US Government Lurked On Silk Road For Over a Year 129
angry tapir writes "In order to build a case against the notorious Silk Road underground marketplace, a team of U.S. law enforcement agencies spent well over a year casing the site: buying drugs, exchanging Bitcoins, visiting forums and even posing as a vendor, although they did stop short of selling any illicit goods. From March 2012 until September 2013, Federal agents closely tracked the site, making over 50 drug purchases, according to Jared DerYeghiayan, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security who was part of a special investigation unit looking into the site.
Go get em... (Score:5, Funny)
Now, kindly pay your taxes, drink a case of beast and watch the football game. Thank you!
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Who dat on Silk Road (Score:5, Funny)
And that's just one agency! (Score:5, Funny)
For example, in the US, I could imagine there were buyers from DEA, FBI, some DHS agencies, some DoD agencies, maybe even NYPD (heck, NYPD even has a branch in London, Israel, and Hamburg [countercurrentnews.com] ) -- and that's just one country. Multiply by a couple hundred countries, and that really might have been a significant fraction of the market.
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It wouldn't be surprising. There's suggestion that LEO/regulatory crawl-bots make up a lot (possibly most) of child-porn TOR traffic.
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So what you're saying is the 4chan Party Van isn't really coming to my house?!
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Bitcoins - Good Enough for Government Work! (Score:2)
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Parts of the US government hold that Bitcoin is property, namely the IRS. However, the government certainly counts it as money with regard to money laundering - just ask Charlie Shrem.
Laundering can be done with any tangible asset, from cash to diamonds to Bitcoin. That's hardly news and doesn't suggest the Government considers Bitcoin to be a currency. Bitcoin can be considered a currency when it's legal tender for all debts, public and private. Until then it's merely an asset. The fact that some people are willing to trade it for goods and services does not make it a currency. You could exchange everything from beer to securities for goods and services. Maybe I'll start charging
Re:Bitcoins - Good Enough for Government Work! (Score:5, Informative)
Legal tender has a very specific and limited meaning relating to payment of debts - if you owe a debt, then an offer of legal tender to settle it cannot be refused. Not being legal tender is not a barrier to something being used in commerce, even by the government. If both parties agree, they can use whatever payment system they want (as long as the IRS is kept happy by declaring a US$ equivalent where required).
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oil for food. Et cetera.
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oh, you mean the ones that don't get my business?
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Slashdot messing up their UI? (Score:5, Informative)
Has someone been tweaking the Slashdot CSS? Because you've gone and fucked things up.
The Newer/Older buttons on the front page shrank, so the background style doesn't cover all of the text. Also, the search bar in the header (site-wide) shrunk in height and is too small to display the text typed into it. In the screenshot I have "search term here" entered into the input. Screenshot 1 [imgur.com]
There's a huge empty white block on the left side of each article page now. Screenshot 2 [imgur.com]
The post/reply comment page now has a semi-visible "Archived Discussion" button, on every article, even brand new ones. Screenshot 3 [imgur.com]
All in Firefox 34, Windows 7.
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Have you seen how shitty it looks on a mobile device? Firefox or Chrome on android, neither have pinch-to-zoom, and the sad thing is that's more the browser manufacturers' fault than Slashdot's.
Re:Slashdot messing up their UI? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it becomes beta only, I'll become soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org] only.
Re:Slashdot messing up their UI? (Score:4, Informative)
They'll follow this course of action now -- subtle stuff.
Back in 2006 they ran a CSS redesign contest. Slashdot users overwhelmingly preferred Peter Lada's redesign:
http://web.archive.org/web/201... [archive.org]
They picked a mobile-ready, stripped down design that left a lot to be desired. Then the beta fiasco with the Dice purchase ("fuck you, get ready to have this shoved down your throat for the sake of pointless redesign" ).
To avoid a hue and cry, they'll be making unannounced changes like this. Why? Because fuck the slashdot community, that's why.
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The un-anti-aliased text, it burns! :-)
The reply page seems to have shrunk by about 50% horizontally too for some reason. Now half the screen of my widescreen monitor is just an empty space.
its a drug bust (Score:3, Insightful)
For everyone who is about to object: what do you think a drug bust looks like? They posed as drugs consumers/dealers and busted the parties buying/selling. This seems like what my taxpayer dollars should go towards: stomping out illegal activity where it is prevalent.
Re:its a drug bust (Score:5, Insightful)
For everyone who is about to object: what do you think a drug bust looks like? They posed as drugs consumers/dealers and busted the parties buying/selling. This seems like what my taxpayer dollars should go towards: stomping out illegal activity where it is prevalent.
Not only is it a complete waste of time and ruins people's lives, it is a fucking waste of my tax dollars. Oh, but they sure are about to win this stupid fucking drug war.
Next you think they'll try to outlaw stupidity, thereby breaking logic once and for all.
Re:its a drug bust (Score:5, Insightful)
I know some people probably can't handle it, but the only lives I know that have been ruined have been due to the police action against them and nothing to do with the pot smoking they did.
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You mean people that were too stupid to either just follow the law or keep the activity hidden? Yeah, that's a fucking shame, how exactly is that the government's fault? You don't have the right to snort random things because you want to, and certainly not expect everybody else to pick up the tab because you're so fucking pathetic that you need drugs to forget about it.
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Well, not many people are close acquaintances of the meth and crack heads on the street. At least, not after they become like that. For weed you at least have some low key folks who aren't so bad.
It's not like you have to look hard to find drug addicts who are out committing crimes because they can't hold a job and have no money.
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Heh, laughable - they were caught doing something illegal and that ruined their lives, but its somehow the polices fault that being caught ruined their lives.
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Never said it was the polices fault. It's the fault of the Laws and the punishment that doesn't fit a victim-less dogmatic crime.
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Not only is it a complete waste of time and ruins people's lives
Because crack and illegal abuse of prescription drugs also ruin people's lives.
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Yes, but whose lives are ruined? The lives of the people who choose to take such drugs.
Plenty of people's lives are runing by gambling and alcohol, yet we know that banning these vices leads to worse problems than regulating them.
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Yes, but whose lives are ruined? The lives of the people who choose to take such drugs.
My guess is you haven't had to deal with a family member who is permanently paralyzed on one side from several strokes during heart surgery which was needed after decades of doing crack and abusing prescription drugs, who will never get better and will die a premature death.
linky [heart.org]
How does cocaine affect the heart?
Cocaine use kills over 15,000 people each year in the United States due to overuse or related accidents. Additionally, cocaine use can cause damage to the heart, which leads to many more deaths each year. Several cardiovascular complications are closely related to cocaine use. They include chest pain syndromes, heart attacks, heart failure, strokes, aortic dissection, and fatal and nonfatal arrhythmias.
Others include:
myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle)
endocarditis (inflammation of the inner lining of the heart)
pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs)
vascular thrombosis (blood clots in blood vessels)
dilated cardiomyopathy (an enlarged heart)
Some of these potentially fatal complications can occur in a first-time user. Older people with abnormal coronary arteries and diseased blood vessels in the brain are at even greater risk.
Today law enforcement agencies and the medical community recognize cocaine as one of the most dangerous illicit drugs in common use. Because it's increasingly popular and easily bought, the number of cocaine-related cardiovascular disabilities and deaths may be expected to rise. Furthermore, smoking crack cocaine, which is cheaper, more potent and widely available, will lead to even more strokes and heart attacks in younger people not normally "at risk."
It's going to cost taxpayers at least $70k a year (on top of the 6-figure sum already spent last year for quintuple bypass, physiotherapy to try to restore function, etc) because she needs 24/7 care in an institutional setting a
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And now respond:
1. The drugs taken were already illegal. Your personal experience shows that the laws against such drugs don't work.
2. You ignored my point that we have historical data that banning personal vices leads to more hardship, not less.
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Sure. I know some people whose lives were seriously harmed because a loved one was an alcoholic, also (to be clear, I'm talking about more than one alcoholic also). Thousands of people each year die in the US because of drunk driving. Alcohol is still legal. Tobacco kills a whole lot of people and is still legal. From what I've read about pot (which is doubtless biased and unreliable) it's not as bad as alcohol (but might be as bad as tobacco).
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That doesn't change the facts. We don't need yet another way for people to ruin both their lives and the lives of those around them, and cost up to a million or more in taxpayers money before they "shuck their mortal coil."
Your argument is as persuasive as the speeder who says he shouldn't be ticketed because other speeders were going even faster.
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What I don't understand is what Congress should have to do with illegal drugs. Banning alcohol took a Constitutional amendment. Making marijuana a Schedule I drug, considered more harmful than morphine, was a Congressional act.
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Yeah, rare offenses like the NSA head-honcho lying to congress 3 times don't count. Those 30 (?) Goldman-Sachs employees who repeatedly falsified the value of the CDOs they insured before defaults occurred, aren't important. Let's go after the the thousands of college kids and soccer mums for staying home and relaxing via some marijuana. The USA tried that with alcohol and eventually admitted defeat. After some 80 years of illegality, US states are de-criminalizing marijuana consumption.
Many countries h
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For everyone who is about to object: what do you think a drug bust looks like? They posed as drugs consumers/dealers and busted the parties buying/selling. This seems like what my taxpayer dollars should go towards: stomping out illegal activity where it is prevalent.
Surely catching big white collar crime and corrupt politicians should be prioritized over small quantity drug issues.
But of course stomping out truly significant criminal activity is beyond the scope or capabilities of the LEOs that work for those same corrupt politicians, who in turn are owned by those big white collar criminals.
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Also, their methods (as far as this goes...the method by which they exposed the server's location is still shrouded in mystery) are fine. People are just butt-hurt about the crime they're investigating.
I think drugs should be legal (and regulated). But until they are...this is just good police work. You want the cops to stop doing this? Change the drug laws.
the thing i never understood was (Score:2)
why did people ever trust tor?
tor was built by the us navy for dissidents and spies. this is no deep secret
and the slightest strategic thought makes one understand it should be possible for an entity like the us govt to control or track enough exit nodes to mostly have a handle on most tor traffic
how would anyone with a basic understanding of networking not see?
now people are building their own tor-like services. ok, i see the innate untraceability therein (until govts make a concerted sustained effort to p
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The thing i never understood was
how your post didn't end with
Burma shave
What exactly is a burma shave anyway? Is that anything like a brazilian wax? Really want to know cuz it's often repeated but never defined.
It's an old Troll Tuesday tradition. It's a long story.
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it's an old brushless shaving cream from the States, they had some whacky idea that roadside advertising (a distant ancestor of the IED) would distract drivers frm their primary purpose which is to KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE FUCKING ROAD and leave them with a hankering to spread non-foaming spoo on their faces before blade grooming.
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I use a Philips Nivea Coolskin and did it work?
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So in all your big spiel, you either think that the government is still covering up their "exploit" of tor, or you are just spreading FUD.
Tor was taken down do to a social slip and not anything technical.
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So in all your big spiel, you either think that the government is still covering up their "exploit" of tor, or you are just spreading FUD.
Tor was taken down do to a social slip and not anything technical.
The TOr project openly acknowledges they are vulnerable to timing attacks by an entity that an view all of the network or at least a large segment of it. The US government is definitely such a entity. That isnt even remotely controversial. Thats probably why the Tor project itself warns you not to depend on Tor if you truly need strong anonymity.
Why would they need an "exploit" when they easily have the resources to take advantage of a fundamental weakness in the Tor design? Methinks your "anti-tinfoil-
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I read in a Tor forum that it was Silkroad that was taken down (not Tor) and it was indeed due to a social slip, the owner logging in to IRC WITHOUT the protection of Tor, that caused him to get busted.
True, hard drugs and kiddie porn are to be dealt with. Fine. Go get 'em Barney Fife!
But what troubles me is that with all the advances in computer science, it's still impossible to create a truly brick-wall secure network where people can be truly anonymous. Is it even possible? It seems so, at least theoreti
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That would in theory contain any more direct ip requests sent from any site or network.
Re "how would anyone with a basic understanding of networking not see?"
funded by the US government (16, 2014)
http://pando.com/2014/07/16/to... [pando.com]
The parallel construction that still seems to hold up is the sending of a page or code to show the real ip t
Your Tax Dollars At Work (Score:5, Interesting)
So how many millions of dollars did this "team of U.S. law enforcement agencies" spend in a whole year of fattening themselves up at the taxpayer's expense?
And what did they accomplish? They knocked Silk Road off the net for a few months, and in so doing helped it improve its security for next time. Now it's up and running again, making scads of money for the operators, and thumbing its nose at the U.S.
Oh, well, at least long-suffering taxpayers can happily contemplate about all the boats, cottages and retirement homes they've bought for Norbert the Nark and his Homeland Security buddies.
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And what did they accomplish? They knocked Silk Road off the net for a few months, and in so doing helped it improve its security for next time.
What is your point?
Are you suggesting we just ignore the black market?
That we should simply pretend it doesn't exist, until its so mainstream that even the local coffeeshop will let you pay for your espresso and avoid paying taxes?
You do have a supportable case that drugs shouldn't be a black market product in the first place. But that's hardly a justification to m
Re:Your Tax Dollars At Work (Score:5, Insightful)
What about murder for hire? Money laundering? Child porn? Slave trafficking? ...
Unlike recreational drug use, those things cannot be done responsibily and they always have victims. That's why they should remain illegal, because they do demonstrable material harm to real people, not merely because they're frowned upon by busybodies, nanny states, private prison industries, and other control freaks whose fevered egos require them to try (and fail) to dictate how other people will live.
I seriously and rightly question the intellectual honesty of anyone who would deliberately conflate such things. A willful effort to misrepresent one issue by grouping it with much worse issues can be the only motive there. This is, in fact, a good example characterizing the pro-drug-prohibition rhetoric that has expanded the police state and caused over 60% of all prisoners to be there because of nonviolent drug offenses at tremendous monetary and social cost to us all.
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There's nothing dishonest about conflating the enforcement of drug laws vis-a-vis the enforcement of laws against violent crime.
Illicit drug trade and murder-for-hire have something in common: they're both illegal. And it's the job of the cops to investigate and arrest people who engage in those activities. The last thing I want is cops deciding which laws they are and are not going to enforce. Who they will and will not bust.* That's not a nation of laws. That's a nation of men. No thank you.
If you want th
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Unlike recreational drug use, those things cannot be done responsibily and they always have victims.
Ok.
I seriously and rightly question the intellectual honesty of anyone who would deliberately conflate such things.
I didn't conflate anything.
The silk road is a black market for ALL of those things. It is therefore the police's job to shut down the MARKET itself; which is what they (albeit briefly did).
And the further and deeper underground it goes the better. One will never eliminate a black market entirely
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You proved your opinion is worthless, and you know exactly how. So I'll repeat myself: fuck off. You're a shill, probably paid by some government enforcement agency one way or another.
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Money laundering shouldn't be illegal because of the 4th Amendment/5th Amendments.
It's only due to presumed guilt that such an absurd concept even exists. It's partially drug dealers fault for dealing in cash instead of gold. If drug dealers only accepted gold coins as payment, the US Government would have a hard time going after them for money laundering.
Murder for hire gets blurry around assassination markets vs Life Insurance.
Nobody is arguing that shutting down child porn and slavery is bad. They are gr
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Thanks for an interesting perspective on this.
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The problem with keeping drugs illegal is that there are so many customers who want to buy drugs that you end up with a huge thriving black market in which the murderers, child porn, slavers etc can easily hide. It's a lot harder to catch the dangerous part of the black market when a large fraction of the country is using the black market for non-dangerous things.
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I am not arguing that drugs -should- be illegal. Frankly, as I said in my post, I agree they largely should not be illegal.
The silk road however isn't going to disappear with the legalization of more recreational drugs.
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The number of people involved with silk road and thus the overall viability and impact of silk road would be severely damaged without the recreational drug market.
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Thus is the "war on drugs". Same old story, just new actors. It always amazes me how the US government THOUGHT it learned its lesson that with alcohol that prohibition doesn't work. But no, they just prohibited other substances and ended up with the same problems (organized crime).
"I am invincible!" (Score:2)
And what did they accomplish? They knocked Silk Road off the net for a few months, and in so doing helped it improve its security for next time.
There is no tech and no system that can protect a geek from his own inflated ego. The problem isn't getting a geek to talk, the problem is getting him to shut up.
No Surprise (Score:1)
Anyone who is surprised by this is an idiot.
Over 50 drug purchases. (Score:2)
Last I've heard, they can arrest and charge with a single transaction without any problem, so why so bloody many for this?
Maybe it was good shit and they wanted to stock up, especially since they knew other agents would steal 90% of it from the evidence storage.
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Last I've heard, they can arrest and charge with a single transaction without any problem, so why so bloody many for this?
Police do that to establish a pattern of ongoing criminal activity and counter the "it was a one time thing" defense.
Good segway to unsupported police bashing.
Re: Over 50 drug purchases. (Score:2, Interesting)
Most police bashing is quite well supported. Take for example the enormous waste of time and money this represents, while as many others have pointed out, actual crimes with actual victims are not dealt with. Of course, dealing with actual criminals is HARD and harassing people whose crime has no victim is so much easier and yet still headline grabbing.
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That isn't valid police bashing. When police do what they are ordered to do by lawful superiors, and do it professionally, they're doing what they should. Police bashing should be reserved for unprofessional and illegal police behavior.
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Maybe it was good shit and they wanted to stock up, especially since they knew other agents would steal 90% of it from the evidence storage.
That is what I call police bashing. Care to quote any actual evidence that agent theft of drugs is anywhere near 90% or is that an assumption based on your opinion?
Free Keen and Jury Nullification (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been following the trial with some interest.
The Free Keene [freekeene.com] group went down (from NH to NYC) to protest the trial and hand out Jury Nullification pamphlets, for which they were threatened [freekeene.com] by the judge.
The government is using threats to prevent jury nullification information from getting to potential jurors. Doesn't seem fair to me, but then the constitution is probably written in some strange dialect of English where the meaning is something different to a lawyer.
It occurs to me that this is one way we can have an effect on government in addition to the vote. By informing people about jury nullification, we can encourage juries to ignore unfair laws.
Re:Free Keen and Jury Nullification (Score:4, Interesting)
Substitute Supreme Court for Humpty Dumpty:
Result (Score:1)
The federal government were very pleased with the quality of their purchases and 9/10 would recommend them to a friend. A+
jeez (Score:2)
for all the sophistication, you'd think the silk road would have asked if you are a cop during registration. you know they have to say "yes" if they are.
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actually, no they don't.
Local middle school? (Score:2)
Big deal. 30 years ago my kids in middle school could get anything you can imagine right there at school. That hasn't changed at all, in spite of suspending girls for having Midol in their backpacks. More people are using drugs (including alcohol and tobacco - it's the money, stupid!) than ever before. Considering the scandals that are uncovered from time to time about the government using drug running itself to further its own interests it's pretty obvious that this is just one of the more blatant attempts
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us government additional actions (Score:1)
They also bought cypress hill records,bean bags, blacklights and hendrix posters...because reasons
In other words... (Score:1)
"law enforcement agencies spent well over a year casing the site: buying drugs"
In other words, they were committing the same crimes. Oh wait, that's right, laws don't apply to our own government. They only apply to us. Silly me.