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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.
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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
You can't win the WoD--the Jyhad is eternal.
No way, never. Who'd buy any of the overpriced, useless but patentable drugs from various Pharma Corporations if there were more potent, cheaper drugs available where the patent expired?
That's the problem when you invent the holy grail of drugs. The ultimate drug. At some point in time, your patent is gone. And then... what do you want to do when there is nothing you could invent that is "better"?
Take a look around at when something gets invented, when it gets patented and when it gets outlawed. You just MIGHT see some sort of pattern.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Heh, people tell me all the time that I have 'delusions of grandeur,' but they are a bunch of nobodies and who cares what they think.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
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.
...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.
It's completely possible.
Ulbricht was not very smart. He bought fake IDs off his own website and had them shipped to his actual home address. The IDs were intercepted in the mail. and this clued the FBI in on his activities. Then he managed his servers using a direct VPN connection. Once the FBI traced the VPN endpoint he was done. They coerced the hosting company to allow them access and they could collect all the information they needed to build a case from that point on.
I imagine this Defcon guy did something similarly dumb.
To do this right:
1. Find a VM hosting company offshore that accepts bitcoins and doesn't ask for identity. 2. Buy some bitcoins, use one of the many tumbler services to wash them, and pay for the services that way 3. Never manage or otherwise connect to your VM directly. Always use TOR. SSH works great over TOR. 4. Don't buy shit off your own website and have it shipped to your damn house.
Just finished reading the affidavit from the FBI. This guy was a dumbass. He used a gmail account to pay for the VPS service and used his home internet connection to connect to the gmail account. He used his own, hotel, and relatives internet connections to connect to the hosting provider without any sort of anonymizing service. The FBI used either an undercover agent or a confidential informant to eventually find the VPS provider. From there, he was quite easy to track. The FBI had been watching the guy for months. The affidavit suggested it was an undercover agent that was hired as a staff member on the website that lead to this case being cracked open.
MDMA is relatively benign and no one is overdosing on it. What you do increasingly see is people overdosing on what they think is MDMA because it's not as readily available now thanks to law enforcement.
http://www.theguardian.com/pol...
One the other hand, demand does not make something right either.
A complete lack of victims other than self does bloody goddam well make it not wrong, however.
>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"
It's completely possible.
Ulbricht was not very smart. He bought fake IDs off his own website and had them shipped to his actual home address. The IDs were intercepted in the mail. and this clued the FBI in on his activities. Then he managed his servers using a direct VPN connection. Once the FBI traced the VPN endpoint he was done. They coerced the hosting company to allow them access and they could collect all the information they needed to build a case from that point on.
I imagine this Defcon guy did something similarly dumb.
To do this right:
1. Find a VM hosting company offshore that accepts bitcoins and doesn't ask for identity.
2. Buy some bitcoins, use one of the many tumbler services to wash them, and pay for the services that way
3. Never manage or otherwise connect to your VM directly. Always use TOR. SSH works great over TOR.
4. Don't buy shit off your own website and have it shipped to your damn house.
Actually, he brought the IDs from a person in Canada and Canada inspects packages purchased from Canadians and shipped to people outside of Canada. That's how he got caught. Canada narked on him. It was an idiot move. As for Defcon, also an idiot move. he didn't vet everyone in who has admin credentials. FBI placed a mole in TOR who Defcon hired to help run the back end according to Ars and other sources. Silk road is too obvious anyway.
"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.
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.
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
" 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.