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I visited Hansa a few days ago and the first thing I noticed was a banner that read something like:- "New registrations are disabled because of high demand caused by the exodus from AlphaBay"
> 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.
It would be interesting to compare damages caused by the release of this information versus damages caused by the production, sale, and usage of the drugs themselves.
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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.
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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?
Everybody has the right to expect a fair and reasonable treatment and punishment. If that can't be guaranteed it might be imperative to not share the identity, because sharing it would imply another injustice without righting any other.
The paranoid side of me says Tor is unsafe (due to whatever - the authorities having backdoors on most hosting services, on your PC, due to the encryption being cracked by some unknown breakthrough or due to 90% of entry nodes being controlled by NSA). And NSA and FBI and co just have hundreds of people working on "parallel construction" of evidence.
Of course, a blunder by the operators is much more likely...
Services like these give Tor and related projects a bad name. Taking down illegal market places is part of the police's job and this is definitely a success story. The article is lacking in details a bit, but it seems they've taken it down using regular old police work as they mention an "undercover operation". This proves once more that the weakening of security for everybody is not needed to catch criminals.
You mean they used parallel construction to make it seem like they used "regular old police work"
The question is how to put them in a cell to begin with, but I don't think that it requires some super high tech or shady wiretapping. The publicly known lawful interception laws are most likely good enough for finding almost anyone accessing a know site.
As the current situation is in regards to islamistic terrorism in Europe, I really expect the law to be used to its full extent.
Unfortunately, the harsh stand on drugs play both criminal organizations and islamists in hand as they can make good money on even relatively harmless drugs. I'd prefer a legalization and regulation on those, in order to decapitate the black market.
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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?
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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.
Besides, it's possible that many of the users live in countries where _buying_ drugs isn't a crime, or where circumstantial evidence like this isn't enough to warrant opening an investigation. So it's possible that most of these users won't even face those repercussions.
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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.
good argument for legalisation....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think there's also value in defining what people mean by 'small time dealer' in this context. To me, that connotes someone selling a bit of pot to their friends so they can smoke for free or something. People who ship misc. substances internationally and in some cases earn six figures plus annually don't fit that definition in my eyes.