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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.
>1. Tor is not as secure as everybody says it is (because _____ insert your favourite conspiracy theory/security failure here).
It is. We know it is from the Ross Ulbricht case. They posed as a vendors and customers and sent malware to the browsers at the other end. Tor might be fine as an intermediate, but the endpoints are leaky as hell if you don't act with great caution.
>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.
We know it is. Parallel construction is well documented.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
What? You nuts? Who the heck ever wanted to WIN a war on $generic_subject? Winning a war isn't profitable, waging it is!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You need a form of currency that cannot be tracked that is accepted by the receiving party. Bitcoins are one kind of currency that fulfills that requirement
Bitcoin is absolutely not anonymous. It's more anonymous than a direct bank-to-bank transfer, but every transaction is recorded publicly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...and then they'd have none left and the price would shoot up again. Unlike paper money, there isn't an infinite supply of money to keep manipulating the market.
they got Slik Road 1.0 the site but not anything like a customer registry or order history.
That's not true. The FBI had full admin access to Silk Road 1.0 for several months before they shut it down. People around the world were arrested.
Most of the Google results are this new 2.0 arrest. Here are some articles about sellers from SR1.0 getting arrested.
http://www.law360.com/articles/479177/8-more-silk-road-arrests-reported-in-us-europe
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/silk-road-merchant-arrested-over-sale-drugs-guns-cash-n35691
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-09-05/news/bs-md-silk-road-sentencing-20140905_1_dread-pirate-roberts-ross-william-ulbricht-jacob-theodore-george-iv
There's another reason why selling drugs online is a bad idea. After SR1.0 got shut down, there were a bunch of forum posts from people who had been fronted large amounts of drugs to sell online. The drugs had been sent out, and then the resulting bitcoins got seized by the Feds. Now they owed very unpleasant people huge amounts of money that they didn't have.
Of your three articles, the first is behind a pay wall. The second explicitly says they caught the package in the mail and worked from there. The third happened before the Silk Road bust and they said they used information in that case against Silk Road, not the other way around. Nothing really supports that the bust itself was used to round up sellers or buyers in large numbers.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings