111–120 of 381 posts
So, basically, they took down a minor competitor to the bigger drug trafficking businesses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain why and how you think these are different?
They're pretty obviously different. One is a characteristic of a person, and one is an action that can be taken by a person.
And until those countries figure out mind control it's just going to be oppression of their actions.
Now that we've cleared that up, I still think laws against "acting" gay are wrong (within the same framework that it's legal to "act" heterosexual).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everything that is illegal is wrong. E.g. being gay is illegal in many places.
>being gay is illegal in many places. Is that true? Or is it the behavior that's illegal?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work. It's possible they'll go "legit" like the mob did after prohibition and get into the Casino business, but it's also possible they'll switch to human trafficking or gun running or some other harmful trade. This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs bu…
Right, we need to make sure that selling drugs continues to be a viable black market business model.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That's not how entrapment works. Entrapment requires the cops to push someone into doing something they wouldn't otherwise have done. Cops buying drugs from a dealer isn't entrapment, but repeatedly begging someone to sell you some drugs after they initially say no would be.
I would love to know how they got caught. There is probably something to learn about opsec from this. 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 "p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees? I'm not saying violence is not a part of these kinds of crimes, but I don't think the purpose of their participation is just to enable other, more serious crimes. That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough pe…
> it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees No. I'm just saying that the people upstream manufacturing massive quantities of meth and heroin probably aren't the kinds of organizations that you want to be making that kind of money.
Dream Market is still up since Nov 2013. (1 year older than even AlphaBay) Perhaps they're the ones that are actually based in Russia ;P You seriously have to be a moron to host your DNM in Canada or NL though, NL LE especially has many years of experience and millions worth of equipment for these investigations. Pick a place where they're less likely to have advanced DMA equipment handy! Even better though, is to ch…
It leads one to wonder... what is the "best" place to host servers if you're going to run a darkweb market? Seems like you'd want a place where the government/police/spooks aren't as tech savvy and sophisticated, and perhaps somewhere where the government isn't on the best terms with traditional Western powers. Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Maybe some smaller African nations? Botsw…
All of the Dark Net drug website busts I have seen over the last few years are because of poor coding, poor architecture, poor security and even worse OPSEC. The people who run these sites are not professionals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>being gay is illegal in many places. Is that true? Or is it the behavior that's illegal?
...It's legal to think about murder as long as you don't behave that way. That doesn't mean murder is legal. Is there a reason for the distinction?
Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime. This is in the US, but I would be quite surprised if various other countries did not have similar statutes.
More generally, there are all sorts of laws out there that effectively criminalize thoughtcrime rather than behavior. Of course behavior might be needed for anyone to _discover_ the thoughtcrime.
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
Only send messages to vendors with known "trusted" keys and don't trust new keys? So in general, use a trusted channel for key exchange separate from the communication channel so that a MITM needs to control both channels?