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Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

politie.nl

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Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#51

Post by kazagistar »

mfoy_ wrote: post #45
delegate wrote: post #23

> Some 10,000 foreign addresses of Hansa Market buyers were passed on to Europol. That's really bad, because not all countries are Holland, which is famous for its 'relaxed' attitude towards drugs in general, so some users might have their lives turned around by this - followed, arrested, jailed, extorted, etc.

To be fair... If you commit a crime, you have to expect there's a risk of being caught and punished. So how is this "really bad", except from the POV of the users who may face repercussions?

When laws are bad, its bad when people face the repercussions of those laws.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#52

Post by the_af »

dankent wrote: post #8
aqme28 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you would construct a switch that couldnt be bypassed by the police once they have full access to the servers.

Even if the primary service itself was compromised, it would be possible to have an automated dead man's switch running on an alternative service that would alert the world that you were being held incommunicado. Of course, failing to disclose the switch to the authorities and thus allowing it to trigger could be considered a violation of a court order and lead to punishment.

> Of course, failing to disclose the switch to the authorities and thus allowing it to trigger could be considered a violation of a court order and lead to punishment.

Black market operators are unlikely to be willing to take this risk for the sake of their customers, but political activists/dissidents might for the sake of their audience.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#53

Post by mfoy_ »

hkon wrote: post #41
thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it doesn't look good when you're arrested on suspicion of running Hansa and next morning Hansa has a big banner saying "the admin hasn't checked in, we think something is wrong".

The best point of them all.

"the alleged admin hasn't checked in"

X'D

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#54

Post by olegkikin »

RutZap wrote: post #37

I think this is brilliant. A very efficient way of policing and removing a lot of drugs from the market without spending a lot of public money and wasting time on the streets. Also the darknet is great as it reduces the violence associated with drug crime, by taking the drugs off the streets and into the legitimate courier business. You have to love technology sometimes.

How does that reduce the violence? Now the buyers have to go to the streets to get their drugs.

Prohibition doesn't work. It creates much more violence than it solves.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#55

Post by snissn »

theEXTORTCIST wrote: post #43
mschwar99 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I remember poking around at Hansa that's not true. Each vendor / user had a public key associated with their account. All text communication through the website was supposed to be with GPG encrypted text secured by private keys unavailable to website. So law enforcement has lots of encrypted text along with some clear text from users not informed enough to follow any kind of opsec.

Law enforcement could have easily MITM'd the PGP. They replace the public key of a vendor with their own public key (on the vendors's page, without the vendor's/buyer's knowledge), then the buyer address gets encrypted with that public key. Then they decrypt and resend the message using the sellers original public key. I really wonder if this happened at all

Then users looking at their accounts from other logins would see the wrong public key and know something was wrong. Also wonder if that happened at all

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#56

Post by princeb »

TillE wrote: post #28
deanclatworthy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an over engineered solution, and I never understood the value of these warrant canaries etc. In the right set of circumstances you would be compelled to hand over any keys (with their passphrase) in an investigation like this, and failure to do so would result in harsher penalties. People are the weak link here.

This is fanciful. It assumes both extreme competence and legal powers to compel just about anything, neither of which generally exist. You can often be forced to unlock encrypted data as part of evidence gathering, but there's no legal power to make you conduct arbitrary processes which only exist in your head.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/justice-naps-man...

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#57

Post by kazagistar »

bahjoite wrote: post #16
r721 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This involved taking covert control of Hansa under Dutch judicial authority a month ago, which allowed Dutch police to monitor the activity of users without their knowledge, and then shutting down AlphaBay during the same period. It meant the Dutch police could identify and disrupt the regular criminal activity on Hansa but then also sweep up all those new users displaced from AlphaBay who were looking for a new tra…

So the banner must have been placed there after the server was seized. Keeping the server running long enough to gather evidence of the actions of their high-value targets was probably a higher priority than sweeping-up as many customers as possible.

Possibly there are laws related to entrapment? Allowing new user signups on a police controlled website might cross the line, where allowing existing users to finish their deals might not?

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#58

Post by wybiral »

atemerev wrote: post #34
ch8230 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems fair to lump in with the rest since it was in fact an illegal market place.

Not everything that is illegal is wrong. E.g. being gay is illegal in many places.

True. It sounds like the site was mostly dealing in drugs, which for small time dealers I feel is a waste of time to prosecute... But the problem is that larger organized criminals often get their funds to do worse things from the drug market.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#60

Post by nailer »

squegles wrote: post #21
5_minutes wrote: post #10

The clever thing is that they took it over and for one month monitored it without the users knowing. Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies. That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement.

If users were smart they would have PGP encrypted their address with the seller's public key.

If law enforcement were smart the "seller's" public key would be part of a keypair made by LEOs.
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