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Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

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Re: Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

#91

Post by dobbsbob »

chrissnell wrote: post #26

The Dread Pirate's curse is that he'll never be able really spend much of this pile of currency that he's accumulated, at least not without drawing attention to himself and getting busted. History has shown that these guys eventually get busted but rarely for drug dealing; it's usually the IRS that busts them for tax evasion. If you're buying fancy cars, big houses, yachts, or businesses, eventually someone is going…

From all the online busts I've seen since Shadowcrew busts and countless other illegal forums and markets after it the #1 downfall was letting federal agents become co-administrators and worm their way into the fold. From there they can engage suspects in supposedly confidential/trusted chatter and find out everything there is to know about them. Criminals love to brag and talk their way into jail.

This is easy to do. As a federal agent, sabotage the market with spam, ddos or security breaches, then be johnny on the spot with the solution offering your helpful services. Gain trust, engage in talk, bust everybody.

Re: Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

#92

Post by stevewillows »

wiredd wrote: post #80
gwern wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it becomes pretty obvious when you look at how SR actually operates: why don't sellers just post a list of products on a forum or wiki and buyers send them bitcoins? Because there would be no form of escrow or feedback tracking or interventions by third-parties or bonds required of sellers; with pseudonymous identities and irrevocable payments, it'd be an incredibly tempting lemon market. It's those additional…

Interesting link, particularly the part about ways law enforcement might try to shut down SR. One approach police might take is to set up shop as sellers, and then instead of running a scam, actually ship the illicit goods and have the police show up right after the mailman. If I understand correctly, the buyer's address must go to the seller instead of the SR admins. This might be considered entrapment, but if the b…

The US is already doing something similar for potential terrorists - - they essentially handhold people they believe to have the potential to carry out a terrorist plot. This American Life had an episode called The Convert [1] and Rolling Stones had a similar article [2]

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/471/t...

[2] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/...

Re: Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

#95

Post by cstavish »

wiredd wrote: post #80
gwern wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it becomes pretty obvious when you look at how SR actually operates: why don't sellers just post a list of products on a forum or wiki and buyers send them bitcoins? Because there would be no form of escrow or feedback tracking or interventions by third-parties or bonds required of sellers; with pseudonymous identities and irrevocable payments, it'd be an incredibly tempting lemon market. It's those additional…

Interesting link, particularly the part about ways law enforcement might try to shut down SR. One approach police might take is to set up shop as sellers, and then instead of running a scam, actually ship the illicit goods and have the police show up right after the mailman. If I understand correctly, the buyer's address must go to the seller instead of the SR admins. This might be considered entrapment, but if the b…

Most people will only buy from established sellers with a history of good reviews. To my knowledge, those reviews cannot be readily faked. It would be possible for LE to create a number of seller accounts, slowly build up a good reputation, and then bust a bunch of people across the country within a day or two (before news spread). That immediately fails a cost-benefit analysis.

Re: Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

#96

Post by LukeShu »

dmix wrote: post #69
mw6621 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean Timothy May, Cypherpunks founder? AFAIK John Young runs Cryptome.

Correct, I wrote "Cryptome founder" as I figured that was more well known than John Young's name. Although I see now how the comma placement in my comment was confusing.

Incorrect comma usage, actually. You can't omit the Oxford comma (the comma before an "and") with a list of exactly 3 items. If you do, the middle item in the list can be parsed too many different ways, as happened here.

Re: Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

#97

Post by patcon »

dobbsbob wrote: post #17

The name Dread Pirate Roberts should've given away the fact the site is supposed to be handed down to different operators if you read/watched Princess Bride. This guy is making a fatal mistake of talking to the press. History shows all blackmarket admins like Max Vision go down shortly after press articles come out with interviews. Now he went from guy running a drug site to "subverting the US with propaganda" so the…

> This guy is making a fatal mistake of talking to the press.

Naw, the interview was on the forums and via PM. I'd be more worried about his book club entropy than the interview

Re: Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

#98

Post by rabbidruster »

LukeShu wrote: post #96
dmix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, I wrote "Cryptome founder" as I figured that was more well known than John Young's name. Although I see now how the comma placement in my comment was confusing.

Incorrect comma usage, actually. You can't omit the Oxford comma (the comma before an "and") with a list of exactly 3 items. If you do, the middle item in the list can be parsed too many different ways, as happened here.

I beg to differ. I don't see how an oxford comma would fix this confusion. In fact I think without it his statement is easier to understand. We can easily see he means three people. If he used the Oxford comma the second person would look identical to a preposition and would make your parents comment more valid.

Re: Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

#99

Post by ivmi »

dobbsbob wrote: post #85
rdl wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way a proper counterintelligence effort goes after someone like this is to develop a list of candidates based on known facts, then use surveillance, statistics, etc to rule people out. I could ID DPR for $500k with a few staff in a year, either by breaking the law or as an official state entitity breaking the laws of other countries.

I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting. Failing that go looking for hosting services that accept bitcoin, or online wallet services esp one's coded in php, since this gu…

>I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting.

You would not want to run a heavily used hidden service that you want to remain hidden right beside an exit node. That would be foolish.

Re: Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road

#100

Post by rdl »

ivmi wrote: post #99
dobbsbob wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting. Failing that go looking for hosting services that accept bitcoin, or online wallet services esp one's coded in php, since this gu…

>I would start by examining where all the major Tor exit nodes are, since that's likely where you would hide your heavy trafficked Tor hidden service, right beside a giant exit node to blend in with the other traffic. Feds already know this, this is probably how they caught Freedom Hosting. You would not want to run a heavily used hidden service that you want to remain hidden right beside an exit node. That would be…

I wouldn't want to run a long-lived service which attracted serious attention on an onion routed network. You could get some initial protection by terminating the onion frontend traffic on "tamper resistant, untraceable, throwaway nodes", and then backhaul (maybe via Tor?), to other servers, etc. The frontends would be able to do some local processing to maybe break up the traffic somewhat.

All of this kind of stuff would impair site reliability. IMO, if SR went down more often, I'd have a higher opinion of the paranoid exhibited by the admins. A highly reliable underground site is usually either 1) run by people who are going to get caught or 2) run by people who are doing the catching. There's I guess 3) run by really exceptional people who are doing it as a political statement -- generally unlikely, but in this case, possible.

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