Silk Road 2.0 Seized By FBI, Alleged Founder Arrested In San Francisco 219
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.
Another Idiot Tempts the Fates (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Another Idiot Tempts the Fates (Score:5, Interesting)
And there will be a third and forth and fifth... It will NEVER stop. There is absolutely nothing the government can do to stop it. Nothing. There is 8 million a month spent on something relatively complicated to use (compared to say Amazon) and carries a risk of jail time. Think about that. Obviously there's a demand and that demand will be met no matter the cost. But it's not like there are more important things to spend the time and money on.
Re:Another Idiot Tempts the Fates (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the previous AC's point was not that it would eventually stop, but rather that eventually someone would come along who was smart enough to run his criminal empire from somewhere outside the US. Then we'd get a story about the CIA, instead of merely the FBI.
Re:Another Idiot Tempts the Fates (Score:5, Insightful)
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The CIA will be a vendor and customer..
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Look at AllOfMP3. They were legal under Russian law, run by local Russians, so the US put pressure on them to use mob tactics to convince them it's in their "best interests" to shut down. Because there were no legal options to shut them down.
And given that it's standard pra
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Then we'd get a story about the CIA, instead of merely the FBI.
Except for that article yesterday (?) about how the FBI wants authority to fuck with people outside the country now, too.
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Nothing new. J. Edgar was chomping to get the power to project the FBI into places outside of the USA during WW2.
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Then I guess I don't understand why, if the FBI isn't explicitly barred from doing whatever-it-is, they aren't doing it already. The NSA had no qualms about doing things they clearly *weren't* authorized to, after all.
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A place with no extradition treaty beholdening it to the USA, for one thing. The list lacking such is pretty imposing:
Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Armedia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bhutan, Bosnia, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Croatia, Djibouti, Dubai, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Herzegovina, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Kazakhs
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If he was to run a drug ring from one of those countries, extradition is a moot point as he could simply be prosecuted by local courts. Best to find a place where the officals are easy to bribe.
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Re:Another Idiot Tempts the Fates (Score:5, Insightful)
... It will NEVER stop.
... until the primary products sold there are legalized. Several more states legalized pot this month. I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime. That will certainly be the end for a black market for that particular good. How much of Silk Road's market (in terms of money actually spent) is for similarly innocuous stuff? For all the hype, I doubt the assassination market is real. There are of course some drugs that will never be legal - anyone know if that's a big business?
The business for botnets is probably with us forever, but amazingly the price of cloud servers is coming down low enough where it won't make much sense to use a botnet except directly for criminal activities (DDOS etc).
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I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime.
That's a reach; the regulatory apparatus will doubtless place a heavy enough burden on it as to preclude Amazon or really any generalized online retailer from selling it. There's a multitude of legal products that Amazon could sell -- firearms and ammunition are the easiest example -- but do not because of compliance and regulatory burdens.
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I could see it happening on Amazon eventually [amazon.com].
In case that link breaks, it's a list of the states to which sellers of both domestic and international wines are allowed to ship.
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Long before you can "just buy pot on Amazon," I think it's much more likely we'll see Amazon provide a link between local sellers and local buyers, perhaps in places were Amazon already has local warehouses -- pardon me, "Fulfillment Centers."
Arizona, California, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.
Sorry Colorado :)
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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...)
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... until the primary products sold there are legalized. Several more states legalized pot this month. I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime
I still can't even buy alcohol on Sunday mornings. Queue the Texas conservative jokes, however when I lived in the liberal northeast my town did not allow ANY alcohol sales.
Getting rid of these laws is going to take a long time.
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however when I lived in the liberal northeast my town did not allow ANY alcohol sales.
Yeah, both sides can be real nannies, the only real difference often being the justification.
A bunch of statists, the lot of them.
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Several more states legalized pot this month. I expect it will be sold on Amazon in my lifetime.
I keep hearing about people talking about how marijuana is legal in serveral states, especially since the other night, however state's rights are eroded to the point it is ultimately irrelevant because it is still a controlled substance at the federal level. I see it as being immensely harder to legalize a controlled substance of any kind at the federal level, especially if representatives from legalized states remain in the minority. Even if legalized states refuse to comply with the feds per the anti-comm
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Once enough states legalize, the federal legislature will find the courage to do likewise. It may even be the GOP who steps up - or at least there's been a lot of discussion from conservative bloggers about the prospect, it's just a matter of the elder social conservatives aging out of the GOP. (And, to be fair, SilkRoad does look like actual interstate trade).
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I suspect that most law enforcement officers are at state level or lower. If they're not busting pot growers and sellers, the Feds aren't really likely to take up the slack.
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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.
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It should also be noted that just because there is a demand for something, people attempting to meet it should not automatically be lauded and the fight against it should not simply be written off as 'but people want it!'.
Like many things, it has never been about 'stopping' it, measly trying to reduce things and the harm they do. That is not to say there is not a huge area for discussing what t
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<SadTrombone/>
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The US Feds are apparently working with the Gardaí of Dublin, and someone got caught with encrypted, but unlocked computers containing client CRM data. Now lots of dark sites all over the world are suddenly being exposed.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/b... [irishexaminer.com]
Not smart (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And not just some single stranger.
How many thousands of programmers/engineers are indirectly involved?
Can you trust the programmer of the website?
Can you trust the programmers that wrote the webserver code?
Can you trust the programmers that wrote your web browser?
Can you trust the programmers that wrote BASH?
Can you trust the programmers that wrot
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Not every interesting program property that one wishes to prove can be transformed into an example of the halting problem.
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Just because you can prove that there are *some* programs that can't be proven to halt, doesn't mean that there isn't a subset of programs that *can* be proven to halt.
We can build a language / compiler that rejects all programs that aren't provably correct. It might be difficult to get any useful work done, but it's not impossible.
Something like the rust programming language might be more useful in practice. You can still write completely unsafe code, while being careful to limit the impact of doing so.
Re:Not smart (Score:5, Insightful)
What arrests? From what I gathered last time I looked into it, people advertised drugs with their public PGP key. The actual transaction with payment and shipping address happened encrypted between the seller and the buyer, they got Slik Road 1.0 the site but not anything like a customer registry or order history. Of course there's the risk of dealing with the individual dealer but hey, it's not exactly like that's risk free in the real world either. From what I gather it was pretty much like closing down a torrent site, everybody just moves to another site and carry on like before. Now who'd operate an online drug sales portal that's a good question, you're getting waaay too much exposure compared to the rewards. But that's for the 0,1% who runs the site, not the 99,99% that use them.
Re:Not smart (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Not smart (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Whether in the drug market or the stock market, trading on margin has its risks.
Re:Not smart (Score:4, Informative)
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.
People wanting money? (Score:2)
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?
Money trail (Score:4, Interesting)
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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, but there are also others that are less ... currency-y.
Re:Money trail (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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You can use Tor all you like, your username is written in plain text right above your message!
We know who you are, Mr. Anonymous Coward!
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This message is also quite public, does that mean it's not anonymous? Just to prove the point I did it through Tor, so good luck trying to find my identity.
I don't know your identity, but the NSA very well could know your identity by now.
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There is no Evergreen Terrace in Wichita. But 34 Evergreen Terrace does exist in Springfield. Just a few blocks down from The Simpsons.
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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, but there are also others that are less ... currency-y.
Last I heard, the FBI very much wanted you to believe that Bitcoin is anonymous, because it's far easier to track than many other options.
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False, bitcoin system has entrances and egresses that can be tracked. And you are a very weak link in that system
I have said it before... (Score:3, Insightful)
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..
Re:I have said it before... (Score:4, Informative)
>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.
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Tor is only as secure as the user is. What good is it to use tor to conduct business, then hand out your gmail address, or a skype name, or post on non-tor-based forums with the same fucking username you use on your darknet presence? Or if you configure your web server incorrectly? Just because it's the "darknet", it doesn't protect the users from their own ignorance and stupidity.
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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..
Or 3- that the steps required to be completely anonymous on the internet are so demanding, and must be done without a single mistakes at any time ever, that no real human can obtain complete anonymity.
This guy made some pretty serious mistakes. We can all get our heads together and develop a plan on what he should have been doing instead. But actually following such a plan, to the letter, without ever making a mistake, seems nearly impossible.
Do they think they won't get caught? (Score:2)
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?
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What I don't understand is how someone could believe that they wouldn't get caught.
Sociopathy, "delusion of grandeur"...
Re:Do they think they won't get caught? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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They know they'll get caught, but still do it for two reasons: money and addictions.
The people run the site and sell the drugs for the money.
The people use the site and buy drugs because they're addicted, and no legal recourse exists
The Government God Forbids (Score:2)
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USC Title 26 subtitle E Ch51 has some restrictions on how you deal with your sobriety
Funny thing, the price went up (Score:2)
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.
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...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.
Just the beginning (Score:4, Interesting)
Just the beginning (Score:2)
Decentralized Marketplaces (Score:2)
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/... [github.com]
http://tip4commit.com/projects/728
Typical sloppy journalism (Score:2)
" 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.
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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.
Re:DON'T ABUSE TECHNOLOGY!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:DON'T ABUSE TECHNOLOGY!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
A complete lack of victims other than self does bloody goddam well make it not wrong, however.
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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?
Re:DON'T ABUSE TECHNOLOGY!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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>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.
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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.
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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
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"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.
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Which part of "private transactions between consenting adults" from the original post you did not understand?
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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 v
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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.
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Hint: Don't drink until you puke.
Re:The war on drugs (Score:4, Funny)
You can't win the WoD--the Jyhad is eternal.
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What? You nuts? Who the heck ever wanted to WIN a war on $generic_subject? Winning a war isn't profitable, waging it is!
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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 MI
Re:Silk Road 3.0... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [theguardian.com]
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Though short
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Is that near the Straits of Dover? Or the Straits of Gibraltar?
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Quite true, considering the shit you get today, you often pay Money for Nothing.
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The problem with 'let things sort themselves out', keep in mind there is no biological or neurological difference between those who end up in the gutter dieing and those who do not. It pretty much comes down to chance, chance that is often taken during the
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The same applies to alcohol. Your point being?
The chance that you take with illegal drugs is mostly due to the crap not being available from a reliable source. With this I don't want to say that the crap is healthy in any way (far from it), but to qualify for being a Schedule I, all it takes is having no therapeutic use and addiction potential.
So why isn't alcohol on that Schedule?
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If you get high on illegal substances, you're not buying legal substances you can get high on and evade tax. That's basically the reason.
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I guess analogue acts only work if you need to outlaw something that works but can't be patented.
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Yeah. I like totally need to take out a hit on somebody. *rim shot*
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Yes, it is possible. I don't know the position my country has on giving someone a hint how to start his way into organized crime, so I won't go into detail. :)
Re:Gentlemen, start your engines! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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You do a virtual crime, you do the virtual time.
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