There are already movements to decentralize Silk Road type sites using P2P technology, like OpenBazaar: https://openbazaar.org/.
Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
171–180 of 264 posts
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nevertheless, selling illegal drugs on the internet is illegal. I don't think you can say that attempting to bring down darknets is an example of government corruption in this case, notwithstanding the inevitable argument that the government is corrupt in any case.
I can say exactly that, watch me: their persecution priorities are corrupted. How many rights violations is this darknet thingy causing? More than the megabankers that get away with a slap on the wrist? And how much easier is it to arrest megabankers than technical-minded hacker guys and gals that try their best to hide their crimes? There's a much higher beneficial payoff that can come from arresting bankers (like I…
(Shrug) The bankers have no power that the government doesn't give them. Your enemy lives on Pennsylvania Avenue, not Wall Street.
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could have located the servers, but not the administrators because they don't do stupid stuff like connect to their servers directly. Perhaps they're just waiting for the admins to make a mistake. Taking down the servers without arresting anyone just isn't the same.
The servers may also be located somewhere that is less friendly and will not image the server for them?
I would argue that makes them more friendly. You would think someone who works for SpaceX would have better sense than to administer is darknet server using his real email address though...
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Specifically which laws did the FBI break in this investigation?
I'm not sure if they did, "in this investigation". I was commenting more on the general tone of US agencies, since the PATRIOT ACT, and their contradictions of what is breaking the law when it applies to them vs. whomever they are investigating.
It's possible to be skeptical of the government and government agencies while at the same time thinking that the arrest of (alleged) drug traffickers is a good thing.
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point. Noises have been made for a long time that Tor is compromised given a sufficiently motivated adversary. For instance, [0], among many others. In light of those noises, my non-rhetorical question is this: Why would any Ulbright wannabe reside within the US DoJ's sphere of influence? Get thee to Russia, and quickly! And while you're at it, keep your hardware in some third, fourth, and fifth locations, neith…
> Why would any Ulbright wannabe reside within the US DoJ's sphere of influence? Get thee to Russia, and quickly! 100% agree with this. I imagine it is mostly that people never think they'll get caught - or they view the risk of getting caught as much lower than the benefit of not moving, in any case. Edit 1 : To add: I think "people" also underestimate just how easy it is to get caught . Getting caught doesn't mean…
Hopefully anyone doing this in the future would be doing so only from Tails and public internet cafes
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting read, some highlights from the complaint: "40. Based on a review of records provided by the service provider for the Silk Road 2.0 Server (the “Provider”), I have discovered that the server was controlled and maintained during the relevant time by an individual using the email account “blake@benthall.net” (“Benthall Email Account-1")." "b. I have also reviewed a publicly available profile of “Blake Bentha…
>> made a down payment of approximately $70,000 in Bitcoins towards the purchase of a Tesla Model S Way to lay low.
Sounds like he confessed to everything after being read his rights, but before he even had a lawyer. His lawyer met him for the first time in court this morning.
Odd all around, like he wasn't at all prepared for this to end up here.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/prosecutor-silk-r...
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#177They located Silk Road 2.0's server in an unspecified way, not directly related to their undercover agent on the support staff. Given that two other darknet markets (Black Market and Cloud9) have been shut down today, and they didn't specify how they located the SR2 server, it seems plausible that law enforcement have a vulnerability to locate servers over the Tor network. From the complaint: "In or about May 2014, t…
> service outages at the time the imaging was conducted That whole "correlation is not causation" maxim comes to mind here.
This seems like an excellent example of a 'natural experiment' where the FBI's imaging request serves as an instrumental variable.
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#178so, is everyone ready to ditch Tor for i2p yet?
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#179They located Silk Road 2.0's server in an unspecified way, not directly related to their undercover agent on the support staff. Given that two other darknet markets (Black Market and Cloud9) have been shut down today, and they didn't specify how they located the SR2 server, it seems plausible that law enforcement have a vulnerability to locate servers over the Tor network. From the complaint: "In or about May 2014, t…
Interesting read, some highlights from the complaint: "40. Based on a review of records provided by the service provider for the Silk Road 2.0 Server (the “Provider”), I have discovered that the server was controlled and maintained during the relevant time by an individual using the email account “blake@benthall.net” (“Benthall Email Account-1")." "b. I have also reviewed a publicly available profile of “Blake Bentha…
> I have discovered that the server was controlled and maintained during the relevant time by an individual using the email account “blake@benthall.net”
That's pretty f*ing retarded of him.
No, I mean, what an idiot of epic proportions.
Or he is just a fall guy.
This is such a huge WTF to me. I mean, I can rent a server with Bitcoins completely anonymously right this moment from many providers.
Re: Operator of Silk Road 2.0 Website Charged in Manhattan Federal Court
#180I think this may be his hn account.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=blakeeb