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A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

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Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#81

Post by ChrisCinelli »

marta_morena wrote: post #55

This sounds fishy. He probably pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal, so law enforcement has a scapegoat and some meaningless "media success" in exchange for him getting a drastically reduced sentencing. They always do that, threaten people with insane penalties if they don't accept so shitty plea deal and if you are not super certain that you can win, you will likely accept that one, just because it seems "safer". T…

As a side note:

Promise (YC startup) was also saying that 70% of people in jails are waiting for judgement or are in for a technical violation (ex: did not show up to a hearing). And being in jails they end up losing their job, eventually they lose their house etc.

This is a space with a lot of low hanging fruits. And minor fixes may end up doing a lot of good.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#82

Post by jokoon »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #66
emayljames wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am merely give my opinion, but a service created by the US government/Military is going to have undocumented "issues". I would not trust it one shred.

Tor is open source: https://www.torproject.org/download/tor/ So, no undocumented issues.

I believe tor was researched designed and developed by the government

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#83

Post by homonculus1 »

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #79
homonculus1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your value system. Another perspective is that some laws ought to be broken, in spite of the potential consequences.

If the values of a person are "achieving personal power" in first position and "respect others" in last, that person may be ok to steal. I hear some people arguing that in business "not breaking the laws" is not the problem unless they get caught and even in that case, it is a problem only if the consequences end up costing more than the gain they receive in doing it. So a person with those value may end up breaking…

There are numerous unjust laws that infringe on the rights of the individual. Not only is it morally defensible to break such laws, but it is a good for respectable people to do so in order to reclaim behavioral territory and psychological freedom from the police state. This demonstrates to others that being a "criminal" is not a moral status but a legal one.

It may even be a social duty.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#84

Post by stock_toaster »

ohmygodel wrote: post #46

Running a hosting server for onion services, as was done in this case, is a terrible idea. It greatly increases the risk of deanonymization. The question is less how this hosting service was discovered and more how it ever stayed up long enough to become so notorious. Here's why: 1. Each hidden service chooses a "guard" relay to serve as the first hop for all connections. 2. A server running multiple hidden services…

Interesting. Looking for more info on what you were talking about (with regard to "guards"), I dug up this post[1] which has some info too.

[1]: https://blog.torproject.org/announcing-vanguards-add-onion-s...

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#86

Post by jokoon »

Isn't it rather trivial to find who is accessing a website if you can manage to monitor tor nodes? Just do some heuristic, to see when traffic happens, and over time, narrow down users.

If you're the FBI and have the authority to monitor the whole internet, isn't it trivial to catch any tor user?

Tor is still secure, but of course if you are the government and have skilled engineers, time and admin access to the internet infrastructure (by legit or covert means, I'm pretty sure the US can monitor traffic outside his jurisdiction), tor is not safe. But tor is still safe from countries other than the US, unless the US government have a problem with what you're doing.

I would still be curious to see if tor does counter this problem by passively sending traffic to avoid this. Anyway I stand that there are 2 kinds of security: security against small bad actors, and security against competent, resourceful, big actors. The latter is usually impossible to get because it becomes extremely fastidious and complicated.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#87

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cronix wrote: post #44
strictnein wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor was created to help dissidents of other nations communicate. The military does not run on Tor.

> Tor was created to help dissidents of other nations communicate [1] Why would the US Navy develop something to help dissidents in other nations? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Histor... > The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and D…

>Why would the US Navy develop something to help dissidents in other nations?

Seriously? USA's notorious for not wanting to influence the destiny or politics of other countries, eh. /s

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#88

Post by tempsalt »

ohmygodel wrote: post #46

Running a hosting server for onion services, as was done in this case, is a terrible idea. It greatly increases the risk of deanonymization. The question is less how this hosting service was discovered and more how it ever stayed up long enough to become so notorious. Here's why: 1. Each hidden service chooses a "guard" relay to serve as the first hop for all connections. 2. A server running multiple hidden services…

These are well known attacks. In case of Freedom Hosting this maybe was the cause for finding the server. Mitigation exists. Today big illegal darknet websites run lots of Tor servers on their own. You can also manually set trusted guards or other nodes in the chain so no malicious node will ever be part of your path through the network.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#89

Post by safety-third »

jokoon wrote: post #86

Isn't it rather trivial to find who is accessing a website if you can manage to monitor tor nodes? Just do some heuristic, to see when traffic happens, and over time, narrow down users. If you're the FBI and have the authority to monitor the whole internet, isn't it trivial to catch any tor user? Tor is still secure, but of course if you are the government and have skilled engineers, time and admin access to the inte…

This would be more NSA jurisdiction and they do. The problem is most people's assumption is that if one part of the government has it, then everyone gets it. This is wildly false. Even within the FBI itself, different departments and cases get different tiers of access.

Even when the case agents get access, policy dictates what evidence is allowed to be taken to a public trial. Otherwise you get repeats of the FBI/4chan/8chan debacle. This is especially true for legal "grey areas" like mass surveillance. This means that agents will often get evidence they won't use in order to guide active surveillance using more legal means in order to collect evidence they feel comfortable admitting in public court.

Re: A dark web tycoon pleads guilty, but how was he caught?

#90

Post by throwawaybbb »

ChrisCinelli wrote: post #81
marta_morena wrote: post #55

This sounds fishy. He probably pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal, so law enforcement has a scapegoat and some meaningless "media success" in exchange for him getting a drastically reduced sentencing. They always do that, threaten people with insane penalties if they don't accept so shitty plea deal and if you are not super certain that you can win, you will likely accept that one, just because it seems "safer". T…

As a side note: Promise (YC startup) was also saying that 70% of people in jails are waiting for judgement or are in for a technical violation (ex: did not show up to a hearing). And being in jails they end up losing their job, eventually they lose their house etc. This is a space with a lot of low hanging fruits. And minor fixes may end up doing a lot of good.

These people are too poor to be a viable market. There is a lot more money in getting more of them in prison than getting them out.
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