What are soft drugs now? Interesting new neologism.
Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
271–280 of 381 posts
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#272Earlier 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…
> The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work
Is that a counter argument? There are bad actors (in society). Some bad actors have social, moral, physical, intellectual barriers that prevent them from acting WORSE. Raising the social barrier (marketplace) isn't any different than the social barrier (legality). If you rather not compete bad actors out of the market because of what they might do, why legally punish them out of the market? Why bother trying to stop them at all?
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The legality of committing crimes while in pursuit of criminal prosecutions is interesting.
Here's a reference for your reading pleasure (though this is, I believe, U.S.-centric, so not exactly the case here)
https://www.quora.com/Are-undercover-cops-allowed-to-break-t...
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's still no proof of payment. How could you win the case? I could easily order drugs to someone I don't like.
Blockchain analysis can tie transactions with KYC'd identities. http://www.sandia.gov/news/publications/labnews/articles/201... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xz35e/us-law-enf... http://www.coindesk.com/elliptic-partners-with-risk-controls...
If your BTC is KYC'd then you're doing something very wrong...
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#275Services 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"
It may be parallel construction, but in a kind of cynical way we can publicly praise it as good traditional police work. It takes credibility away from demands for special or clandestine access.
When we call it parallel construction we buy into the surveillance communities marketing... that surveillance it is effective.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? If the law is unjust, it's perfectly reasonable to be outraged at being punished when you're caught even if you knew exactly what would happen beforehand. Since drugs have such a stigma in the countries HNers are likely to be from, imagine if we were talking about laws against, say, women driving cars, or criticizing the president.
Then you'd be using your arrest / punishment as a form of martyrdom to draw attention to the issue. Kind of like civil disobedience... but criminal. You'd get arrested (as expected), fined or imprisoned (as expected), then be outraged that the law exists. But you wouldn't be outraged that you _were_ arrested... you must have expected that.
You can both expect something and be outraged by it.
Your post seems to assume the reason for the outrage is that the arrest goes against an expectation.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#277> More than 500 Dutch delivery addresses were reported to couriers and postal services with the intention of stopping the deliveries Does this mean that the goal of the LEO was to only stop the deliveries without actually arresting the recipients? If that's true then it seems the way law enforcement works in the EU is very different than that in the US.
unless they can link your computer to entering that address, isn't there some plausible deniability that someone else entered your address. Having drugs delivered to your house isn't illegal if someone else sent them there right? (Asking about in the US, but also interested in hearing if it's different or the same in EU)
Whether your denial is plausible is a matter for a judge or jury. Your credibility might be stretched if, say, the drugs were worth a lot of money, you didn't report it when they turned up at your house, you had drugs in your house when the police searched it under a warrant, and you bought cryptocurrency which you can't account for a few days earlier. You might choose to take a plea rather than rolling the dice at that point.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
They almost certainly did. I do market research and a number of vendor keys changed on Hansa and Dream on June 23rd. Some had various comments in them claiming to be older, e.g. "EST June 2016". Dutch Police released a statement claiming as much http://politiepcvh42eav.onion/hansafaq.html
Interesting. What do you do with your market research?
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I highly doubt anyone looked at it or cared. People were most likely on there to buy drugs. Do you think they turned to their friend and asked "hey do you mind looking into this website and comparing the PGP keys with me? I just want to be sure!"
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#280Earlier 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…
> The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work Is that a counter argument? There are bad actors (in society). Some bad actors have social, moral, physical, intellectual barriers that prevent them from acting WORSE. Raising the social barrier (marketplace) isn't any different than the social barrier (legality). If you rather not compete bad actors ou…
Society doesn't want to consider certain transactions to be legitimate.
Allowing a marketplace for murder or human trafficking (or the other nefarious things organized crime gets up to) allows the most efficient and effective bad actors to prosper, as markets are designed to do. But society doesn't want bad actors to prosper, it wants them prevented from acting badly.