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Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

politie.nl

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Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#201

Post by mfoy_ »

mikeash wrote: post #197
mfoy_ wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not outraged at the laws, outraged at being persecuted. If you know something is illegal, and it carries a fine of $1,000 and you do it, you get caught, and they fine you $1,000 you can't be like "What?! How DARE you catch me and fine me like the law says?! ARRRGH!"

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.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#202

Post by cowmoo728 »

mfoy_ wrote: post #187
mikeash wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised, yes, but why can't people be outraged at people suffering from bad laws? That makes no sense.

Not outraged at the laws, outraged at being persecuted. If you know something is illegal, and it carries a fine of $1,000 and you do it, you get caught, and they fine you $1,000 you can't be like "What?! How DARE you catch me and fine me like the law says?! ARRRGH!"

Part of the issue with this line of reasoning is selective enforcement. If the law is unjust and commonly broken, it is fair to be outraged if they choose to target you for punishment. Drug laws are broken every day, and in some cities LEOs are even working with the dealers. Unjust laws allow them to pick on people they don't like and people that threaten their business. Given these circumstances, I think it's still fair to be outraged at the enforcement of unjust laws.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#203

Post by 7952 »

jimmyk wrote: post #128
wybiral wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if we're being pedantic it's hard to enforce laws against "being" gay so they enforce laws against "acting" gay. And until those countries figure out mind control it's just going to be oppression of their actions. Now that we've cleared that up, I still think laws against "acting" gay are wrong (within the same framework that it's legal to "act" heterosexual).

Laws against inherent characteristics seem to me at least to be worse than laws which ban behavior. Conflating the two in order to make some particular law sound worse seems sort of dishonest to me.

Perhaps. But within the context of gay rights it is the government that behaved improperly. Society bundled behaviour and innate characteristics into a single thing. That was wrong, and it is important to highlight that.

Of course in a post homophobic world the distinction is rather irrelevant. It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours. Why would it matter either way? But for a while it was necessary to remind people that you don't have any choice about being gay, or about having gay relationships. That claim was a response to homophobia, not something rooted in science of philosophy

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#204

Post by valuearb »

rfrank wrote: post #171
valuearb wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality of illegal drugs is by making them illegal you give massive amounts of capital to the worst people in the world, who invest those profits into other awful trades. You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.

> You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations. I'm not convinced this is true, there's lots of ways to make a big profit illegally, drugs are just comparatively easy. I'm a proponent of full drug legalization (it's a space where I have large amounts of first hand experience that won't be discussed on HN), but it's still important to separate an ideological position from…

Drug trafficking funds human trafficking. It's not the other way around. Removing profit incentives from bad behavior is an easy way to improve human behavior. Our murder rates plunged after prohibition was repealed, for example.

And human trafficking is for a purpose, take away it's incentives and it mostly goes away too. Legalizing prostitution eliminates a big incentive for human trafficking. Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#205

Post by adrianratnapala »

jandrese wrote: post #90
xwvvvvwx wrote: post #63

Earlier 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 point is that gansterism will become a smaller part of the economy, have "less funding" if you want to think of it that way.

Gangsterism is funded by various econmic oppornities which for one reason or another are illegal. Some things like assasination and extortion need to be illegal by their very nature.

But by passing laws that make new things illegal, we increase the amount of resources available to fund criminalality.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#206

Post by freeflight »

rhizome wrote: post #117
wybiral wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees No. I'm just saying that the people upstream manufacturing massive quantities of meth and heroin probably aren't the kinds of organizations that you want to be making that kind of money.

And I'm saying that it sounds like you think "the kinds of organizations" are using drug money to enable worse crimes. I mean, it's no secret that the purpose of certain laws are to prevent anybody from making "that kind of money," but to me your comment read as if there was more to it.

Because that's also the case. Big organized crime groups often have access to exactly the kind of logistics required to manufacture and smuggle drugs across large distances.

They have the muscle to stay competitive in a market where there is no state authority to give you guarantees on anything.

This isn't an outrageous claim at all, rather it's a well-known fact: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Il...

That's why prohibition is such a bad approach, it creates exactly the kind of black markets where these organizations make their massive profits.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#207

Post by deer »

mfoy_ wrote: post #187
mikeash wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised, yes, but why can't people be outraged at people suffering from bad laws? That makes no sense.

Not outraged at the laws, outraged at being persecuted. If you know something is illegal, and it carries a fine of $1,000 and you do it, you get caught, and they fine you $1,000 you can't be like "What?! How DARE you catch me and fine me like the law says?! ARRRGH!"

Yea and attacking peoples fine as long as you threaten them first.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#208

Post by theWatcher37 »

5_minutes wrote: post #10

The clever thing is that they took it over and for one month monitored it without the users knowing. Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies. That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement.

This is wrong, but I can't say why. Investigate a bit more.

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#209

Post by tylersmith »

theEXTORTCIST wrote: post #43
mschwar99 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I remember poking around at Hansa that's not true. Each vendor / user had a public key associated with their account. All text communication through the website was supposed to be with GPG encrypted text secured by private keys unavailable to website. So law enforcement has lots of encrypted text along with some clear text from users not informed enough to follow any kind of opsec.

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

Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down

#210

Post by valuearb »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #177
valuearb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying drugs doesn't fund those actions. Making drugs illegal does, just like when Prohibition started murderous gang wars, gave us the highest murder rate in modern history, caused thousands of deaths from adulterated spirits, and funded the modern mafia.

Buying drugs does fund those actions. Drugs being illegal are a major reason why, and why I support legalization. But that doesn't excuse anyone currently making a purchase today. Think of it this way, illegal images could be produced by advanced CGI, but aren't because that tends to be just as illegal. That doesn't excuse anyone who consume images not produced by advanced CGI.

People have the right to control what goes in their bodies. I don't have the ability to see if my weed is "violence free", because drug prohibition took that away. You can't hold me responsible for violence among marijuana cartels if you don't give me a clean source for my marijuana.

It's like saying encryption is used by terrorists, so if I buy encryption I'm indirectly supporting terrorism.

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