FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites • Hacker News Board

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#61

Post by dobbsbob » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 1:36 AM UTC

mechatronics wrote: post #49

kordless wrote: post #2

As little as 50 years ago, selling these drugs wasn't illegal in the US. Look how far we've come.

Just once, I'd like one of you to admit that Silk Road (any many of the other sites) sold large amounts of identity theft equipment. These are not noble drug dealers harming nobody. They are sociopathic assholes selling whatever makes money, even if the ONLY reason for the item is to harm innocent individuals against their will.

Vendors there sold phony identification for the sole puposes of renting drops to import narcotics or start a false front company. SR wasn't involved in trading databases of stolen info, though the other major sites that weren't busted are. Agora is like the walmart of e-crime

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#62

Post by jared314 » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 1:44 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #48

oofabz wrote: post #13

Was anyone charged with a crime? It disturbs me that the FBI has free rein to seize people's property without even giving them their day in court. The Fourth Amendment says "nor shall any person [...] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". I don't see any process of law here. The FBI is law enforcement, not judicial.

That interpretation of "due process" seems to neither make sense nor be just. Are police officers or FBI agents who are being shot at prohibited from shooting back at their attacker, because that would deprive life without due process of law? Can suspects not be arrested until a court case has exhausted all its appeals, because that would deprive liberty without due process of law? The FBI (presumably) had a warrant…

> The US (hopefully) is a land in which the process of acquiring a warrant before actually seizing anything or arresting anyone is so commonplace that it isn't even mentioned.

That is not true any more. There was a discussion [1] two months ago about the changes in the law regarding property seizure post 9/11. They call it "asset forfeiture".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8280889

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#63

Post by fabulist » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 2:18 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #23

fabulist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time something like this happens, lots of people shout that the sky is falling and Tor is "dead." Thank you for putting forward a reasonable hypothesis amid the FUD. That being said, I doubt he was a developer for 399 other sites, thats quite a few. I think a "watering hole" style attack is likely here, but I think there must be a part of the story that hasn't been revealed; perhaps there was a federation of .o…

I work in the security industry, and normally I'm the first one to argue against the FUD, but this time I'm not so sure. Clearly, out of these ~400 a decent portion were probably on the same server or in the same datacenter, and many of their operators were obviously quite careless in terms of personal, infrastructure, and application security (as has always been the case and will likely forever remain the case). But…

I seem to stand corrected.

I guess we'll have to watch this story very carefully.

I'm also "in" the security industry (I'm applying to my first jobs, but that is my chosen career path), and I do not believe Tor is sufficient to protect one's identity; but it irks me when people dismiss it outright because it has flaws.

The flaws are serious and should be better known, but nothing will ever excuse you from maintaining proper OPSEC and employing defense in depth.

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#64

Post by etherael » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 2:33 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #39

xnull wrote: post #31

Some here may know me as a critic of overreaching and aggressive cyber enforcement (and related surveillance). First, I'm quite happy that this activity does not appear to be the result of wide scale infrastructure sabotage. And I am quite happy that the FBI is doing its job to combat crime that is facilitated using (abusing) the technologies that are bastions for free speech, privacy and whistleblowing. Of course th…

On the bright side it leaves us in the same position as man has always been- rather charted territory. I've been skeptical of Tor et-al from day one. I didn't have provable reasons why, but the court has always served as the gatekeeper to investigation, and the Tors of the world seemed like the sort of hubris we techies are so prone to- "Age-old social justice problems man has struggled with for thousands of years ca…

> As a sidenote I find it bitter satire; people who cannot accept the will of others seeking tools to forcefully impose their own morality on the world instead

By this do you mean those that can't accept the will of others comprise the judicial system or those not prepared to submit to it and pursuing alternate avenues? Your comment works either way, but if you're talking about those attempting to place themselves outside the judicial system that's less them imposing their own morality on the world and simply not allowing the world to impose its morality on them.

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#65

Post by xnull2guest » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 2:56 AM UTC

aaron42net wrote: post #42

xnull wrote: post #31

Some here may know me as a critic of overreaching and aggressive cyber enforcement (and related surveillance). First, I'm quite happy that this activity does not appear to be the result of wide scale infrastructure sabotage. And I am quite happy that the FBI is doing its job to combat crime that is facilitated using (abusing) the technologies that are bastions for free speech, privacy and whistleblowing. Of course th…

That depends on how you define "wide scale infrastructure sabotage". I believe that this is resulting from: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay... January 30 to July 4, 2014 someone set up 115 tor nodes on fdcservers.net (total cost maybe ~$200k?), which was 6.4% of entry guard capacity. Clients talk to 3 guard nodes for an average of 45 days each, which means they probably picked a guard ~12…

I didn't know about those attacks. Very interesting. $200k is chump change for a Tor attack from large organizations. It's interesting to compare that number to the $100k prize offered by Russia. A neat speculation is that better attacks require a few digits more to be extremely effective and that six-digit attacks are at the cost-effectiveness threshold for most national purposes.

By "wide scale infrastructure sabotage" I was trying to refer to QUANTUMINSERT, TEMPORA and other internet-scale mass read and write capabilities. It doesn't look like the FBI had to use those sorts of technologies to interrupt the .onion addresses - I'm really happy about that. First because it shows that law enforcement can fight cybercrime without those tools and second because if they were used proponents/supporters would have championed them as 'necessary' or 'inevitable'.

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#66

Post by xnull2guest » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 2:59 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #39

xnull wrote: post #31

Some here may know me as a critic of overreaching and aggressive cyber enforcement (and related surveillance). First, I'm quite happy that this activity does not appear to be the result of wide scale infrastructure sabotage. And I am quite happy that the FBI is doing its job to combat crime that is facilitated using (abusing) the technologies that are bastions for free speech, privacy and whistleblowing. Of course th…

On the bright side it leaves us in the same position as man has always been- rather charted territory. I've been skeptical of Tor et-al from day one. I didn't have provable reasons why, but the court has always served as the gatekeeper to investigation, and the Tors of the world seemed like the sort of hubris we techies are so prone to- "Age-old social justice problems man has struggled with for thousands of years ca…

I'm rather partial to your comment. Though as a cipherpunk of my own generation, fully knowledgeable of rubberhose cryptanalysis and the rest, I do hold out hope that some of these technologies balance power and push them into the hands of the benign individual more than they magnify the power of a select or chosen few.

If all technology provides more power to everyone, but unevenly to where more is added at the top than the bottom, then the only thing that is left to defend against power inequality are court systems and forms of mass unrest. I distrust the completeness of the former (we've seen them go bad) and rather dislike the latter.

The pendulum could of course swing too far the other direction into anarchy. This, too, leaves my mouth bitter.

Ultimately I think technologies like Tor aren't so bad. Certainly it is nothing compared to nuclear weapons or personal firearms. Information and communication, while they can aid criminal behavior, are not criminal in themselves. Like has always been the case - long before it was possible to monitor and store information and communication for later introspection - criminal acts are acts in the physical world and they can be investigated there.

https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2014/04/bruce_schneie...

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#67

Post by sliverstorm » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 3:29 AM UTC

etherael wrote: post #64

sliverstorm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the bright side it leaves us in the same position as man has always been- rather charted territory. I've been skeptical of Tor et-al from day one. I didn't have provable reasons why, but the court has always served as the gatekeeper to investigation, and the Tors of the world seemed like the sort of hubris we techies are so prone to- "Age-old social justice problems man has struggled with for thousands of years ca…

> As a sidenote I find it bitter satire; people who cannot accept the will of others seeking tools to forcefully impose their own morality on the world instead By this do you mean those that can't accept the will of others comprise the judicial system or those not prepared to submit to it and pursuing alternate avenues? Your comment works either way, but if you're talking about those attempting to place themselves ou…

Mostly the former. Some think they are the latter, but a lot of outright criminals will explain to you how they are actually justified using their own carefully-crafted moral code that always conveniently allows for their behavior. That's what I mean by forcing their own morality on the world.

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#68

Post by etherael » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 3:42 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #67

etherael wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a sidenote I find it bitter satire; people who cannot accept the will of others seeking tools to forcefully impose their own morality on the world instead By this do you mean those that can't accept the will of others comprise the judicial system or those not prepared to submit to it and pursuing alternate avenues? Your comment works either way, but if you're talking about those attempting to place themselves ou…

Mostly the former. Some think they are the latter, but a lot of outright criminals will explain to you how they are actually justified using their own carefully-crafted moral code that always conveniently allows for their behavior. That's what I mean by forcing their own morality on the world.

Interesting point. Nobody thinks they're the bad guy, but some people are only considered the bad guy by the state, rather than almost everybody. That's the latter group to which I referred.

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#69

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 7:18 AM UTC

dobbsbob wrote: post #57

forgotpasswd3x wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about silk road 2, but firearms were never sold on silk road.

SR#1 they created the Armory, a seperate market. It was full of scams and extortion attempts so shut it down. Best listing was some guy in Russia trying to peddle uranium for GPS coord drop.

[deleted]

Re: FBI takes down over 400 .onion sites

#70

Post by kordless » Sat, Nov 08, 2014, 5:20 PM UTC

mechatronics wrote: post #49

kordless wrote: post #2

As little as 50 years ago, selling these drugs wasn't illegal in the US. Look how far we've come.

Just once, I'd like one of you to admit that Silk Road (any many of the other sites) sold large amounts of identity theft equipment. These are not noble drug dealers harming nobody. They are sociopathic assholes selling whatever makes money, even if the ONLY reason for the item is to harm innocent individuals against their will.

As I read the article I was thinking, "Shouldn't they be catching bad guys?" A 'war' on drugs is technically catching bad guys, where the 'bad' is defined as selling one thing to another for (presumed) personal use. What you are talking about is important, but you should take that up with the FBI. They are the ones going on and on about drugs.