Tracking the Mole Inside Silk Road 2.0 81
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.
Cirrusly? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The Internet works again! (Score:5, Informative)
This is veering offtopic, but, according to this [venturebeat.com] 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.
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blow their minds (Score:4, Funny)
Re:blow their minds (Score:4, Funny)
until one of your psyche's turned on you.
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Just fire them and give their position to another one that better represents your organization's values.
Bonus points for having the ousted personality publicly burn bridges on the way out the door.
Fire Me, Myself, and AC. Give the position to "I". After all, "I" always think I'm right...
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Re:blow their minds (Score:5, Funny)
If I ran a secret tor site, I wouldn't publicly post my security practices, especially on a non-Tor site that doesn't even use SSL. That's the most important security...
Oh, crap.
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Yup - this is what it boils down to.
For "secret" things related to any sort of distribution to succeed, you have to connect people who want things to people who can distribute them.
You need people on both end in order to facilitate distribution from one party to another.
If someone shows up looking for some skub but finds no one distributing skub, they'll leave. The way to prevent this is to ensure there are plenty of people on both sides. To ensure there are plenty of people on both sides, people invite m
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If I ran a secret tor site, I wouldn't register the servers with my email address based on my real name.
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Re: blow their minds (Score:3)
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Nice reference.
it always surprises me that people actively trying to avoid detection by law enforcement do so many dumb things.
Re:blow their minds (Score:5, Funny)
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Wish I had mod points for "hexth ass."
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"Don't hexth ass six things, whole ass one thing." - Abraham Lincoln
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Thats why traditional structures like family, extended family, village, tribe, cult, faith region or other aspects that can be understood.
Lucky grab (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Lucky grab (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think they took down the criminal mastermind?
Remember this is the government we recently learned abducted a German citizen, beat him, chained him in the Salt Pit where he was rectally violated, only to learn they'd snatched a vacationing car salesman who happened to have the same common Arabic name as the guy they actually wanted. It was like kidnapping and anally raping "John Smiths" until you found the one you wanted.
Re:Lucky grab (Score:4, Insightful)
What it has in common is that the government isn't infallible. It should have to prove its case before it anally rapes anyone.
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Warrantless anal rape: The scourge of the 21st century.
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Yes, everyone is surprised when they learn about government and buttseccs. From what I understand, a new bill about that is going up for general consideration soon.
The Government Operational Amendment for Transfer of Sensitive Exchanges
Or, GOATSE.
This amendment allows government unprecedented leeway to perform "exchanges" that they consider to be of a "Sensitive" nature however and whenever and with whoever they wish.
Naturally, anything related to BUTTSECCS, or the Bureau for Universal Totalitarianism, Terr
Re:Lucky grab (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I think he is saying we can trust them about as far as we can throw a battleship.
Certainly is evidence that the people in charge, up to the highest levels, don't seem bound by any sense of duty to their own laws, or really any sense of justice. I mean, bad enough they broke the law and tortured people, but, the wrong people? And the only response was to cover it up? Now....now we are to take their statements on other issues at face value?
Thing is, it gets worst. We have the DEA having openly claimed in the past that they believe Parallel construction is perfectly acceptible practice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
Based on that alone ANY claim they make as to the investigation and ESPECIALLY to where information was obtained is suspect....they have admitted openly they will fabricate the origin of information, and go so far as to present that fabrication to prosecution and the courts.
Seeing this information so widely disseminated (Score:1, Troll)
Makes me want to support parallel construction. Seeing this forced out into the public just serves as a howto of things to avoid for the next silk road.
Re:Seeing this information so widely disseminated (Score:5, Funny)
Seeing this just serves to remind me that criminals are dumb.
Re:Seeing this information so widely disseminated (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Seeing this information so widely disseminated (Score:4, Insightful)
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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
& if crimils wanted to work hard, they'd get a (Score:1)
Securing a criminal enterprise from infiltration or detection by the FBI is a lot of hard work. Criminals don't want to work hard - if they wanted to work hard for their money, they'd just get a job.
The fact that criminals are basically lazy makes life a lot easier for law enforcement and for those of us in security. As an example, I can almost instantly spot when a server has a root kit due to one specific thing the bad guys are aways too lazy to do.
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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.
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Sure I know about the smart criminals. They typically work on Wall Street.
Re:Seeing this information so widely disseminated (Score:5, Funny)
> criminals are dumb
Indeed, They put faith in Cirrus after all the warnings about not trusting the Cloud.
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Well played.
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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.
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What this shows me is that there's just no way to keep a secret if other people are involved.
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For all we know, the speculation and guesses in the article are complete misses.
There's nothing even approaching evidence in the Vice article.
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Sure there is - don't you remember the old adage?
"Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead."
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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".
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Sure, they will just look under C for Cirrus in the phonebook.
Re: Nature of the beast (Score:1)
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.
Old fashioned detective work (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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And how do you think they knew where to put a mole in the first place? They needed to insert him into the operation so they could do their parallel construction of evidence.
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And how do you think they knew where to put a mole in the first place?
It was the most notorious and publicized narcotics marketplace in the world, open to all comers. I don't think it took much work to figure out that's where they needed to put the mole.
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Meanwhile, as Silk Road 2.0 was taken down, another 10 tons of illegal narcotics slipped through a shipping port into the US!
Yes. Regardless how I feel about drugs, this is exactly how we should be curtailling those nasty things. Taking down small fry digital black markets. Much easier that way, than say, stopping an actual internation drug cartel with the military. More high profile too!
Great job, FBI (Score:1)
Kudos to the quiet agent.
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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?"
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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."
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No, this is why we have things like guns.
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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.
No, it wasn't Cirrus... (Score:5, Funny)
...it was his brother, Achenar. He's demented, he is guilty!
antilop.cc??? (Score:2)
These guys should give credit to lamoustache. See http://antilop.cc/sr/