNNING it

[GameboyRMH]

The house of some dumb sucker who will be the fall guy if the packages are searched. Pay him in cash or drugs. Arrange scheduled exchanges and only speak face-to-face.

Re:Got nailed by USING Silk Road, not RUNNING it

[CaseCrash]

That's great, except all the IDs had his picture on them.

LOL

[sexconker]

How: Anyone can get on Tor, get on Silk Road, and watch what's going on. Anonymity doesn't do shit when half the nodes are run by three letter acronyms and you end up selling BTC on MtGox for USD.

The only questions I have have are about the seizure and the hacking.

How do you seize BTC? Surely they had an encrypted wallet and copious backups, right? The feds can take your wallet and do exactly nothing with it, while you could then reproduce your wallet from one of your backups and have instant access to your BTC.

Why was he hit with a hacking charge? Because he did things with a computer?

Re:LOL

[mederbil]

The feds could have transferred his BTC to another wallet. Your backups are of no use when the blockchain insists that those Bitcoins don't belong to you anymore. Correct me if my understanding of Bitcoin is wrong, please.

As for the hacking charge, I'm not sure - but you can read the court docs here - http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu.nyud.net/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf. I still need to go through this myself so I won't comment on why there is a hacking charge.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe read the complaint. Good idea, eh?

And you seize BTC by also arresting the only person who had access to the wallet, and the backups. :0

Re:LOL

[sexconker]

The feds can't do that without decrypting his wallet first.

Re:LOL

[sexconker]

Maybe read the complaint. Good idea, eh?

And you seize BTC by also arresting the only person who had access to the wallet, and the backups. :0

Not a good idea. Seems you didn't read it either.
Why do you think that there's only one person with access to the wallet or backups? Encrypt and disperse.

Re:LOL

[lgw]

Apparently he wasn't big on encryption. Could be as simple as that.

Re:Federal Reserve Notes Used to Sell Illicit Good

[Nidi62]

Can we arrest Ben Bernanke?

If he ran a site that allowed the sale of illicit goods, then sure. Your argument would be stronger if the story were about the arrest of they guy that created bitcoins, and not a guy who ran a website where you can use bitcoins to buy drugs and other illegal goods.

So how long...

[Em Adespoton]

So how long will it be before the Silk Road is back up and running under the management of the Dread Pirate Roberts? I presume he had a cabin boy prior to being arrested... or was that how he got nabbed?

Re:So how long...

[bobbied]

Inconceivable!

Re:So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is "never get involved in a drug war in America"

Re:So how long...

[bunratty]

I suspect the end result will be similar to when the U.S. government took down the Medellin Cartel. In The Silk Road's place will pop up dozens of similar sites, and no one will ever be able to shut them all down. Welcome to the "war on drugs," which actually makes drugs more available and cheaper than ever before. Remember, boys and girls, when you fight an entity you often just end up making that entity even more powerful.

Re:So how long...

[Thud457]

Stay out of my territory.

-- Unka Sam

Re:So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

In The Silk Road's place will pop up dozens of similar sites...

... Half of which will be just fly-by-nights out for a quick money grab and other half will stay empty in fear of fly-by-nights and law enforcement traps, until one de facto successor of Silk Road pops up. Will its owner be more careful than DPR and will they get anywhere close to SR's notoriety?..

Re:So how long...

[runeghost]

The more they tighten their grip, the more pseudonymous drug sites will slip through their fingers?

Though somehow, I doubt Dread Pirate Roberts is about to become more powerful than the FBI could possibly imagine.

Re:So how long...

[dkleinsc]

Well, actually, the real Dread Pirate Roberts has been living like a king in Patagonia. This guy is an imposter.

Re:So how long...

[Em Adespoton]

...and the Silk Road is only "mostly dead". I'm surprised nobody came up with that one in the past 11 hours.

Re:So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep using that word.

Jumping to conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

Roberts got busted when the RCMP confiscated fake identity documents in the mail and reported to the FBI.

Expect to see bitcoin lose half its value

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an open secret that Silk Road was THE primary driver of demand for bitcoin in the beginning. Adoption by the Silk Road transformed bitcoin from a technical curiosity to a real currency backed by a valuable physical commodity (drugs).

Bitcoin has a life of its own now. Even Wall Street is involved. But without Silk Road, 99% of slashdot would have never heard of bitcoin. And the end of Silk Road is certain to impact bitcoin in a big way, even today.

Re:Expect to see bitcoin lose half its value

[Ultra64]

Expect to see bitcoin lose half its value

Sweet. When that happens it will be time to buy.

Re:Expect to see bitcoin lose half its value

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard lay people talking about Bitcoin WAY before there was Silk Road, though Silk Road definitely raised public awareness of Bitcoin, it was most definitely NOT the reason those of us on /. heard of it.

Re:Expect to see bitcoin lose half its value

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already started: I'm seeing panic sells bringing the price down from $140 to $110.

In the long run, this might be good - people frequently claim that Bitcoin is just good for crime, so this will tell us what % of its value is actually due to crime. It also opens up the market for several smaller sites, rather than one big site.

Re:Expect to see bitcoin lose half its value

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're working from the assumption that all the sellers and buyers aren't just going to move to one of the currently less popular black market sites.

This economy isn't going to shut down due to the loss of one web site, though Litecoin may see more use since SR forced Bitcoin use, and the other sites are more flexible.

Re:Expect to see bitcoin lose half its value

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen pretty convincing arguments to the effect that Bitcoin price has never been driven strongly by SR, because SR users don't really care. To them it was just a form of money laundering. On one end, a drug buyer would buy bitcoins exclusively to spend them on drugs, and on the other the drug dealer would convert the bitcoins back to a real currency (since there wasn't anything else they could really spend their bitcoin revenues on). The quantities both were interested in were how much real currency was moving from buyer to dealer. Bitcoin was just a theoretically untraceable intermediary for moving that money. It didn't much matter to SR users what the current price of bitcoins was so long as the convert-transfer-convert transaction could be completed without volatility making the money out too different from the money in.

Bitcoin wasn't actually all that good at that (the exchanges have always been notoriously difficult to get money in and out of), but the value of its perceived anonymity and untraceability overcame its faults for SR users. IMO, what happens to the "price" of Bitcoin now that SR is gone will be a mix of speculator emotional reaction and second order effects of reduced Bitcoin liquidity.

Ya, Sure.

[fahrbot-bot]

Everyone knows the real Dread Pirate Roberts has been retired +15 years in Patagonia ... But, of course, no one would care about arresting the Dread Pirate Ulbricht.

/redundant

Re:Ya, Sure.

[bobbied]

Inconceivable! Retired 15 years?!!

Re:Ya, Sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm nearly certain that most popular celebrities use the DPR paradigm, especially the attractive female celebrities. The worlds we live in are not what they seem, and it is all so complex and ridiculous, a complete clusterfuck that, IMO, its simply not worth the effort it would take to expose it. There are good people out there finding and coaxing talent from the masses. The deception is for the purposes of preventing the wrong type of people from acquiring too much wealth and power, which has happened in the past (Hitler, Capt. Kangaroo, etc.). Once an individual becomes aware of the absurd deception, their lives become considerably difficult. One path is to offer no resistance and accept that one is simply not in control of their life; another is to ignore the idocracy, regect external validation, and do your best to avoid the temptation traps (easy money, hot women, or promotions of power), only putting effort into making oneself better, to enrich yourself.

mo3 3own

[Anonymous Coward]

May be huRting

Nothing remains secret on the internet

[tomkost]

Every system devised by men can be broken by other men with the right funding. If your system maintains any records like posting of items for sale, that's easy for someone to grab at some point. Once they determine the physical locations and gain access it's all over. Even if the system only sends messages which are not stored, those can be intercepted eventually given enough work or again the physical access to the servers.

How he was caught.

[YesIAmAScript]

https://medium.com/p/d48995e8eb5a

I didn't write it.

Link to indictment contained within too.

$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[CanadianRealist]

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.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

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.

You can take off your tin foil hat and turn off Rush and Sean from the radio. Yes, of course the government will try to redeem these and keep the money. That's how drug related seizures work. The government will not likely make any statement about bitcoin. It's just your paranoia that attaches some significance to what the government thinks of bitcoin. Let me guess - you're a "Let's go back on the gold standard" guy too, right?

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[Anonymous Coward]

They will use the seized bitcoins for spying and entrapment operations.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[girlintraining]

Will the government try to redeem these bitcoins? Wouldn't that be like saying that they accept that bitcoin is valid?

Your username here suggests you may not be up to speed on how the government operates. Allow me to explain;

Bitcoins are the main financial instrument used by terrorists on the black market to purchase guns, WMDs, drugs, and even children. So we seized them and will charge those found with them with terrorism, money laundering, etc., at the maximum dollar amount that these coins were ever traded at, come trial.

During the trial, the defendant may claim that we seized his/her property illegally. However, as bitcoins are not currency, they do not ever have to be returned. Further, being in possession of so many is bona fide proof of intent to distribute by itself, and thus falls under existing seizure laws that do not require a search warrant, or return of property, whether charged or not.

Hope that clears things up for you.

Sincerely,

-- Government Man, From The Government.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[Anonymous Coward]

They already say they're valid.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[richardellisjr]

I'm not sure what dropping $3.6 Million in bitcoin on the open market would do but it probably wouldn't be good for bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to exchange them just to collapse the market. Perhaps they'll just wait until they've accumulated even more to ensure they collapse the market and kill the currency.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[Rich0]

Bitcoins can't be "redeemed" any more than cash can be redeemed.

They can be traded, just like cash, baseball cards, and scrap metal. There are outfits that routinely trade bitcoin for cash, but there are also outfits that you can sell your gold to as well.

They'll just put the bitcoin up for auction and it will sell for whatever it sells for - just like any other evidence sell-off. That isn't any kind of admission that they're a currency.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[jonbryce]

When they size 20kg of cocaine "with a street value of $3.6m"[1], they don't sell it, or at least they are not supposed to. They destroy it. Maybe they will treat bitcoin the same way?

[1] I have no idea if that is the real street value of 20kg of cocaine. I made the number up, just like they do.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[tftp]

When they size 20kg of cocaine "with a street value of $3.6m"[1], they don't sell it, or at least they are not supposed to. They destroy it.

- Officer Smith, please take this pile of drugs and make it disappear!
- Sure, boss. You won't see this particular pile of drugs ever again.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

FinCEN already legitimized it in April; it's completely legal as of this writing. From the perspective of the government, DPR may as well have accepted payment in Beanie Babies.

It would be neat if all the seized bitcoins could be identified and recorded as being worthless now.

This comes up frequently in Bitcoin discussions with regards to coins which can be provably traced to fraud. Doing this would establish a precedent of community leaders deciding which coins are valid and which ones aren't: it would destroy Bitcoin's fungibility. And while pretty much the entire Bitcoin community agrees that fraud is wrong, they're slightly more divided when it comes to the War on Drugs or overtly fighting against the US government.

DPR didn't sufficiently protect his wallet. Those coins belong to Uncle Sam now, and he'll use them to catch the greedy for years to come.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[Anonymous Coward]

DBAN. Destroying virtual currency since 2013.

Re:$3.6 Million Bitcoin Seized

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't sell cocaine because to do so is illegal. They sell houses, cars, boats, and anything else they seize that private citizens are allowed to own.

Surprise?

[dysmal]

Is anyone really surprised? When something like this is constantly referenced in the news media, it's only a matter of time before they get shut down. Demonoid, Astraweb, Suprnova, Napster. As soon as something is referenced in the news media, start the count down.

Re:Surprise?

[GameboyRMH]

How long is the countdown for TPB?

It had to happen

[Karmashock]

We can't have things like this... at the same time... I do support the legalization of drugs and I do feel we need more economic freedom.

That said... you can't have people buying hit men on the dark web.

Re:It had to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I was being nice by having it done professionally, but have your way.

Re:It had to happen

[Karmashock]

I agree, which is why we should legalize drugs. Then you can buy them over the internet legally.

My issue is the illegality of the silk road. It couldn't be tolerated.

But that doesn't mean the DEA is right.

Hold on just a god damn minute

[Crimey McBiggles]

Our federal government shut down yesterday. How the hell do they have the resources to fight the "war on drugs" when they can't even keep the national parks open?!?!

Re:Hold on just a god damn minute

[fustakrakich]

How the hell do they have the resources to fight the "war on drugs" when they can't even keep the national parks open?!?!

It's an "essential" service to keep the market from becoming saturated and driving down prices.

Re:Hold on just a god damn minute

[Anonymous Coward]

Law enforcement is an essential service, whether you agree with that particular law that was being enforced in this example is irrelevant.

Re:Hold on just a god damn minute

[Lithdren]

DEA didn't get shut down...there that was hard.

Re:Hold on just a god damn minute

[Actually, I do RTFA]

How the hell do they have the resources to fight the "war on drugs" when they can't even keep the national parks open?!?!

The FBI is an essential service. It continues to run during the shutdown.

Fun fact: Although the FBI is still running, FBI agents are not currently getting paid. It is almost certain they will get their backpay when the government reopens, but that is something Congress gets to vote on.

Re:Hold on just a god damn minute

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding is that essential employees who work during the shutdown are guaranteed pay after the budget is passed. Furloughed employees who were forbidden from working only get paid if Congress approves.

Re:Hold on just a god damn minute

[gweihir]

Not a problem. The "war on drugs" cannot be won, just as a "war on stupidity" could not be won. It will just be a bit less intense for a while.

Well...

[sociocapitalist]

Where there is demand, there will be supply.

Even if Roberts goes down with the sinking of the Silk Road site, I give it a week before there's some replacement site up and running.

Re:Well...

[circletimessquare]

i'm attacking the notion that because the "war" goes on forever it is invalid. you also need to take the trash out every thursday. is that an argument to end "the war on trash"? no, some functions of society are just maintenance functions that never end

i'm not defending us drug policy, it's poor tactics. and some substances need to be legal. but i'm attacking the notion that just because there's demand and supply for something, therefore it needs to be accepted

example: something like meth has a lot of supply and demand. meth also creates horrible costs to individuals and society. such that attacking the meth supply and demand chain has direct costs, and secondary costs. but if meth use is minimized to some extent because of the "war", that pays dividends in the form of less overall costs for individuals and society in regards to the harm that meth does. such that fighting meth is worth it

it's a case-by-case basis. just because marijuana is legalized (and should be legalized) doesn't mean all drugs should be. each substance has to be evaluated individually

Re:Well...

[SleazyRidr]

Accepting that something exists doesn't mean we make it legal. I accept that people speed and plan for it, but I don't think that speed limits should be abolished.

Re:Well...

[ErichTheRed]

See my other comment -- your argument holds water only if we allow the current black market to continue with the criminal penalties removed.

If someone were able to walk into a store and buy absolutely pure meth (for example) the following costs disappear:
- Many of the health costs (ingesting a pure substance synthesized by a drug company vs. one contaminated with very toxic solvents)
- Many of the criminal costs -- (1) it would be cheaper, meaning you might not have to steal to feed your habit, (2) transactions would be in the open, not controlled by organized crime or random drug dealers, (3) you wouldn't have to waste resources throwing people in jail.
- Random houses out in the country getting blown up because of a poor understanding of organic solvent extraction chemistry

Yes, you're going to have other consequences, but they're all better than what we have now. And, they can be counteracted. There are plenty of rehab facilities for people who want to get clean, and funding those beats funding prisons to warehouse people that will just keep coming back.

Treat every drug like alcohol and tobacco -- regulate it, tax it, and use the proceeds to clean up the rest of the problems associated with its use. We already fund methadone clinics for heroin addicts -- that's not just for fun; it's a cost we've chosen to take on in exchange for more controlled addicts and a lower rate of IV drug-borne diseases.

Re:Well...

[bunratty]

It's not that the war is neverending. It's that the war makes the drugs even more available and cheaper by taking down drug kingpins so that the market is allowed to set the price. Additionally, by making drugs illegal, you create a black market that actually creates crime. Not to mention the otherwise law-abiding citizens whose only illegal act was to puff some weed who are thrown in jail for no good reason. If you still don't understand, look at what happened in the U.S. during prohibition. There's a reason alcohol is legal even though it's such a dangerous drug.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, marijuana and LSD and possibly MDMA should be legalized...but opiates really need to stay illegal otherwise we'll end up with Monsanto engineering heroin into the world's food supply.

Re:Well...

[lgw]

Taking out the trash is not used as an excuse to end-run the constitution worse than the Patriot act. It's not that it needs to be accepted, or shouldn't be policed, but that the "WAR!!!" rhetoric (and general irrationality on the topic) is used for perhaps the worst abuses of constitutional rights in America.

Re:Well...

[JesseMcDonald]

Accepting that something exists doesn't mean we make it legal.

Sure. But the argument for it being made legal isn't that it exists, it's that there is no legitimate justification for making it illegal. It's an entirely victimless crime.

Speed limits fall into a large grey area which results from mixing the role of the owner of the road, who has every right to ban people from using it when they break the rules, with the role of the government, which has no business punishing anyone for merely going too fast or otherwise taking risks. If you actually hurt someone then that's your responsibility, otherwise we're well into the domain of pre-crime, punishing people for harm they haven't caused yet and may never cause. This confusion of roles is one of many moral hazards which could be avoided by making the roads (and other things) privately owned and operated.

Re:Well...

[SleazyRidr]

As much as I like the libertarian ideals, we here in the real world have to make some compromises. Traffic accidents don't just hurt people, they kill people. How do you propose that someone could "take responsibility" for killing someone? We know that people tend to overestimate their abilities (it happens even without laws). We as a species have come to realise that sometimes individual freedoms must be infringed for the benefit of the population as a whole. There is some disagreement about how much personal freedom can be infringed for the benefit of the whole, or how much of a benefit for the whole warrants an infringement of personal liberty, but every sane person acknowledges that the line is not at no infringement.

Re:Well...

[circletimessquare]

i am for better tactics in the war/ maintenance function: healthcare, not prisons, for example

however, we can't even control oxycodone distribution and abuse, and that's a completely artificial substance for healthcare

and you really think the market for meth will be controlled if we regulate it and tax it?

nevermind that this is a substance that does grave medical harm to people. you want us to freely sell such a substance?

no

we treat people for addiction rather than throwing them in prison, yes

but we also still crack down on the supply and demand. we don't regulate and tax a highly addictive and medically harmful substance: more people will simply be addicted and damaged, and society is not going to subsidize and tolerate this tragedy

we're going to do our best to make sure you don't get meth. and if you still get it, we'll treat you

we're not going to make it easier to get meth. that simply means easier medical harm and addiction

you say it is already easy to get meth? so this means we should make it even more easy?

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

- Many of the health costs (ingesting a pure substance synthesized by a drug company vs. one contaminated with very toxic solvents)

Many drugs are inherently poisonous.

- Many of the criminal costs -- (1) it would be cheaper, meaning you might not have to steal to feed your habit, (2) transactions would be in the open, not controlled by organized crime or random drug dealers, (3) you wouldn't have to waste resources throwing people in jail.

(1) Unless it is free, some people will have to steal. If the particular drug impacts their ability to earn a living, they will certainly have to steal.

(2) Because your argument in (1) fails, you will inevitably have a market for stolen drugs (which can be sold below market), and thus the drug dealers and organized crime remains.

(3) Because your arguments in (1) and (2) fail, you still have to put people in jail

- Random houses out in the country getting blown up because of a poor understanding of organic solvent extraction chemistry

I've heard that these incidents are on a decline, as most of the related drugs are produced by highly efficient labs south of the US border which create a better and cheaper product. Yes, "Breaking Bad" is a myth.

Legalization is not an answer (either).

Re:Well...

[JesseMcDonald]

How do you propose that someone could "take responsibility" for killing someone?

It happens all the time. Speeding isn't the only way to accidentally kill someone; that's why manslaughter charges exist. In any case, the existing legal consequences for speeding (fines, loss of license) could easily be implemented by a private road operator. It's up to the owners (and their customers) to determine what level of risk they're willing to accept on their own property. Every action we take has the potential for irreversible consequences for others; if we insisted on eliminating all risk, to ourselves or to others, we would never actually live. Only actualized consequences, not risks, are properly the subject of the law.

every sane person acknowledges that the line is not at no infringement

Casting your opponents as "insane" does not help your argument. This is a blatant ad hominem.

Re:Well...

[SleazyRidr]

If you make an insane argument I'll call you insane. You're ignoring over 2,000 years of deliberations, experiments and discussions to arrive at your viewpoint. You should not be able to influence others beliefs.

Re:Well...

[circletimessquare]

"private road operator"?!

It's up to the owners (and their customers) to determine what level of risk they're willing to accept on their own property.

you are insane if you do not understand that society's rules trumps that

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

just making a point, if methamphetamine is so bad, why do pharmaceutical companies produce and sell it under the trademarked name 'desoxyn'?

Re:Well...

[sociocapitalist]

i'm attacking the notion that because the "war" goes on forever it is invalid. you also need to take the trash out every thursday. is that an argument to end "the war on trash"? no, some functions of society are just maintenance functions that never end

i'm not defending us drug policy, it's poor tactics. and some substances need to be legal. but i'm attacking the notion that just because there's demand and supply for something, therefore it needs to be accepted

example: something like meth has a lot of supply and demand. meth also creates horrible costs to individuals and society. such that attacking the meth supply and demand chain has direct costs, and secondary costs. but if meth use is minimized to some extent because of the "war", that pays dividends in the form of less overall costs for individuals and society in regards to the harm that meth does. such that fighting meth is worth it

it's a case-by-case basis. just because marijuana is legalized (and should be legalized) doesn't mean all drugs should be. each substance has to be evaluated individually

I never said that it had to or should be accepted. I said merely that where there is demand there will be supply. Someone, somewhere is going to step up quickly to fill the gap left by the takedown of the Silk Road. Economics 101.

Re:Well...

[buck-yar]

How about punishing people for crimes they do commit instead of making rules against behavior that may lead to harm? IE nanny state.

If the punishment for harming someone in an automobile accident were high enough... Just a few months ago some lady was driving too fast at night in downpouring conditions. A lane change in front of her caused her to slam on her brakes. Driver behind her slammed into her, the truck behind that hit them both and went off a bridge. Driver in critical condition. The person at fault had no charges filed, despite her reckless behavior that left a CDL driver in a coma.

Yet if I drive 65 in a 55 I'll get a ticket in my state, and nobody was harmed.

Re:Well...

[ultranova]

Speed limits fall into a large grey area which results from mixing the role of the owner of the road, who has every right to ban people from using it when they break the rules, with the role of the government, which has no business punishing anyone for merely going too fast or otherwise taking risks. If you actually hurt someone then that's your responsibility, otherwise we're well into the domain of pre-crime, punishing people for harm they haven't caused yet and may never cause.

Reckless endangerment is illegal because if you do something that's likely to result in me being killed, I'll have to take action out of self-preservation. Your right to swing your fist doesn't stop where my nose starts, it stops where I have to choose between reacting or being hit. And it is very much the role of the government to keep that from happening.

This confusion of roles is one of many moral hazards which could be avoided by making the roads (and other things) privately owned and operated.

That's been tried. Feudalism and the divine right of kings weren't much fun for the serfs. It turns out that having the owner be an abstract entity beholden to the residents works much better than , even if it leads to the moral hazard of not letting you endanger other people.

Re:Well...

[ultranova]

and you really think the market for meth will be controlled if we regulate it and tax it?

The market for alcohol is, despite the fact that you can make it by putting sugar, water and yeast in a bottle.

nevermind that this is a substance that does grave medical harm to people. you want us to freely sell such a substance?

Alcohol kills people. Tobacco kills people. Fat kills people. Sugar kills people. Salt kills people. All of these are addictive, cause grave and often lethal damage to the people using them, and all are legally available - the latter three without any limitations. So no, medical harm is not a credible explanation for why meth - or any other drug for that matter - is forbidden.

we don't regulate and tax a highly addictive and medically harmful substance: more people will simply be addicted and damaged, and society is not going to subsidize and tolerate this tragedy

No one is asking the society to subsidize meth, or any other mind-altering substance. On the other hand, society does subsidize and tolerate the production of high-fructose corn syrup, which is linked to diabetes and is highly addictive. Said poison is even being added to children's food, to get them addicted from the early age. So, obviously the society doesn't really give a rat's ass about the health of its members, and therefore there must be another reason for the War on Drugs - and likely an ignoble one, since it's not said out loud.

Of course all of this is ignoring the obvious solution: if attitudes about drugs could be changed, we could develop safer alternatives. There's no inherent reason why molecules binding to various synaptic chemicals need to have any other metabolic side effects, and a custom drug could also be designed against abuse - for example by having its own metabolites bind to it and render it inert, forcing a few days interval between hits.

Or we could teach everyone meditation techniques at school, letting them achieve altered states of consciousness without chemical substances. That might work too.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm attacking the notion that because the "war" goes on forever it is invalid. you also need to take the trash out every thursday. is that an argument to end "the war on trash"?

Declaring a "war on..." anything that will be around forever is stupid. Would you seriously declare a "war on trash?" You don't seem stupid, so I'll assume no. Warfare has specific, limited, and measurable aims.

And likewise, I'm not defending drug policy nor advocating legalization. Increased enforcement yielding societal dividend may be very desirable. But that comes from increasing enforcement, not from having declared a "war" which must lose because its aims (eliminate drugs!) are impossible.

NSA = RACIST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since blacks are a major consumer of drugs. Does any one think this is racist?

Re:Federal Reserve Notes Used to Sell Illicit Good

[cervesaebraciator]

Indeed you're correct. My purpose, however, was merely to make a smart-ass remark about the irrelevance of bitcoins to this case. The bitcoins are just a tool, just as federal reserve notes are, but they'll nevertheless be part of the cyber-scare case. Even so, let me know if you come up with an excuse to arrest Bernanke.

Re:Federal Reserve Notes Used to Sell Illicit Good

[PPH]

Right. Bitcoin, MtGox et al did nothing wrong. And (based on my only having scanned TFS) the Feds did nothing with the Bitcoin infrastructure either. When you arrest a drug dealer, you seize all the money found in the raid.

This could have an interesting implication for Bitcoin. We all know how deeply in love the authorities are with seizing the proceeds of criminal activity and utilizing said proceeds for themselves. So if they exchange Btc for USD, they are legitimizing Bitcoin as a currency. If, on the other hand, they live by their claims that Btc is merely an intermediary for money laundering, then I'd expect them to delete the seized wallet. In much the same way that they destroy illegal contraband. Lets see if the gov't can pass up US$3.6m. Particularly now that their primary funding source has dried up.

Or perhaps Bill Gates?

[RevWaldo]

Steve Ballmer: It is very strange. I have been in the CEO business so long, now that it's over, I don't know what to do with the rest of my life.

Ross William Ulbricht: Have you ever considered black marketing? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.

.

Re:Or perhaps Bill Gates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently not such a random quote... http://pt2ncoryi5tgxice.onion/index.htm

well..

[Anonymous Coward]

where do I buy my meth now..

The Internet is not anonymous

[DogDude]

The Internet is NOT anonymous. Structurally, it's designed not to be anonymous. No matter what kind of crap you pile on top of the basic protocols, it will never be anonymous. Anybody who is too stupid to realize that, quite honestly, kind of deserves what they get, at least in my mind.

RTFA! And Read the complaint!

[MadCow-ard]

It sure doesn't read like TOR was compromised. It was the Gmail account DPR left when first advertising SR on a shrooms site. The FBI (if they aren't just covering for the NSA) do seem to have caught DPR through old fashioned sleuth work. Yes, they managed to copy a server but they still couldn't get the names out of it, only link the messages and transaction dates to other events they tracked down to DPR after tentatively identifying him using Gmail, Google+ and LinkedIn. Ouch.

The feds have never said they are invalid

[sirwired]

The feds have never taken the position that BitCoins are invalid or valueless. A vehicle for money laundering? Yes. Something that is likely to attract regulatory and legal attention if you deal in a lot of them? Yep. But valueless? Nope; they've never said that.

Going after somebody under money-laundering or securities laws (which has been done already) would be kind of difficult if you argued they weren't moving money.

Assuming the civil forfeiture proceedings go as planned, the BitCoins will likely be sold at auction just like any other seized property that isn't actual fungible currency (at least, BitCoins aren't fungible on any platform the feds deal with...) They might sell a USB stick containing the wallet so they have something in-hand to pass on to the buyer.

Re:The feds have never said they are invalid

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming the civil forfeiture proceedings go as planned, the BitCoins will likely be sold at auction just like any other seized property that isn't actual fungible currency (at least, BitCoins aren't fungible on any platform the feds deal with...) They might sell a USB stick containing the wallet so they have something in-hand to pass on to the buyer.

They could sell five USB sticks each containing a copy of the wallet. ;) Either way, I'm not buying (and wouldn't be, even if I had the cash), because there's no guarantee they haven't kept a copy (indeed they almost certainly have) and that it won't get cleaned out by someone with access to such a copy (

Also, when you say "any other property", it's not literally true. Went to Washington, D.C. as a teenager, and amongst other attraction, took the FBI's propaganda tour. They had display cases full of shiny expensive stuff they seized -- apparently they found the propaganda value ("Join the FBI and you get to raid & loot rival gangs' headquarters legally!") greater than the value at auction for those things. While I understand the appeal to a certain type of person, I was a bit flabbergasted that they were bragging about the process to the general public -- then again, nobody I saw showed any signs of shock or revulsion for the idea of siezing private property without a criminal conviction. In retrospect, it's clear I was underestimating the degree to which the general public trusts that law enforcement will always correctly differentiate between them and the "bad guys" who deserve to have their stuff taken.

How?? Are you stupid?

[Stan92057]

How?? Are you stupid? Articles all over the Internet buy drugs at silk road and you dont expect the FBI or whoever to use the same damn software to buy said drugs and track down where it cam from?? Complete stupidity to think they wouldn't hunt them down.

Not surprised...

[Anonymous Coward]

Was only a matter of time.

It's not far-fetched at all...

[sirwired]

Every incoming (or, I guess, in the case of Canada, outgoing) mail parcel goes through an x-ray (I'm not saying they actually pay a lot of attention to each one; it's kind of luck-of-the-draw.) If the inspector sees a package containing a bunch of plastic cards and something that looks like a passport, they are naturally going to wonder what that's doing being sent via international mail. It's not as if you can accidentally leave your passport at home when leaving the country.

Because customs facilities are on international borders, they don't need anything but the barest suspicion to take a peek in your package, certainly not a warrant.

But yeah, hosting SR in SanFran was not very bright. Of course, given that what he was doing would get him arrested in pretty much every country in the land, there's not really any good location for the servers. Even in Russia, you would have needed some pretty good underworld connections to keep those servers out of govt. hands.

Re:It's not far-fetched at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is most likely bullshit, because I ship photographic film back and forth to Canada all the time, and if it was xray'd, then it would be ruined.

Re:It's not far-fetched at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.sealandgov.org/

Re:It's not far-fetched at all...

[Anonymous Coward]

they don't need anything but the barest suspicion to take a peek in your package

Sounds like the TSA and those damn backscatter machines...

Re:It's not far-fetched at all...

[pne]

If the inspector sees a package containing a bunch of plastic cards and something that looks like a passport, they are naturally going to wonder what that's doing being sent via international mail. It's not as if you can accidentally leave your passport at home when leaving the country.

It's not? Worked for me when I went on a school trip to Austria. My teacher was not amused to have to get up at the middle of the night with me (sleeper train) when we crossed the border to fill out paperwork with the border guards. And my passport got sent by express post to follow me.

(Ended up arriving after I had already come back so the school we visited had to send it back home again, but that's another story.)

Solution - End the "war on drugs"

[ErichTheRed]

An interesting side point that comes out of all this is that services like Silk Road wouldn't exist if there wasn't a market for them.

I'm about as far from Libertarian as you can get, but one thing I do think they have right is the idea that the "war on drugs" should be stopped. It can't be won, that has been proven. Every single defense that's put up to stop drug trafficking is worked around shortly after it comes on the scene. Drug cartels basically run large parts of Mexico and Central America. US citizens get tossed in prison for drug use and sales, which basically turns them into a wasted resource (good luck getting a normal job with a prison record) and this ends up costing more in the long run.

Prohibition basically gave birth to organized crime, simply because enough of the population wanted to keep drinking alcohol and was willing to break the law. As a result, we saw what we see now with other drugs -- the price of alcohol shot up, other ancillary crime increased, violent gangs brutally wiped each other out neighborhood by neighborhood in big cities. With drugs it's the same thing -- I have no desire to use drugs, but there are plenty of others who do. And they'll do whatever it takes to do so, and pay whatever street price is prevalent. Econ 101 -- inelastic demand (more like infinite demand) in the face of constrained supply means prices keep going up no matter what you do.

I believe drug use is a completely victimless crime -- it's the other stuff that happens alongside it (stealing to pay for expensive drugs, drunk/high driving, etc.). If everything were readily available, sold in safe doses and taxed appropriately (like tobacco and alcohol,) prices would be low and people wouldn't have to steal to pay for their habits.

The other thing to consider is that we're rapidly heading towards a sci-fi dystopian future where human labor is no longer as important as it is now. When the unemployment rate shoots up to 85%, wouldn't you rather fill their free time with something other than random crime sprees? Yes, it sounds very "Brave New World"-ish, but it's rapidly coming true. Unless society just drops the use of labor and money as measures of productivity, which will never happen, this is the inevitable future!

Re:Solution - End the "war on drugs"

[Koreantoast]

Believe me, even if every drug on the face of the planet was legalized, there would still be a Silk Road. As long as there are products and services that governments prohibit, whether it be weapons, children or something else, there will be demand for this sort of service.

Re:Solution - End the "war on drugs"

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe drug use is a completely victimless crime -- it's the other stuff that happens alongside it (stealing to pay for expensive drugs, drunk/high driving, etc.). If everything were readily available, sold in safe doses and taxed appropriately (like tobacco and alcohol,) prices would be low and people wouldn't have to steal to pay for their habits.

Pardon the pun, but this is a pipe-dream.

Drugs are not just innocuous entertainment that some uptight people don't want people to have. They create very real personal and societal damage, regardless of their price.

Short of paying people a comfortable living wage to get high, there will always be a black market and always be people committing crimes to get the money to feed their habit -- these problems persist with alcohol and tobacco, as well as with prescription and even non-prescription drugs.

The War on Drugs has not succeeded and our laws against drugs include many excesses, but legalization and regulation are not going to be effective alternatives.

Personally, I would advocate working towards a society where very few people turn to drugs as a remedy for their boredom, despair, untreated mental disorders etc., but speaking of the impractical. . .

Re:Solution - End the "war on drugs"

[Anonymous Coward]

The other thing to consider is that we're rapidly heading towards a sci-fi dystopian future where human labor is no longer as important as it is now. When the unemployment rate shoots up to 85%, wouldn't you rather fill their free time with something other than random crime sprees? Yes, it sounds very "Brave New World"-ish, but it's rapidly coming true. Unless society just drops the use of labor and money as measures of productivity, which will never happen, this is the inevitable future!

For your reading enjoyment!

Re:Solution - End the "war on drugs"

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound a lot like a Libertarian to me. Welcome to the Dark Side, Erich!

Re:Solution - End the "war on drugs"

[Anonymous Coward]

If everything were readily available, sold in safe doses and taxed appropriately (like tobacco and alcohol,) prices would be low and people wouldn't have to steal to pay for their habits.

No but what stops drug induced loonies from maiming and killing innocent people just like alcohol does today?
Sure the War on Drugs is crazy, but let's not assume that the alcohol and tobacco model is a good situation. This is a study into the societal effects of alcohol here in Australia. TLDR: It costs us $14Billion/year due to criminal, heath, accidents and lost productivity.

Re:Solution - End the "war on drugs"

[Baki]

In addition, you don't need to be libertarian to find the idea of the government telling me what I may ingest and what not abhorrent.
Only massive propaganda (since 100 years) can keep up some level of acceptance for this concept.

Forgeries mailed to suspect at location of servers

[pupsocket]

Fake ID's mailed from Canada to the address where the FBI found the servers. Totally plausible, right? That would be the address a clever black-marketeer would use when ordering forgeries internationally, which obviously is the only way to obtain them.

Re:Federal Reserve Notes Used to Sell Illicit Good

[the_other_chewey]

Federal Reserve Notes haven't been issued since 1971, the year Bernanke turned 18.
So no.

even more shocking

[slashmydots]

I'm more surprised that their business model didn't ground them before this seisure did. Let me explain how I hear it works:
1. you go on and order drugs from some random anonymous person and pay BTC and arrange a meeting
2. you show up to the meeting either it's a cop or nobody shows up and they stole your BTC

You also have the option of shipping the drugs, in which case you hand your address to the police or get your BTC stolen.

Re:even more shocking

[timmyf2371]

I never heard of a transaction which took place in real life, nor have I ever seen it advertised. In fact, I've seem some vendors explicitly say that they don't offer this because it breaks the anonymity SR offered. I'm sure it will have happened, but these transactions will be in the minority.

The site offered an escrow system for purchasers, so the vendor never received the money until the buyer confirmed that it had been received. In the event of disputes, SR staff mediated.

Overall, as good a system as you can devise for dealing with underground, black market transactions. And for the most part, it seemed to work judging by the number of users and deals which took place.

Re:even more shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't work like that. The funds were held in escrow, and whatever you ordered was shipped via the mail. You sent your mailing address GPG encrypted with the seller's public key. Once you received it, you marked it as received on the site (or 15 days pass with no manual "extension" being requested by the customer), and the funds are released to the seller.

Re:even more shocking

[tobiah]

Clearly you have never purchased drugs on the internets..

Re:even more shocking

[lennier]

I never heard of a transaction which took place in real life

So it's just a really complicated way of selling EVE Online stats?

Re:even more shocking

[eyenot]

lol

the comments on this are outrageously hilarious.

yours almost makes me feel like i'm in irc right now

Less mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this mean there'll be less crackheads on Slashdot posting about their HOSTS FILE?

Wow

[m.dillon]

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

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that part was interesting... but I came away from it thinking that he was an idiot who got ripped off, and most likely the previous hitman hire he was alluding to was a bluff to negotiate the price down.

To summarize for those who haven't read it:

A user (established seller, I believe) sends DPR a message claiming to have broken into one of the site's big sellers' machines, and gotten a list of mailing addresses of their clients. He threatens to release it if DPR doesn't pay $50k; he says he owes his suppliers some money. DPR asks him to put him in touch with the suppliers. Someone claiming to represent the suppliers contacts DPR; DPR suggests that rather than selling to people who sell on SR, they should start selling directly themselves. They say they're going to try it out. Meanwhile, the extortionist is still trying to extort, so DPR asks the people if they'd be willing to kill the guy. They eventually agree on the price (in the process, DPR mentions how much he previously paid for a hit - this is the one I have a feeling he's lying about), and a couple of days later, the messages indicate that he received a picture of a corpse with some writing (timestamp or whatever) in the photo for proof.

Now, the important point is just a couple of sentences tacked onto the end: the investigators couldn't find a record of the supposed victim having existed.

My take on this was that the extortionist saw an opportunity to build a con on top of the extortion attempt, and in fact ultimately conned more money out of DPR than was requested in the original extortion attempt! ($150k vs $50k).

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

five hundred grand, not fifty

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that was the final demand, after the process had been going on for a few days. The very first demand was $50k, I believe.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? - Lets take another look at the 'evidence' here:

user 'FriendlyChemist' attempts to blackmil Dread Pirate Roberts, with "real" SR usernames they have "obtained".
'FriendlyChemist' supposedly "needs 500k for drug debts".
Asked by DPR to name supplier to whom he owes money, 'FriendlyChemist' *himself* supplies the username 'redandwhite'.

'redandwhite' then converses with DPR over the 'FriendlyChemist' problem - during the course of which, 'redandwhite' requests that DPR organise a meeting with 'FC' - as to exactly how 'FC' manages to owe 'redandwhite' 500k when 'redandwhite' himself appears unable to find 'FC' otherwise, remains unstated.

DPR supplies a name for 'FC' and suggests to 'redandwhite' that 'FC' be removed - a fee of 150k is agreed. As to exactly why 'redandwhite' would problemlessly agree to murder a user who owes him 500k, this for a payment of 150k from another user - the financial logic (or lackof) of this peculiar arrangement is apparently never raised.

'redandwhite' receives the cash and claims that the murder has taken place, 24hrs later. No corresponding name or body has ever been found, nor has user 'redandwhite' ever been traced. User 'FC' indeed departs from online life tho.

***

Moving on, DPR (in a completely seperate transaction a few months later) now requests the supply of fakeID from, who else, 'redandwhite' - naturally, despite being the operator of the worlds largest underground website for the supply of such, you would arrange this with the very same user whom you have previously online contracted a murder. Complete with supply of your photograph and home delivery address, etc.

***

Silk Road is 'busted' as *Canadian* customs 'randomly' open the very package containing the false IDs, complete with photograph and home address of the SR operator, as helpfully provided by the very self-same user 'redandwhite' with whom DPR has previously arranged for the murder of another SR user. A user Who, to all extents and purposes, has, like 'redandwhite', never provably existed. The US Feds appears surprisingly unwilling to claim any investigative credit whatsoever themselves for this fortunate, when not entirely improabable, chain of circumstances, one which forms, more or less, the entire basis of their indictment.

***

I dunno about anyone else, but, assuming 'FriendlyChemist' and 'redandwhite' are indeed the same entity (and the only link between the two remains self-supplied); from here, it is hardly a leap of faith to assume a Fed sting gone longst overboard and legally awry - thus, the emphasis on it being the Canadian cousins who lucked out in finding the single piece of evidence that happily tied the entire loose ends of the Fed case together. Given the stated facts, and supporting evidence such as the only *private messages* to which the Feds appear to have access to both sides of the conversation remain those involving DPR and both 'Friendlychemist' and 'redandwhite', I would humbly suggest a Fed sting remains, after Occam, entirely the only plausible solution here.

Without the 'murder that never was', DPR is admittedly still facing the legal problematic of being involved in an ebay for non-legal substances, the remainder (murder, etc.), however, stinks to high heaven. Outwith the 'murder(s)', they maybe have DPR on providing SR tech support, and not a hell of a lot else as I see it.

End of the day, that clown DPR himself admittedly hardly inspires confidence either - on stupidity grounds alone, he inarguably deserves locking up. This murder stuff, however, remains, as they say, another bag of crack altogether. There is no f****g way whatsoever that aspect is going to fly in court.

Moral of the story remains, you are planning on running an online drugs seller-buyer-match site, try and do so with somewhat less visibility and publicity than that generated by the entire Coca-Cola distribution network, operate at several degrees of personal seperation, and, above all else, try not to be such an obvious f*****g asshole when doing so either.

Re:Wow

[eyenot]

i now wish i hadn't joined in with what little i have to say based on what little i know or care about silk road or any of this

otherwise these mod points would be modding parent up

Re:Federal Reserve Notes Used to Sell Illicit Good

[the_other_chewey]

Ah crap. I was thinking of Federal Reserve Bank Notes.

There's a confusing amount of different kinds of Dollar notes (National Bank Notes, Federal Reserve Notes, ...) with very similar names.

DEA & parallel construction?

[Valdrax]

Wait, so after all the NSA bullshit, he was caught by Canada? Oh, the irony.

Welllll, maybe...

Do you remember the recent stories about the DEA and "parallel construction," where the DEA was getting phone records from the NSA and then using them to identify suspects from which they could reverse engineer a false "lead" to let the police just happen to find other incriminating evidence to build a case on?

I'm not saying that's clearly what happened here, but as others have pointed out, it's a distinct possibility given that drugs are involved.

The DEA agent who sent the package

[pupsocket]

rubbed it with a medical nitroglycerin patch to ensure it got the attention of sniffers. (The foregoing claim, being pure speculation, is guaranteed to be free of government disinformation.)

Re:Forgeries mailed to suspect at location of serv

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Store Front

[u16084]

I scanned through the Articles... some were tl:dr, but was he acutally SELLING or just providing a store front? I was under the impression that sellers would post their warez and the Bitcoin were held in escrow via the site?

Value of bitcoins

[halcyon1234]

Article: 11:36am: US Government seizes $3.6 million worth of bitcoins

Update, 11:45am: US Government seizes $1.75 million worth of bitcoins

Update, 12:03pm: US Government seizes $8.3 million worth of bitcoins

Update, 12:54pm: US Government seizes $766 thousand worth of bitcoins

Update, 3:27pm: US Government seizes Eight Dollars worth of bitcoins

Update, 5:55pm: US Government seizes $15 million worth of bitcoins

Re:Value of bitcoins

[Pope]

Damn, you're good! :D

Re:Value of bitcoins

[gweihir]

Hehehehe, nice!

Re: Value of bitcoins

[Anonymous Coward]

*26000 BTC. Fixed that for you.

Re:Value of bitcoins

[eyenot]

(this)

hilarious, lmao in fact

where did my ass go! whoops!

Dem Darn Feds! *rioutous laughter*

will the judge, at sentencing, have to have a computer monitor displaying the current value of bitcoin, and gavel it in and speak the value aloud, JUST at that moment?

or will they press charges on his 3.6 million dollars of bitcoin even after it's worth a wooden nickle?

IANAL, but here is why you won't get your coins.

[Valdrax]

The US govt seized my bitcoins which silk road kept for me. I am not a US citizen. I have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens. Will I be able to reclaim my bitcoins? I was actually keeping them there as a safe haven.

You will probably not be able to get your coins back. They have been seized via civil forfeiture. To get your coins back, you will need to establish proof that you are the owner of the coins and that you qualify for an "innocent owner" defense under 18 USC 983(d). Specifically, you will need to show that you "(i) did not know of the conduct giving rise to forfeiture; or (ii) upon learning of the conduct giving rise to the forfeiture, did all that reasonably could be expected under the circumstances to terminate such use of the property."

So, can you show that you did not know that drugs and other illicit materials were being traded on Silk Road? If not, can you show that you tried to get your coins out as soon as you learned this was the case? If not, then goodbye money. You shouldn't have knowingly comingled funds with criminals.

Beyond the unlikelihood of successful recovery, I would point out that attempting to claim your coins may put you at risk of criminal charges for your own actions. I note that you specifically mention that you "have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens" (emphasis added). If you have used your coins to participate in a crime elsewhere or have participated in activity that is legal elsewhere but criminal in the US (e.g. trade in controlled substances), you may run afoul of money laundering charges (18 USC 1956-1957) and RICO (18 USC 1961-1968).

I highly recommend you consult a real attorney first. (I am not one!) Be honest with them; you have attorney-client privilege in the US and in many other countries, and they cannot give good legal advice without all the facts. Don't be reckless, though. Since you're a foreign national, any calls to the US will most likely be monitored according to recent news, and the DEA is accused of using information they can't legally obtain to fake up a "clean" evidence trail that can't be constitutionally impeached. If possible, you may wish to seek an attorney local to your country who works with US law internationally.

Final note: I am not a lawyer. This should not be construed as legal advice, and I may be quite wrong on several aspects of the above. If you are in serious trouble, consult a real attorney and not Slashdot.

Who cares?

[Frosty Piss]

i could care less about these types of grammatical errors...

Re:Who cares?

[gandhi_2]

that isn't a grammatical error. we aren't talking about mis-conjugating a verb.

widespread misuse of words and phrases reduces the value of a language. if we allow "taco" to become "divine right of kings" or ignore things like "for all intensive purposes" we are basically saying that all words and phrases are allowed to equal all meanings and definitions. the result then is that no words or phrases carry any meaning. this is the complete destruction of the value of the language.

lazy capitalizations? poor spelling? grammatical errors? none of those actually attack the very basis for the purpose of language.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking moron. Go back to masturbating to tentacle posn in you mom's basement.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, but "could care less" is actually considered correct in the US (or at least it's still in dispute), but it's intended to be used sarcastically. The original phrase was "couldn't" in the UK but wasn't used that way here for long.

Re:Who cares?

[Frosty Piss]

Funny, but "could care less" is actually considered correct in the US (or at least it's still in dispute)

When it is used incorrectly, it's considered incorrect, even in the US. There's no dispute about that.

so this means

[Zex_Suik]

That the govt recognizes bitcoin as a viable currency? Everyone knows that Silk Road was just a complex game, like a more involved version of that old text based drug dealer game.

LOL, Bitcoins

[Pope]

Anonymous! (well, not really)
Instant! (10 minute transaction times, if you're lucky)
Service charge free! (if you like waiting forever to get your transaction processed)
Price Stable! (what)

How he was really busted

[MushMouth]

Using his real name posting Silkroad code on StackOverflow.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/02/silk_road_s_dread_pirate_ross_ulbricht_asked_stack_overflow_question_under.html

Re:How he was really busted

[behrooz0az]

Thats why I use different nicks, do different things, tunnel through different proxy servers on different PCs and WTF, I'm not even a crimminal.
How stupid can one person become?frosty?really?thats all he could come up with?

something fishy about story.

[Anonymous Coward]

so the guy deletes a photo of his dead enemy, but doesnt delete the conversation from the database?
so the guy uses the same username for every transaction? even tho it says in silk road to use a new username for every transaction?
so the guy sends fake ids to his own address, when the silk road rules say to use different addresses?
so the guy who came up with the site, and all of these rules, doesnt follow his own rules?

then theres this i found while searching

PostmanPot is the collective username of a group of Australians - "no more than seven" - selling marijuana in small quantities on Silk Road. "All of us have experience selling afk (away from the keyboard)," one member of the group said via a private message on the Silk Road website.

He described himself as in his early 20s and studying physics at university.

is that where the physics thing comes from? an australian article about some aussie pot dealers? or is this just a strange physics coincidence?

be safe from evil, disable javascript.

Re:something fishy about story.

[Anonymous Coward]

and in the criminal complaint it says his was the biggest account on silk road.

why did he store his btc in silk road?
a site that has gone down multiple times, and is a prime hacking target?

Re:something fishy about story.

[Anonymous Coward]

you know, after continuing to read the criminal complaint, it looks like ross was just not that smart.
that or he was setup big time.

Laugh

[koan]

"Silk Road was used to sell ~$1.2 billion in illicit goods since being founded in 2011"

Illicit? They mean untaxed =)
It's a shame really silk was kinda nice even if I didn't do any business there fun to read through it... my fav beiong the "fixer" for "any job" up to $50,000.
Hmm what kind of job cost 50k? =)

So like I said... fun to be a tourist there but I wouldn't (didn't) ever do business there, so I was never sure how legit any of the items really were, apparently they were 3.6 million legit.

Civil forfeiture is kind of funny...

[sirwired]

Civil forfeiture laws are kind of funny... there IS some due process involved, but the case is lodged against the property, not the owner of the property. This leads to hilarious case names like United States v. a 1978 Ford Mustang.

As far as legality goes: The consititution does not require a criminal conviction before property is seized; it merely requires "due process." To incarcerate you, you must be convicted, but property directly involved in an alleged law violation (as opposed to property acquired through ill-gotten gains) is a civil matter, not a criminal one.

I think it's marginal, but still passes constitutional muster. After all, if you sue somebody for fraud, the court can award you damages without you being convicted of criminal fraud. This is little different. (You can even hire a lawyer to represent the property if you so choose.)

coincidence

[Anonymous Coward]

can it be a coincidence that this was announced just as the final season of breaking bad comes to an end?

would the feds actually take the site down rather than use it to catch dealers?

methinks they may have been logging all the transcations for a while..

Re:coincidence

[EmagGeek]

It makes no sense to actually catch all the drug dealers. Then, there would be no reason for the government to spend billions of dollars militarizing local police forces to wage war on US Citizens.

The "war on drugs" is a money and power grab, and nothing more. It's an excuse to put local cops in control of armored personnel carriers, fully automatic machine guns, riot gear, and other weapons necessary to oppress The People.

Re:coincidence

[eyenot]

can it be coincidence that both "characters" have advanced chemistry backgrounds specializing in the formation of crystals

can it be coincidence that the bust comes right on the heels of the federal government almost seemingly without sanity declaring bitcoin "real currency"

can it be coincidence that all of this comes just as the show "breaking bad" is coming to an end?

there's coincidence, then there's synchronicity.

$1.2 billion?

[jcr]

With that kind of money at stake, I predict that a replacement for Silk Road will be operating out of Russia within the week.

-jcr

I can't imagine...

[rthille]

I can't imagine setting up something like Silk Road without a 'burn it all' setup like Mel Gibson had in Conspiracy Theory.

Silk Road customers are next!

[neiras]

If the feds have Silk Road's wallets, they now know every bitcoin address they ever used - as well as every bitcoin address used by Silk Road's clients.

Since most Bitcoin users are dumb and don't use shared wallets, it should be simple to follow the blockchain back to people who bought drugs. Everyone has to cash into or out of of Bitcoin somewhere, so it's a matter of looking for transactions from known exchanges, subpoenaing them, getting banking information and fingering the buyers.

Silk Road should really have functioned as a massive shared wallet with no records.

I wonder what Atlantis knew when they shut down?

He was so arrogant to give interviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Title says it: He even gave full interviews and participated in the forums, all under the owners nickname. Run the service, shut the fuck up, live a modest life for 3-4 years, move to a nice island afterwards. Just don't think you are the MAN!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/an-interview-with-a-digital-drug-lord-the-silk-roads-dread-pirate-roberts-qa/

No, not even for extremely low values of "win"

[almechist]

So this begs the question - Are we winning the war on drugs yet?

Well, let's see. Looking at the past few decades, the supply of illegal drugs is up, prices are significantly lower, and quality/potency is up, in some cases way up. Source link:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-09-international-war-illegal-drugs-curb.html

On the other hand, many millions of people have been jailed or otherwise had their lives ruined.

I don't know, even granting that it depends on how you define "winning," it's still kinda hard to see any win here whatsoever.

Moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey douche, quit begging the question. We aren't *that* stupid.

Bicycles are currency?

[raymorris]

> So if they exchange Btc for USD, they are legitimizing Bitcoin as a currency.

Law enforcement routinely sells bicycles that have been abandoned or stolen. Does that make bicycles currency?
Selling bitcoins == selling bicycles. Selling something doesn't turn it into currency. Accepting it as payment would be using it for currency.
As soon as you can pay fines and government fees in bitcoin, that's when the government will be treating bitcoin as currency.

Re:Bicycles are currency?

[PPH]

But it legitimizes bicycles as objects legal to posses and legitimate for other people to hold. Law enforcement typically destroys contraband if they don't consider it to be legitimately held by other parties.

Since Bitcoin has no application other than as a currency, exchanging it (placing it back in the market) could establish a precedent that it is, absent other criminal activity, legal to posess and trade.

Re:Bicycles are currency?

[Anonymous Coward]

considering germany accepts bitcoin for taxes they could sell them to germany. It wouldn't work with bicyles.

How long til they find kiddie porn on his computer

[Anonymous Coward]

How long til they find kiddie porn on his computer ..

Re:Federal Reserve Notes Used to Sell Illicit Good

[omnichad]

If they exchange BTC for USD, all they're doing is stating it's an object that currently has value and can be sold. Nothing to do with its status as a currency. A bucket of grain is not currency, Facebook Credits are not currency, a half-used Applebee's gift card is not currency, but all three can easily be traded for money.

Re:How he was caught using Windows :)

[codeusirae]

"Link to indictment contained within too."

'There were 801 listings under the category "Digital Goods," including offerings for pirated media content, hacked accounts at various online services such as Amazon and Netflix, and more malicious software. For example, one listing, totled "HUGE Hacking Pack **150++ HACKING TOOLS & PROGRAMS**," described the item being sold as a "hacking pack loaded with keyloggers, RATs, banking trojans, and other various malware."' link

Conspiracy, full throttle.

[ezdiy]

Let me tell you exactly what happened:

Some vendor quit the business for whatever reason. He then posed as a hacker of himself, providing "proof" of the hack (passwords, adresses etc), demanding 500k. He then proceeded to lay out the "I owe money to these drug people, thats why I need the 500k" story. He somehow provides DPR with "real life data" of this hacker.

Then he poses as the group the hacker owes money to. He then accepts the offer of the hit, photoshops some picture and collects 150k from DPR.

Occams razor smoking dope. Why would the group accept 150k if they were owed 500k? Why did the data turn out to be fake and why was there no murder or missing person filed in the area? How would they even carry out a hit within such short notice in far away Canada?

Bonus points: The 500k and the vendor were undercover shills, that's never gonna show up in court proceedings for tactical reasons (aka entrapment in criminal law).

DPR got soceng'd hard.

The amount of people not reading the news....

[Anonymous Coward]

Tor is not compromised.

He used a gmail account to get help with hidden services after promoting the silk roiad website.

Stupid got him.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/02/silk_road_s_dread_pirate_ross_ulbricht_asked_stack_overflow_question_under.html

there's also the murder-for-hire problem

[ffflala]

According to the criminal complaint, Ulbricht

On or about March 29, 2013, ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, a/k/a "Dread Pirate Roberts," a/k/a "DPR," a/k/a "Silk Road," the defendant, in connection with operating the Silk Road website, solicited a Silk Road user to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site.

It's interesting that they're not charging him for the murder-for-hire scheme; the criminal complaint describes it in lurid detail. http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf (The detail starts at point #31/page 21.) Ulbricht allegedly tried to pay ~$150k to have a supposed blackmailer assassinated. He claims to have had an earlier "clean hit" done for around $80k.

Contrast the murder-for-hire move with the following (allegedly) hypocritical drivel from his LinkedIn profile:

I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression amongst mankind. Just as slavery has been abolished most everywhere, I believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person over another can come to an end. The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort. The best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.

So what are they going to do with his BTC?

[goldcd]

Destroy them?
Sell them on?
I'm kindoff interested to see how this plays - are they treated as an illegal item with a 'street value', or will the illegal currency be sold on the open market and get some bonus legitimacy ("as retailed by the US government")?
I mean if they don't sell them, whilst there are willing buyers out there wishing to purchase a legal 'good', they're burning your taxes (and boosting the value of whatever's left floating around).
Use them for "their own purposes" (like seizing a Ferrari and using it in a sting) - they're then exposing themselves to some tracking ($5 to the first, track the FBIs bitcoin site).
Personally I've got no idea - but somebody's just cracked open the "big barrel of questions"

Tor not compromised

[dutchwhizzman]

Just because they got busted, doesn't mean that a Tor compromise was the cause of it all. If you read the court papers, you'll find out they were on to the guy well before they had access to the server(s) because he used his real name with activities that were related to silk road. They "routinely" found 9 fake IDs in one parcel shipped to him from Canada (there was a recent story where they had a fake-id manufacturer arrested and they took his place, might be related?) so they knew pretty much where he was and that he was related. It wouldn't have been too difficult for them to use that info to actually get wire taps on him and figure out where the actual hardware was without Tor being compromised. It may be correlated, it may even be the cause, but this is in no way proof it is.

Re:Tor not compromised

[buck-yar]

You believe any of that? You are naive. Google "NSA SOD parallel construction." NSA lied about prism until one of their agents blew the whistle.

They look at packages coming in to the US too

[Sycraft-fu]

One time, I bought a used studio power amplifier from Canada. Apparently customs X-ray'd it and was curious as to what this large, somewhat spikey, metal thing was. So they opened it up, had a look, decided it was what the manifest claimed, carefully repacked it, and sealed it with green US customs tape to let me know they'd searched it.

It is legal, and normal. If you ship internationally you package can be subject to search. That is part of what customs is all about.

Poke a hornet's nest, hornets will emerge ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when I first heard of Silk Road some years ago.

My first thought was : "someone is going to get slapped very hard for this
and it is just a matter of time".

I think the core mistake in this situation is not so much in doing something illegal
as it is in doing it in a way that would tend to provoke those in power. Silk Road
was asking for trouble and indeed it appears that trouble has been found.

This is not about the drugs, it is about acting in a way which publicly undermines the
authority of those in power. It is not about what is "right" or what is "wrong" nearly
as much as it is about the trouble that can arise when you thumb your nose at the
entity which has the power. Pussy Riot found this out, and now the guy behind Silk
Road is finding this out.

A new game of wack-a-mole has begun

[ras]

If the comments here are right, it wasn't the technologies Silk Road is based on that caused the issue, it was that he used dumb things like gmail addresses and mailing fake documents to his physical address. So the underlying technology stands firm, and it is now well know the he made millions from it.

There are two ways you can remove a weed. One way is to carefully dig it up, roots and all, and put it in the incinerator. The second way is to wait into it had flowers, then hit it with a weed wacker; spreading it seeds far and wide. This looks like the latter.

If I didn't know better I say someone in the Department of Justice is trying to set themselves up for a job for life. But I do know better. They aren't that smart.

Re:A new game of wack-a-mole has begun

[Anonymous Coward]

If I didn't know better I say someone in the Department of Justice is trying to set themselves up for a job for life. But I do know better. They aren't that smart.

You don't understand what is really going on in this situation.

The "war on drugs" in the US is not about getting rid of drugs. It is about having the means
to lock people away for long terms. It is not really a war on drugs at all. It IS a war on the underclass,
and more specifically a war on ethnic groups most often of non-white origin.

Allowing the underclass to continue reproducing is what guarantees job security for the DOJ. If
this segment of society was prevented from reproducing for three our four generations, the US
would have drastically different demographics and illegal drugs would not be linked with crime
as often as is now the case. The very fact that the drugs are illegal makes the drugs expensive
and the cost of those drugs exceeds the ability of the lower classes to afford to buy the drugs via
their legal income. keeping the drugs illegal makes certain that crime and drugs will be linked.
And when crime is linked to the underclass, that makes it easy to arrest, convict, sentence, and
imprison large numbers of that underclass. THIS is what the war on drugs is really about.

just a note of clarification

[circletimessquare]

because some people don't get the difference between decriminalization and illegality

portugal is very much invested in the war on hard drugs, but with far better tactics than the usa: treat it as a healthcare problem, not a jail problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

In July 2001 a new law maintained the status of illegality for using or possessing any drug for personal use without authorization. The offense was changed from a criminal one, with prison a possible punishment, to an administrative one if the amount possessed was no more than ten days' supply of that substance.[1] This was in line with the de facto Portuguese drug policy before the reform. Drug addicts were then to be aggressively targeted with therapy or community service rather than fines or waivers.[7] Even if there are no criminal penalties, these changes did not legalize drug use in Portugal. Possession has remained prohibited by Portuguese law, and criminal penalties are still applied to drug growers, dealers and traffickers.[8][9]

hard drug addicts represent a cost on society and civilization will always be at war with hard drug abuse, forever, in an attempt to minimize this cost

it is merely a maintenance function of society, this war. you need to take the trash out ever thursday: this is your "war on trash." because "the war on trash" never ends, is that an argument to let trash accumulate in your apartment?

no, taking out the trash is merely a maintenance function of your apartment. just like minimizing drug addicts is a maintenance function of society

portugal is still at war with hard drugs, as is every functional society on earth. forever

portugal just has much better tactics in this maintenance function

Re:just a note of clarification

[TheCarp]

I think its the war on drugs metaphore that is a lot of the problem. We don't need a war on drugs or hard drugs or anything. Many users and addicts are not the problems, its really a small percentage. Those people are not soldiers in a war, they are sick individuals.

These policies are worst than not working though because.... they create such a huge space for some of the worst sociopaths by creating criminal underclasses who can't call the police when they get robbed, or worst, paying people to pretend to be people's friends while informing on them...all over private nonviolent activities...and policies which, aren't even working.

Every time you increase the number of raids, you increase the number of bad ones. The ones where grandma gets her dog shot because some crackhead CI needed to come up with another address...to get paid. It is corrosive to the very fabric of society, and... doesn't even decrease addiction rates.

Its almost like drug policy has been continuing a habbit long after it became harmful....don't they have a word for that?

Re:just a note of clarification

[circletimessquare]

the costs of the drug war is less than the costs of hard drugs themselves, on individuals and society

consider a drug like meth

consider the costs, of the drug itself

weigh that against the costs you mention

Re:just a note of clarification

[dryeo]

Consider a drug like alcohol, addictive, deadly in large quantities, deadly in prolonged use with some painful deaths such as liver shutdown, causes users to get really stupid and often times violent.
It would be way cheaper to wage a war on alcohol then to have it legal and regularized.

Re:just a note of clarification

[circletimessquare]

yes, consider alcohol, and consider that the costs of prohibition are greater than the costs of the drug itself

then consider meth, and consider that the costs of the drug itself are greater than the costs of prohibition

each drug is different. each drug deserves its own legal status quo

to think the same drug policy can apply to all drugs is ignorant of the subject matter

Re:just a note of clarification

[ultranova]

the costs of the drug war is less than the costs of hard drugs themselves, on individuals and society

On what evidence do you base this assertion?

Re:just a note of clarification

[TheCarp]

I am. Perhaps you missed it... the addiction rate doesn't change over time. It fluctuates up a bit and down a bit, but it doesn't change, it tracks a horizontal line. So those costs get paid either way, you don't actually mitigate any of them.

Actual evidence on drug addiction shows that ending these policies do not result in increased costs from drug use, and in fact, actually decrease some of those costs.

Consider a drug like meth. Consider an addict, who we already admit makes bad, harmful choices in favor of their drug. Consider that existing policy has removed safer drug options for them, and has increased the price to the point that they have to choose between drugs and food.

With or without those policies, you have some sort of addict. The choice is not between having an addict or not, the choice is between addicts being able to eat and pay their bills without resorting to illegal activities for income or going without. That is the only choice that was ever on the table.

Do you take a bad but possibly managable situation that likely needs medical help as it is, or do you make it worst and turn it into a tragic nightmare? Thats the prohibition choice in a nutshell. Prohibition takes a minor societal problem and turns it into a tragic nightmare.

anything other than drugs and specific weapons

[raymorris]

Hmm "legal to possess and trade". It's not a controlled drug, a machine gun, or a bomb. Therefore it's legal in the US. Was there some confusion about that? (Actually even bombs are often legal on private property, transporting them on the public roads involves DOT regulations.) Anything not prohibited is legal, and the list of prohibited items is pretty short.

If you had any doubt that the standard principle applies , for several months now Senator Tom Coburn has been soliciting input on workable, common sense ways to apply consumer protection and money laundering regulations in the context of virtual exchange systems like bitcoin. The questionbbeing discussed is "how should rules designed to protect bank deposits etc. be adapted to work well for bitcoin 'banks'?". Noone is questioning whether it's legal to have a number.

  There is a question of how, lacking FDIC insurance, regulatory oversight, etc. you can be assured that your bitcoin service providers won't take your money and vanish. If you can put together some thoughtful comments on how to balance the freedom of users and service providers with existing laws on ie doing business with Iran, Senator Coburn's office would love to hear your ideas.

Backdoor

[Anonymous Coward]

They used OCR and a microsoft backdoor the match the SR Admin users algorithm.

Putting Tor design in high relief -

[Burz]

1. Tor used weak 1024bit encryption until very recently. I2P (a general-purpose darknet that uses onion-like routing) has used 2048bit ElGamal for many years.

2. Tor's relay patterns and referencing methods are somewhat centralized. I2P is less centralized and provides more cover, because every user acts as a router... spreading traffic over a higher proportion of nodes and more thoroughly keeping your traffic mixed with other stuff.

3. I2P is also open to less abuse because when everyone shares banwidth, then much like Bittorrent, being nice keeps you from being blacklisted or ignored.

4. Tor's community never paid proper attention to distrubuted versions of basic services like file storage, email, web, etc. I2P developed or borrowed these capabilities as users sought a less naive approach than Tor.

I'm not saying that Tor was the reason the Silk Road operator was caught. But if it was, I'm sure there is something in the above that contributed to his discovery.

Sealand? You must be joking

[sirwired]

Sealand has been a joke pretty much since it's founding. They are about as much of an independent nation as if I row a dinghy a couple of miles out from the beach and announce it is now the sovereign nation of SirWiredia. The British govt. ignores him because he's not worth their time to mess with; that would change were he to do something besides hang out there.

That said, a floating data center would indeed be outside the effective jurisdiction of pretty much any govt. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to find an ISP to connect to your anarchotopia. In addition, it's kind of hard to avoid the "jurisdiction" of a torpedo or anti-surface missle if you really piss the wrong people off.

Not that kind of x-ray

[sirwired]

Unless you are shipping huge crates, your parcels likely pass through a carry-on style x-ray, to which film is a lot less sensitive. Up to ISO 800 (or is it 1600?) is ok.

Re:Not that kind of x-ray

[Anonymous Coward]

Even ISO3200 film is alright through low-strength x-ray machines. The slower speed films (=400) can take 10+ passes without issue.

Re:IANAL, but here is why you won't get your coins

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are in EU then seriously, get some legal advice.
The UK has a shocking policy on extradition and the US a shocking policy on trumped up charges.
Money laundering, drug profiteering, association, all sorts of crap to get over the level at which they can request extridition and the UK will happily pack you off on a plane.
Some EU countries seem to be following suit, which is why Assange is still in an embassy and not off to Sweden on trust...

Re:Forgeries mailed to suspect at location of serv

[ozbon]

The FBI had already gained control of Tor boxes against Freedom Hosting - see here ( http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/ ). It's not pushing the realms of reason to assume they've done so again for Silk Road.

Weak charges

[eyenot]

It seems to me that three counts of conspiracy can be thrown out of court or at worse will not represent a very firm sentencing.

I don't think this guy should get a hard sentence any way. He's just a merchant.

This is more like an experiment for the FBI to see if it's possible to seize this new form of asset, and to see how valuable it is once they've seized it.

Recall, that bitcoin was recently upgraded to the designation "actual money". VERY recently.

It's all basically in tandem. Hard to have pressed charges on him or his friends if they're just wildly playing russian roulette with a bunch of digital thingamabobber whatsits.

Entirely different if it fetched the grand master 3.2 million dollars of actually now-recognized "real currency".

Re:IANAL, but here is why you won't get your coins

[Anonymous Coward]

Saul Goodman is your guy.

Does anyone here think the SR is really gone?

[NewToNix]

It's now a trifle over 24 hrs since this story hit /.

If you can't located the new site(s) you should possibly consider surrendering your geek card.

And, as predicted by many here, there seem to be several (and growing) more SR style sites propagating through dark net, even as I type this.

Just as the king always lives in one form or another so it is with that which supplies a demand.

Dread Pirate Roberts is dead, Long live Dread Pirate Roberts.

All that was really accomplished was some advertizing to people that had no idea dark net, or the Silk Road existed.

Well it did, it does, and it's growing more outlets --thanks largely to the three letter agencies.

At least he got to watch Breaking Bad's Finale.

[dave.haku]

I wonder if he thought his arrest would be anything like Walter's failed arrest.

torrent like human beings

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to just downloading torrents of breaking bad? geez. Get off the pipe!

Bitcoin aren't anonymous

[DrYak]

Yup, indeed. I too think that it was easier to catch SilkRoad through bitcoin than through Tor.

Specially, keep in mind that Bitcoin isn't anonymous, unlike TOR. (Bitcoin is not TOR).

by design its pseudonymous:
- bitcoin is a distributed currency. no central bank to control everything. instead its the whole collective of all users which whatch the network.
- thus every single transaction has to be boardcasted to the network.
- bitcoin doesn't use real name or user names. but it does use public key. (it not directly giving a user identity, but it's tied to a user).
- even if users are encouraged to use as many different keys as possible, this doesn't guarantee to hide identity, it only makes identity more difficult to track (but not impossible).
- you can't live only with bitcoin if you want to eat food you need to either convert them to real-world currency, or have food delivered to you from an e-store that actually takes bitcoins.
- at that moment, that peculiar public key in that peculiar transaction can be attached to a real-world identity. This transaction isn't anonymous anymore.
- by tracking the bitcoins exchange (which have been broadcasted to the whole network), its possible to follow a money trail.
- Silk Road represents a huge volume of transactions. Thus potential suspects involved in it have lots of money trails leading to this mass of cash.
(- to get a better idea, potential policemen could even buy a few things of SilkRoad and start following the trail that they have launched)

So getting to Silk Road doesn't even necessarily require any hacking or breaking Tor.
It only requires using normal police work.
The only difference compared to regular monney:
- They can send a letter "Dear Mr. Bank of Cayman Isle, please freeze acount #ABC, property of SilkRoad, known criminal", because there's no central control able to freeze accounts.
- They have way much more transactions to track. With normal money you only have transaction between parties exchanging money to pay for stuff. With bitcoin you get tons of intermediate transaction where the money is only shifting from one public key to another (you can't know in advance but most of the time key of the same person, occasionally keys of 2 different persons actually buy stuff from each other).
- But no search warrant is needed to track transactions: all the transaction are in the block chains which are broadcasted to the whole network (as no central bank has authority, everyone share authority in controlling ans seeing transaction, including a policeman).

Tracking bitcoin transaction isn't like tracking credit cards transaction (happens mostly on buying), but more like tracking change of location of physical coins (once in a while a coin actually change owner when a buying transaction. Most of the time it's only shifted around pockets. But every once in a blue moon, not only does it change owner, but it arrives at a location that you know who is there. And absolutely every single coin move, even pointless moves, is announced in pseudonymous way to everyone so everyone can control that the move is legit).