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Tracking the Mole Inside Silk Road 2.0
derekmead writes: The arrest of the Silk Road 2.0 leader and subsequent seizure of the site was partially due to the presence of an undercover U.S. Department of Homeland Security agent, who "successfully infiltrated the support staff involved in running the Silk Road 2.0 website," according to the FBI.
Referencing multiple interviews, publicly available information, and parts of the moderator forum shared with me, it appears likely that the suspicions of many involved in Silk Road 2.0 are true: the undercover agent that infiltrated the site was a relatively quiet staff member known as Cirrus.
Referencing multiple interviews, publicly available information, and parts of the moderator forum shared with me, it appears likely that the suspicions of many involved in Silk Road 2.0 are true: the undercover agent that infiltrated the site was a relatively quiet staff member known as Cirrus.
whose relative?
If I ran a secret tor service site thing, I'd had 5 moderators and 1 administrator and they'd all be me just to mess with people's heads. That would prevent moles.
According to the FBI complaint against Benthall, he registered the black market bazaar's servers with the email address blake@benthall.net.
Lucky they had a mole on this inside, or they never could've taken down that criminal mastermind.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Seeing this just serves to remind me that criminals are dumb.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The criminals that are caught are dumb. You never even knew the smart ones were there.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
This is how I want our 3-letter agencies to be doing their jobs, rather than actively working to sacrifice everyone's privacy and safety just because it might make it slightly easier to nail a small number of criminals.
#DeleteChrome
For all we know, "Cirrus" was a committee.
What this shows me is that there's just no way to keep a secret if other people are involved.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This is veering offtopic, but, according to this article, thepiratebay.cr is not to be trusted, if I am understanding it correctly:
Various mirror sites of The Pirate Bay have sprung up since the site’s disappearance, but this one is different. Some alternatives simply provide a copy of The Pirate Bay with no new content (many proxy sites have been doing this for years). Others, like thepiratebay.cr, go further and even provide fake content as if it was new and even attempt to charge users.
Probably any torrent site is not to be easily trusted, but I could imagine hackers setting up a lookalike site in order to get people who should know better to download problematic stuff. Heck, maybe the CIA set it up.
For all we know, the speculation and guesses in the article are complete misses.
There's nothing even approaching evidence in the Vice article.
...it was his brother, Achenar. He's demented, he is guilty!
Eh, I doubt anything released is all that useful, much less a 'howto'. An interesting post mortem but predictive in a terribly useful way.
Smart ones still make dumb mistakes now and then, luck plays a big role in those lapses catching up with them or not, and every criminal looks dumb at that point.
The risk is probably very low. If, as an organization, they were capable of taking reprisals against the FBI, they could just as easily take them against any number of publicly known faces involves in the case, or the judge, or the prosecutor, etc.
> criminals are dumb
Indeed, They put faith in Cirrus after all the warnings about not trusting the Cloud.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Sure, they will just look under C for Cirrus in the phonebook.
This is why the police win, they just wait for the criminals to make mistakes. Police are not paid enough to attract the top talent, they win by statistics.
I can imagine the defense.
"I didn't sell anything on Silk Road 2. I built a website others used to sell those things. Would you arrest the CEO of Ebay if one of its customers sold something that was illegal?"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I can imagine the defense.
"I didn't sell anything on Silk Road 2. I built a website others used to sell those things. Would you arrest the CEO of Ebay if one of its customers sold something that was illegal?"
And I can imagine the judge's response: "Guilty. Next."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Sure there is - don't you remember the old adage?
"Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead."
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well apparently silk road 1.0 and 2.0 both made the same mistake. There are lots of things that are really obvious in retrospect but get overlooked just the same.
Well played.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
These guys should give credit to lamoustache. See http://antilop.cc/sr/
For all we know, "Cirrus" was a committee.
What this shows me is that there's just no way to keep a secret if other people are involved.
It's best to simply define secret as "that which you and you alone know".
Well they would if the CEO of Ebay:
1) Failed to respond to the fact that their site was being used for illegal activity (ie banning people)
2) Actively advertised it as a haven for illegal sales.
3) Worked to conceal the identity of the illegal salesmen and customers from law enforcement.
4) refused to work with law enforcement to stop the illegal sales.
Sure I know about the smart criminals. They typically work on Wall Street.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's how they catch people, if they're winning well... So they took down Silk Road 2.0, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating the drug industry. They take down The Pirate Bay, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating copyright infringement. From big to small, they can catch a shoplifter but shoplifting doesn't go away, they can bust a crime syndicate but organized crime doesn't go away either. And more often than not they're the mop-up crew, sure it's nice that murderers go to jail but the victim is still dead so it's a limited win. It's far from a lawless country but it's still way off from a lawful country, at least in some areas we can make an educated guess on how many criminals they don't catch because there's a victim and a crime scene but in others it's just guesswork. Particularly the kind that wears suits.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
always fun to watch the big business think they won something.
I for one would like to thank the fbi for doing so much to promote the darknet market places.
with site operators taking home $400,000 a month and counting. it's going to become a highly competitive market for darknet market places if they keep up this level of attention.
But the police don't win. The police tell you they win, and they parade a bunch of the dumbest people on the planet to demonstrate the point, but all the super yachts in the world tell me the police aren't winning, merely creating a situation that is palatable to the masses.
And if they can't do that, they simply collude with a prosecutor who is bucking for high conviction rates to win a judgeship to railroad some innocent schlep by abusing the system, and then the "public' thinks the matter is settled and the pressure to actually find out truth goes away.