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Silk Road 2.0 Seized By FBI, Alleged Founder Arrested In San Francisco
blottsie writes The FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall, a 26-year-old in San Francisco, who the agency claims ran the massive online black market Silk Road 2.0. Benthall's FBI arrest comes a year after that of Ross Ulbricht, also from San Francisco, who's the alleged mastermind of the original Silk Road and still awaiting trial. The largest of those reported down is Silk Road 2.0. But a host of smaller markets also seized by law enforcement include Appaca, BlueSky, Cloud9, Hydra, Onionshop, Pandora, and TheHub. Also at Ars Technica.
That was quick.
Really, a second fool resides in the US while running an illegal operation? Go ahead, wave a red cape at the bull, but don't cry when it gores you.
... in 5... 4... 3...
If only there were legal markets that could be taxed and regulated to meet this demand.
Who is still using these sites after all of the Silk Road 1.0 arrests? You have to be pretty dumb to risk your freedom on some stranger's computer security skills.
So, exactly how would a person create an unbreakable Silk Road? Is it be possible to create a searchable, reputation based, decentralized marketplace for "stuff"? Is it possible if the profit aspect of admin is removed?
If money is being transferred electronically, it can be traced back to you. That's the weakness of all illegal online marketplaces.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They arrested the online persona? Why didn't they arrest the actual person?
This is the second time someone in SF created a silk road. Perhaps we should nuke SF and finally win the WoD.
1. Tor is not as secure as everybody says it is (because _____ insert your favourite conspiracy theory/security failure here).
2. NSA/GCHQ, etc... justification for snooping on everyone (terrorists! drugs! guns!) is just complete and utter bull****. Hard detective work pays every time, and is probably more cost-effective than the massive surveillance and privacy violations we have right now.
Please note that 1 and 2 are not necessarily opposed to each other. We may well have 1 AND 2 at the same time..
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What I don't understand is how someone could believe that they wouldn't get caught. We all know now that everything we do on a networked computer is logged, and someday the government infrastructure will find the transactions and prosecute them. Are they thinking the amount of money was small enough to avoid notice?
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Don't abuse the people. Clearly a large number of people want this service no matter the risk. There will be plenty of others ready to fill the void.
Do you mean the feds abusing technology to pursue and harm peaceful people? If it's free men violating an archaic prohibition that you're against, you're a deeply misguided person who is part of the toxic-government problem.
The Government God forbids mere mortals from being allowed to escape their just punishments of soberly enduring the stupidity and drudgery of Western life - with the exemption of booze and prescription meds like Jesus would want, of course.
You act as if that law was a natural one, imposed by nature itself. Which are by definition also the only laws you can neither break nor change.
Just because something is the law doesn't make it automatically right. Human laws don't define what is right. Only what is legal.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are plenty of nice things where I live (and on the Internet), so what the heck do you mean by "we can't have anything nice"? Care to explain?
Funny thing is, some minutes before the news came out, bitcoin price had a surge, like these aren't bad news for the virtual money.
I dare say that most markets have manipulation to some degree, but the all price of BTC seems to be a huge manipulation... specially when you do the math and see that the top 10 wallets, could bring the price down at once to less that 20$ in every exchange at the same time just by selling their coins.
These free trade sites will keep popping up as fast as they are shutdown. The government's position that unrestricted trade is dangerous is untenable.
This is the reason why we can't have anything nice. Is because their are too many jerks out there who will use a new technology as a way to do illegal activities!
How is Silk Road infringing on your ability to do anything? 90% of the activity on Silk Road are private transactions between consenting adults for things that should have never been illegal in the first place. The way to have less crime, is to criminalize fewer things.
the exchange of goods and services for monetary instruments agreed upon by the parties involved in the transaction... truly a revolutionary idea.
Criminalizing goods that are in high demand will always create a black market, which in turn will divert significant economic assets to the pockets of criminals. By virtue of being rich, they wind up having significant political influence (until they do something stupid and get themselves arrested).
The whole problem gets wiped off the map if you make the drugs legal (perhaps with a bit of regulation by the FDA). You can even tax them.
VT/VPro is the culprit.
Intel chips have a VNC server built in which scrapes the integrated graphics card's framebuffer.
It can be turned off but can always be reenabled remotely.
It can be communicated through the NIC, Wifi, and 3g if a 3g card is integrated.
RAM can also be accessed.
3.0 incoming!
Unless he was dealing in illegal goods himself ( like what happened with v1 ), what are the legal grounds for arrest? He would be no different than eBay or amazon, or craigslist. He provides a legal service, how its used is not his fault.
Perhaps a new paradigm is needed; hosting within Tor but on servers the US gov has difficulty getting to, and a cold money trail. The "important" people in the network would need anonymity and would also need to not make money as admins or VIPs. Instead, they'd collect their profit as minor users (with different accounts) and keep most of their money within the system (e.g. free drugs). Real profits would go to charities (e.g. the EFF accepts bitcoin donations), ensuring that there is no usable money trail (obviously, the EFF would not back this kind of work).
Atop that, the new system could be better distributed (decentralized) and perhaps even free software (self-hosted via Trac or whatever) to follow the cryptographer philosophy of more eyes (reviewers) ensuring more security.
Of course, this assumes the Silk Road community has selfless idealists willing to coordinate this...
Worst haiku ever.
4 syllables
14 syllables
10 syllables
That's not even close!
Just do like a lot of shady companies. Register on the NYSE, do an IPO and get your stocks bought by idiots. Then you become untouchable.
Examples: Herbalife, Primerica, Tupperware Brands, Microsoft, etc...
One the other hand, demand does not make something right either.
Of course it can. And like all security, it's a question of how expensive and time consuming that process is.
If one used anonymizing technology from start to finish, and mined their bitcoin (mining is often a break even affair, so it can be viewed as a secondary avenue of converting dollars to BTC) it's actually quite difficult to trace. Sure you can follow the transaction trail of the bitcoin but you can't establish at which points it changed hands vs simply moving around those addresses could belong to anyone. And if you mined your own coin the origin address won't be associated with an exchange and identifying information.
And then of course there are mixers. The bitcoin you put in is not the bitcoin that comes out. This makes it much more difficult to determine the origin.
Beating the technology itself is a rather expensive process. It's unlikely the FBI will even try for anyone but those running the site and large merchants.
from the link:
[Emphasis added]
VT/VPro is the culprit.
Intel chips have a VNC server built in which scrapes the integrated graphics card's framebuffer. .Xs
It can be turned off but can always be reenabled remotely.
It can be communicated through the NIC, Wifi, and 3g if a 3g card is integrated.
RAM can also be accessed.
The FBI claims that under Benthall's leadership, Silk Road 2.0, as of September 2014, allowed more than 100,000 people to buy illegal drugs, generating roughly $8 million per month in sales.
I'm not sure what Silk Road's cut of that 8million is, but even 1% is a nice chunk of monthly revenue. More than enough to pay for a few AWS servers and live on.
I highly doubt that these guys get into this type of service for any other reason than to make lots of cash. Legal channels are already clogged with robbers, er.. bankers (cheap shot I know) so how else do you try and make lots of money?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
> One the other hand, demand does not make something right either.
It pretty much does.
Don't even try to trotting out ultra low-demand things like murder for hire.
A complete lack of victims other than self does bloody goddam well make it not wrong, however.
The future is being developed and we are already testing a marketplace that cannot be shutdown.
Decentralized marketplace for instantly trading uses blockchain technology, DHT, and mutisigniture arbitration.
https://openbazaar.org/
Beta 3 is about to be released. Join Us and support the future with a decentralized Ebay - https://github.com/OpenBazaar/...
http://tip4commit.com/projects/728
>How is Silk Road infringing on your ability to do anything? 90% of the activity on Silk Road are private
> transactions between consenting adults for things that should have never been illegal in the first place
I am shocked at the baseless allegation that 10% of silk road activity was anything but more of the same.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Ammunition has legitimate real issues concerning its transportation, necessitating regulation. (Not that it's hard to do safely, but we really are talking about small amounts of explosives. You can't just wish away the issues; you have to actually use a little common sense or else face risks and consequences. And since people don't use common sense, government is there to make 'em as though they did.)
In contrast, guns and marijuana don't have real issues; they are regulated for whimsical reasons. My point: Whims change. Whether or not this whim will change, remains to be seen, but it least it can happen. The People could decide to not regulate marijuana (and with no negative consequences to anyone (except black-marketers)) in a way that they would never be able to decide to not regulate ammunition.
I am shocked at the baseless allegation that 10% of silk road activity was anything but more of the same.
There are "murder for hire" ads on SR, that involve non-consenters. But that is probably much less than 10%. If the police spent less time enforcing morality, they would have a lot more time for the real crimes.
Mod OP up.
The way to have less crime, is to criminalize fewer things.
Brilliant! We could have less bank-robbery crime by decriminalizing bank robbery. We could have less illegal wiretapping by decriminalizing illegal wiretapping. Those pesky KKK lynchings? Decriminalize them.
Maybe you meant to say, "I wish things that I personally don't have a problem with would be decriminalized."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The key variable in this is the age of onset for marijuana use and the brain's development, Meier said. Study subjects who didn't take up pot until they were adults with fully-formed brains did not show similar mental declines. Before age 18, however, the brain is still being organized and remodeled to become more efficient, she said, and may be more vulnerable to damage from drugs."
so STFU, no one is talking about legalizing pot for minors, you don't want to smoke pot FINE, fuck off and let everyone else run their own lives.
thanks.
Marry young girls Child marriage of girls is allowed in the Old Testament. Banned by feminists the world over now.
Um unlike the Q'uran, the Old testiment isn't a legal document. Its an written history of how God wanted humanity, Israel and Judea to live. It also records how they chose to live in defiance of that. Child marriage is never ok. Paul who was a pharisee because becoming Christian would have said so in one of his letters. He didn't. So quit taking a book you don't understand out of context. It make you look more like the troll you are.
Which would be in some way relevant of outlawing pot in any way reduced pot use. Since it does not in fact achieve that goal, the negative effects of pot smoking are irrelevant. Outlawing things because we disapprove of them is a stark miss-use of the legislative process. Pass laws because the actual consequences of the law will make the community better off, not because you want to signal disapproval.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If there was any way to verify it, I would bet dollars to donuts that those ads were mostly police, and con artists looking to scam people out of some cash just like Silk Road 1.0 apparently got scammed. I would be shocked if a single actual hit was ever delivered on via Silk Road 2.0
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
You're talking about the Feds of course, and their massive violation of the highest law of the land (constitution) and by such, a complete subversion of American values. It's as if the greatest threat to everything America stands for, is the US Federal Government. Or are you talking about people harming nobody except *maybe* themselves by using various substances currently described as illegal in a shifting regulatory framework (e.g., alcohol: legal, illegal, legal; pot: legal, illegal, legal some places)?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
...to hear how exactly they got him.
And the next one will probably be a distributed system that can't be shut down.
But... it is The Law !
Requiem for the American Dream
Then perhaps, the general population would benefit from a more reasonable price for donuts.
Requiem for the American Dream
" FBI has arrested the online persona "Defcon," identified as Blake Benthall".
No. The FBI has arrested Blake Benthall, alleged to be the online persona, "Defcon". It's for the court system to decide whether it agrees with that allegation.
So suicide is ok then? Where did I put my noose...
What's wrong with suicide? I would probably ask you why and whether you're sure about it (if you asked, of course), but if you really want to, how the heck is it any of my business to meddle in your decision?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only laws one has to abide to are the laws of physics. There's no way around them.
Every man made law can be broken. I guess I don't need to cite evidence thereof. Whether people heed it depends on benefit, risk and punishment. Note the absence of a "moral" attitude towards the law. One may for example have a moral problem with killing. In this case, though, the person does not abide by the law, he doesn't want to commit the act in the first place, making the associated law moot. He would not do it either if the corresponding law didn't exist.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's an excellent question. But if the issue is loss of IQ points, why limit this to "substances"? For example, how many IQ points does inadequate sleep cost? Clearly, we must have a curfew and ban coffee. How about exhaustion from work? Let's ban overtime, and limit daily hours to 4 while we're at it. And of course you are writing your message through speech-to-text while working on a treadmill - good circulation is vital for mental performance, after all - which needs to be mandated, as well.
So. Where do you draw the line?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
What? Who let the commie in to question the eternal law of supply and demand?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Outlawing pot doesn't reduce pot use? LOL, I'm in Colorado where voters decided to legalize pot in 2013, and as a result pot use has increased dramatically. Now if you had said outlawing pot does not eliminate pot use, I would of course agree with you. But if the goal is merely to "reduce," the law certainly can and has accomplished that.
Outlawing things because we disapprove of them is a stark miss-use of the legislative process. Pass laws because the actual consequences of the law will make the community better off, not because you want to signal disapproval.
I thought that's what I was advocating. People walking around with an average of 8 IQ points missing makes the community worse off, especially because it makes them more likely to need public assistance. Whether I "approve" of having one's brain in that condition is irrelevant.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
STFU, no one is talking about legalizing pot for minors
LOL, I'm in Colorado where voters decided to legalize pot in 2013 -- nominally only for adults -- and as a result use among minors has increased dramatically. That's one of the reasons Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) called the decision "reckless."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
That's an excellent question.
Thanks
How about exhaustion from work? Let's ban overtime, and limit daily hours to 4 while we're at it.
In fact, legislators have already dealt with this. The law limits the standard workweek to 40 hours (even shorter in France), working overtime is something that's pretty heavily regulated, and child labor laws prohibit all work for kids under 14.
When adults work and earn income, there is less of a need for kids to work and earn income, but the opposite dynamic exists for controlled substances: when adults gain easier access to them, minors also gain easier access to them. (For most of the people who voted for Amendment 64 here in Colorado, that was an unintended consequence; but for some it was very intended -- "power to the babystoners!") Thanks for making points that support my position.
Where do you draw the line?
I thought I had made clear that permanent loss of an average of 8 IQ points is too high a price to pay for the freedom to get stoned (a freedom that people who have their sobriety don't even miss). Now I ask again, where do you draw the line?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I'm in Colorado where voters decided to legalize pot in 2013, and as a result pot use has increased dramatically.
And how was that measured? You had a compete an accurate census of illegal behavior beforehand? Pot's the second largest cash crop in the US after corn, and we don't export. (No argument about the correlation between pot and IQ, though I do wonder about the causation.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.