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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?
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.
You can't win the WoD--the Jyhad is eternal.
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.
What? You nuts? Who the heck ever wanted to WIN a war on $generic_subject? Winning a war isn't profitable, waging it is!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There are plenty of nice things where I live (and on the Internet), so what the heck do you mean by "we can't have anything nice"? Care to explain?
Funny thing is, some minutes before the news came out, bitcoin price had a surge, like these aren't bad news for the virtual money.
I dare say that most markets have manipulation to some degree, but the all price of BTC seems to be a huge manipulation... specially when you do the math and see that the top 10 wallets, could bring the price down at once to less that 20$ 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 only winning move is not to play
I can think of few things less recreational than alcohol.
One the other hand, demand does not make something right either.
It is not quite as simple as that though. There are a number of things that have high demand and a black market, but historically making the services legal was even worse. For instance, there is still a black market for slavery in the US, it is pretty hard to stamp out completely, but pushing it underground decreased the problem dramatically. The same can be said of rape and child molestation, two things that were not always illegal and there is enough of a demand that quite a bit of both are still going on, but I think people are generally happier with the police at least trying to stop them.
Now obviously these are different from the drug cases in that they address people's actions on people, but that is actually the rationale behind the drug laws. While the American ideal of individualism and personal responsibility sounds good on paper, but people's personal choices have a way of effecting the people around them, so one's personal choice to take drugs has consequences for people who did NOT choose this. A classic example that led to opium generally being cracked down on was as it spread through a community or region it could cause economic collapse. Sure it starts as the addicts themselves simply working less and not contributing, but it eats away at their family's economic capabilities (which has a direct impact on what the children will accomplish) and can have a runaway effect on the larger group. These were extreme examples but they were devastating and did not even take that large a percentage of the workforce to destroy the rest of it.
Having said that, while I see these as good reasons to have controls in place, I also rather strongly feel that the controls have gone WAY too far and are no longer serving to address the actual problems.
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.
Hint: Don't drink until you puke.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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"
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.
Facilitating illegal sales IS indeed illegal, very much so. Torrent trackers exist in a sort of gray area because they amount to little more than links, while these drug markets are clearly illegal. Even if they weren't acting as a middleman and transferring payments (which is what makes them popular), simply maintaining a site that explicitly connects illegal drug sellers to buyers is illegal. The difference with Craigslist is that illegal transactions are banned by the site's policies and are often taken down quickly, they account for a minuscule portion of the site's traffic, and CL does not handle the money. How your site is used IS your fault if you put it up to facilitate crimes and you know that it is being used for that purpose.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
"Maybe you meant to say, "I wish things that I personally don't have a problem with would be decriminalized.""
No he meant what he wrote and we all understand him, you are just an overeager hall monitor who wants to nanny state the rest of us.
Ammunition has legitimate real issues concerning its transportation, necessitating regulation.
And yet it is still readily available for purchase online, and shipped to your door by UPS or Fedex, no signature required.
(which actually makes me wonder just how heavy those regulatory burdens really are...)
Which part of "private transactions between consenting adults" from the original post you did not understand?
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.
Not that it's hard to do safely, but we really are talking about small amounts of explosives
Smokeless powder doesn't explode it burns and it's perfectly legal to ship it via common carrier (UPS or Fedex) or even to fly with it in your checked baggage. The real reason Amazon/eBay/et. al won't allow ammunition and firearms sales is twofold:
1) The regulatory burden, both real and perceived.
2) Political correctness.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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
please give citation....
...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
Widespread != high
Requiem for the American Dream
Which is a good argument for why cannabis should not be illegal.
My point was not that the laws are right or well balanced, but that there is some rational behind why such laws exist and that over focusing on individualism is just sticking heads in sand.
(1) You could read the rest of my post since I addressed this. (2) Ahm, yeah, there has been. Even today the demand is higher and more common then people like to think, it is a very 'swept under the rug' problem in the US. (3) Drug laws pre-date the US. If we are going to reference chinese immigrants then we can go back and look at the devistating economic impact opium addiction had on the chinese population not long before that, resulting in the Chinese government putting laws in place to try to deal with the problem and then the UK government bombing the country into opening up its market again. Chinese economic collapse was actually good for the UK at the the time, one could go even further and point out that racism was a major factor in pressuring for the removal of such laws in China while strenghting their own.... in general you want the other guy to have the weak economy and not your own
" 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.
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.