8 Users of Silk Road Arrested, 'Many More To Come' 318
An anonymous reader writes "Last week authorities shut down Silk Road, an online black market that made use of Tor to hide activity. They also arrested the site's primary operator, Ross Ulbricht, and seized his possessions. Now, an AP report indicates at least 8 more arrests have been made on people suspected to have sold drugs through the site. Four of the arrests happened in the U.K., two were in the U.S. and two were in Sweden. It looks like they're gearing up for more arrests, as well. Keith Bristow of Britain's National Crime Agency said, 'These latest arrests are just the start; there are many more to come.' Authorities are reportedly mining the site's customer review system, which contains months worth of transaction data, for further leads."
I find it more interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I find it more interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
You need to use a real address if you want to buy stuff, and in the UK at least, you don't need to have that much before it is "possession with intent to supply". People could have been buying wholesale on Silk Road and selling it on the street, and even if they weren't, if the quantities were more than about a day's supply they would get charged with that anyway.
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Crime (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of Swedish prison my dad knows a guy who calms it saved his life. How? No alcohol on weekdays. But on the week ends (Swedish prison let most of the prisoners out for weekend) the guy would go drinking with one of the guards. After following this habit for a 2 years. He still no longer drink during week days.
Crime rule #1. (Score:5, Interesting)
Crime rule #1: If you're going to do crime, don't do crime with anyone you haven't known since high school. Doing crime with random strangers over the Internet is just fcking stupid.
Re:Queue The Anarchist & Druggie Comments In.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Operant conditioning chamber
Main article: Operant conditioning chamber
While a researcher at Harvard, B. F. Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber, popularly referred to as the Skinner box, to measure responses of organisms (most often, rats and pigeons) and their orderly interactions with the environment. The box had a lever and a food tray, and a hungry rat could get food delivered to the tray pressing the lever. Skinner observed that when a rat was put in the box, it would wander around, sniffing and exploring, and would usually press the bar by accident, at which point a food pellet would drop into the tray. After that happened, the rate of bar pressing would increase dramatically and remain high until the rat was no longer hungry.
Skinner discovered that consequences for the organism played a large role in how the organism responded in certain situations. For instance, when the rat would pull the lever it would receive food. Subsequently, the rat made frequent pulls on the lever. Negative reinforcement was also exemplified by Skinner placing rats into an electrified chamber that delivered unpleasant shocks. Levers to cut the power were placed inside these boxes. By running a current through the “operant conditioning chamber,” Skinner noticed that the rats, after accidentally pressing the lever in a frantic bid to escape, quickly learned the effects of implementing the lever and consequently used this knowledge to stop the currents both during and prior to electrical shock. These two learned responses are known as Escape Learning and Avoidance Learning. The operant chamber for pigeons involves a plastic disc in which the pigeon pecks in order to open a drawer filled with grains. The Skinner box led to the principle of reinforcement, which is the probability of something occurring based on the consequences of a behavior.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
The balance between anonymity and accountability (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to be able to purchase my drugs anonymously, but since I'm paying Silk Road a percentage, I'd like some kind of guarantee.
Some kind of accountability, in other words.
How to balance the two? They don't balance. Even if the only accountability is a seller's good name, there must be some kind of linked identification which, over time, provides enough information to find the individual and arrest them.
Re:Important to note ..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not directly. Indirectly, it helped create a nice big honeypot where now lots of people got caught. This is not unlike the childporn exchanges on the tor network. Pervs flock to these sites, and create a big juicy target for law enforcement.
You have to realize that it is far more cost effective for law enforcement to break silk road and get the adresses of lots of dealers than to chase them one by one. It is so cost effective that they can use a well funded crack team (no pun intended) to do it.
So in a way, this technology is in fact helping law enforcement.
Re:Crime (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, Britain can't legally extradict to countries where the accused faces the Death Penalty and members of the US Senate had already publically claimed Assange should face the death penalty. Whether that was a legal possiblity I have no idea, but it certainly made the possibility of extradiction harder.
Re:Crime (Score:2, Interesting)
Senators don't get to sentence people in the USA. We have judges for that.
We also have a VERY short list of laws that are eligible for the death penalty. Assange, much as he would like to think he's the most important criminal in US history, didn't commit any of the crimes for which he could get the death penalty (if he even committed a crime under US law, which is debatable).
And no, he couldn't be convicted of treason, no matter what certain Senators think about the subject...
All of which means that Assange has little, if anything, to fear from extradition to the USA, in spite of what he has to say on the subject.