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Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

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Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#261

Post by freeflight »

rhizome wrote: post #220
freeflight wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's also the case. Big organized crime groups often have access to exactly the kind of logistics required to manufacture and smuggle drugs across large distances. They have the muscle to stay competitive in a market where there is no state authority to give you guarantees on anything. This isn't an outrageous claim at all, rather it's a well-known fact: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Stu…

Most drug dealers are not "big organized groups." I don't know from Hansa, but I'm betting a big organized group is not likely to use them as a single point of failure.

Of course, it wouldn't have been their only market, but it's among them. Even something ostensibly harmless as cannabis can finance quite questionable people and groups.

A while ago Arte France released a series titled "Cannabis", where the plot revolves around a shipment of Morrocan hashish lost on the Mediterranean sea, with the consequences playing out all over Europe. And while it's a fictional plot, it still paints a somewhat accurate picture how a lot of this business goes down.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#262

Post by gorkonsine »

msla wrote: post #229
valuearb wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then legalize drugs so they can't make that kind of money.

But until that happens, don't buy from big drug sellers. In a broader sense: We can acknowledge that there's an underlying problem, and how to fix it, while at the same time being willing to advocate a temporary fix until the underlying problem actually is fixed. Think of it like polyfill: The underlying problem is that old browsers exist, but we can't boil the ocean and make everyone upgrade, so we use polyfills to…

These laws don't usually get changed until people violate them en masse, showing utter disrespect and contempt for the laws.

Remember Prohibition? That wasn't lifted because people wrote to their Congresspeople, but otherwise respected the law and followed it. It was lifted because it was widely disrespected, and a huge black market for alcohol was created, along with a lot of brutal violence. Same goes for civil rights for black people in the 1960s. Same goes for civil rights for gay people (like legalizing gay sex, previously criminalized). People committed the crimes and got caught, it went through the justice system somehow, and either a law was passed or the Supreme Court rule on it. It took a Supreme Court case to nullify the anti-gay-sex laws when some people in Texas were prosecuted for it and it got appealed up to the supremes as a privacy/freedom issue.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#263

Post by gorkonsine »

7952 wrote: post #203
jimmyk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws against inherent characteristics seem to me at least to be worse than laws which ban behavior. Conflating the two in order to make some particular law sound worse seems sort of dishonest to me.

Perhaps. But within the context of gay rights it is the government that behaved improperly. Society bundled behaviour and innate characteristics into a single thing. That was wrong, and it is important to highlight that. Of course in a post homophobic world the distinction is rather irrelevant. It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours. Why would it matter either…

There's still plenty of conservative people who believe the being gay is a personal choice, or perhaps something caused by your upbringing/environment, not something you're born with.

Of course, this has as much veracity as the idea that the Earth is flat or that the Sun and planets revolve around it, but there's a lot of people who believe it.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#264

Post by ATsch »

CM30 wrote: post #247
burger_moon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really interesting question. Knowing how they got access to such an old email from an external source.

Perhaps it's from someone they were investigating for other crimes. I mean, it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that law enforcement were going after say, a drug dealer who was using the site to sell goods, and found the welcome email from the platform he or she was using in their inbox. That seems like one plausible possibility.

This is my pet theory. A seller was busted and the emails were siezed. Seems like the most likely possibility.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#265

Post by blawson »

jandrese wrote: post #90
xwvvvvwx wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good argument for legalisation....

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…

Or selling avocados. People with guns who are used to power are not just going to go home because the lucrative product du-jour is legal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bloody-struggle-erupts-over-avo...

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#266

Post by rothbardrand »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #256
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cause-and-effect is backwards. They don't sell drugs so they can kill lots of people. They kill lots of people so they can sell drugs. Either way, there's a lot of violence happening directly because of drug cartels, foreign and domestic.

Great, legalize drugs and that all goes away.

For an example of this, check out Portugal that legalized and had great success.

I wonder if anyone can point to place where drugs are legalized and violence increased? Where addiction increased?

Seems absurd, yet people don't think the drug war is absurd-- they don't immediately see this takeover of Hanza as the government illegally operating a black market for weeks and thus committing massive crime, and they don't see the shutdown of the market as a further crime violating the rights of the sellers to sell something that morally and practically their buyers should be able to buy (when it comes to drugs anyway)

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#267

Post by rothbardrand »

nfbush wrote: post #99
captainmuon wrote: post #65

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…

Every time a market has been taken down it's been due to OPSEC failure and other information leaks (e.g. Silk Road captcha IP leak, DPR's advertising of market being linked to his personal email address). AlphaBay Which got taken down first in this operation was due to a personal email being included in the header of the welcome email sent out to new users 3 years ago [1] [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release…

These opsec failures that you're talking about are very easy to find in the process of parallel construction.

So that these are the stated reasons is no indication that they are the real reasons.

They are, in fact, so very, very convenient the they smell like parallel construction to me.

Might not be, but they certainly aren't good evidence that parallel construction isn't going on.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#268

Post by Confiks »

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #125
raugustinus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For which I expect some of them to be charged with tax fraude or racketeering here in Holland. A lot of financial crimes, especially regarding taxes, are punished heavier than other crimes.

I wonder how cannabis dealers based in Holland would be prosecuted. Doing a quick search shows that cannabis distribution/growing is still illegal under NL law. [1] I thought this excerpt was interesting: "The sale of small quantities of cannabis in coffeeshops is therefore technically an offence, but prosecution proceedings are only instituted if the operator or owner of the shop does not meet the criteria issued by…

No, it doesn't work that way. One of the other criteria for qualifying as a coffeeshop, is that you obtain a permit from the municipality. Some municipalities simply don't allow any coffeeshops. Coffeeshops also have to be physical stores, and may not advertise.

Also, it's also pretty much at the whim of the public prosecutor whether to close coffeeshops for not upholding the unrealistic 500 gram limit (for the amount of shops in densely populated areas other than Amsterdam).

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#269

Post by rothbardrand »

_zl9i wrote: post #116
captainmuon wrote: post #65

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…

Apparentle the Alphabay moron had his real hotmail address in the welcome e-mail they used to send and the same nick on another message board with more personal details as well. Massive OPSEC failure.

Or parallel construction. Easy to find after the fact.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#270

Post by jack9 »

trhway wrote: post #259
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it was -- not all illegal (or wrong) things are equally wrong. I'm much more okay with, eg, petty theft than murder, and would find it weird if people tried to make people stealing candybars from Walmart out to be equal to murderers.

>would find it weird if people tried to make people stealing candybars from Walmart out to be equal to murderers. it is pretty equal for the 3rd strike

Isn't the 3 strikes system for felonies?
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