Click Here to Kill

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/01/click-here-to-kill-dark-web-hitman/

by self • 7 years ago

215 107 7 years ago

harpers.org

neonate• 7 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20191212221610/https://harpers.o...

https://outline.com/y7DM9v

http://archive.is/DHAg6

onesmallcoin2• 7 years ago

Too many popups I quit

naringas• 7 years ago

[quietly whispers] sssh... reader mode

criddell2• 7 years ago

I wonder if anybody at Harpers ever looks at the numbers to decide if the popups should stay? They should have a minimum success rate that, if signups drop below, they get rid of the popups.

joegahona• 7 years ago

What would you tie it to? Bounce rate?

egdod• 7 years ago

Their website is extremely usable with JavaScript disabled.

excalibur4• 7 years ago

Stock firefox, default tracking protection. I received a single nag about free articles that was easily dismissed. One first-party subscription ad at the bottom of the right column, another at the bottom of the article. No other ads of any kind.

graedus• 7 years ago

I got two. For those that don't know, a good portion of these nagging modal windows play nice in the sense that pressing ESC closes them - good to be able to instantly dismiss them without having to hunt for the close button. The first one I saw could be closed with ESC, the second one required clicking "Close".

onesmallcoin2• 7 years ago

I'm more getting at the facy that this is a link to reading an article Not a link to a who-can-get rid of the popup the best contest We're the people that build these systems and this is about design and usability and when you open a can of cola you would be upset if it were worms because it said cola on the front I wonder how many hours of peoples lives are lost to trying to control the computer to get it to do what it said it was doing on the tin, rather than what is in the interests of the politics or the profit I correlate it to the same level as clickbait and I'm sure their are other humans out their that get the same taste in their mouth when using the internet, and then go on to do other things instead, which means that they are potentially missing out on learning something vaulable in the future, because of an impression your design made in the past. People should think more about the psycology of design and what the goal of the message of the content their sending is and try not to give into logic like this:

I publish my papers online, they are academic and educational; I want more money. I add ads or political messages onto the website that was before purely educational because it will help me aquire money. You are no longer selling a delicious can of cola but a terrible can of worms

haecceity• 7 years ago

You'd think it'd cost more money to kill someone. You'd have to pay insurance for the assassin. If something went wrong you'd need to pay the costs of taking care of the assassin's family. Whole lotta trouble.

lonelappde• 7 years ago

That's only important if future assassins know if past assassins are mistreated.

laretluval• 7 years ago

Indeed, as revealed in his court documents, Ross Ulbricht paid a lot more more money than this (by an order of magnitude) to have his darknet hits carried out (although he was likely being scammed).

The price mismatch makes me skeptical of this story.

Alupis• 7 years ago

although he was likely being scammed

It was the FBI posing as a "Hell's Angel" gang member. That part was revealed pretty early on after his arrest.

lrobinovitch• 7 years ago

This was a really interesting and worthwhile read despite the two pop ups.

The Beau Brigham case mentioned is sad[0]...guy seems to have been given a shit lot in life (bedridden with illness for 5 years), payed a token $3.50 for an assassination attempt on his stepmother, then received 3 years in jail. No one should allow their frustrations to build up to actionable murderous intent but you I can't help feel for the guy to some extent. 3 years in jail is probably not the sort of help he needed.

That article also mentions how Monteiro is a registered sex offender related to child pornography. This article[1] goes in to more detail, stating that Monteiro had "58 images of child pornography on his computer, most of which he created" and that "he committed illegal acts in order to access content on the dark web. Monteiro said he compromised and shut down websites while obtaining information about the case". Seems like these child porn sites require users to generate content to gain and maintain access.

Hard to tell from the testimony the intent and extent of good or harm Monteiro did around the child porn stuff. There should really be more published details around the sex offender registry - did someone swap nudes with their underage girlfriend or actively film abuse of their kids? There is a massive difference.

Regardless, Monteiro is doing awesome work around the murder for hire business. Really tricky field to navigate, and seemingly quite taxing and unrewarding. He published this cool public data on murder for hire statistics here [2]

[0] https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/08/15/jury-finds-beau-brigham... [1] https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/07/31/key-witness-in-slo-murd... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AICLS8bS6Kh4GgRTWkSf...

mnm1• 7 years ago

Hard to not come away from this article with a sense that the FBI and other law enforcement organizations are simply incapable and unwilling to do their jobs.

For example, this sentence: "The FBI has a mandate to pursue only those crimes that violate a federal statute." Sorry, but how can a crime over the Internet like this NOT violate federal statutes? It's impossible. By definition all these crimes would be pursued at the federal level.

Then there's the description of the interview where they interviewed the husband and wife together despite the husband being the main suspect. That's like pulling the plug on your server and wondering why the website's down. Beyond incredibly stupid to the point where it's hard to believe that actually happened. Those agents should themselves be charged for facilitating that murder.

I won't bother to go into the failing of allowing the identification of the British guy who placed the hit either by not allowing his ex-gf to read his messages. How dumb are these fucking cops?

The whole piece reads like a story of police, FBI, and law enforcement failings at every level. It's practically guaranteed that hits are taking place online and this is law enforcement's response? Making things worse or at the very best, fucking up investigations with their extreme stupidity.

excalibur4• 7 years ago

In June 2018, news came of a second death from the kill list. Twenty-one-year-old Bryan Njoroge was found dead in Indiana, shot in the head on a baseball field. The police ruled the death a suicide. Weeks earlier, a user with the alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500 to order his murder and provided details of his upcoming travel. Njoroge was a U.S. military serviceman who, before he died, had made a female friend the beneficiary of his life-insurance policy. His father questions whether the death was a suicide, but the local police department has said that it is aware of the dark-web assassination order and stands by its conclusion.

It's possible that the police know something the father does not. I would not put it past a suicidal person to order a hit on himself.

thebean11• 7 years ago

Ordering a hit on yourself doesn't really make it a suicide, someone has still committed murder

ksdale2• 7 years ago

I know nothing of the particulars of this case, but a person could order a fake hit and then kill themselves in order to make it look like a murder to ensure the life insurance payout.

Someone• 7 years ago

If the one ordered to do the killing knows the target is the one ordering the kill and the target is of a sound mind, I would call it assisted suicide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_death), and I wouldn’t call what the killer did murder.

guenthert• 7 years ago

It's possible that the police know something the father does not. I would not put it past a suicidal person to order a hit on himself.

It's absurd to assume the police wouldn't share such information with the victim's father. And if someone would order a hit on themselves, the police would still classify this as murder.

excalibur4• 7 years ago

The police in the article declined to share info that would have been helpful had the victim known. I'm trying not to assume anything about what they would or wouldn't share.

You're right on the other point though, if the hit actually happened there would definitely be a murder there, regardless of any suicidal actions on the client/victim's part.

Which leads to another question: If the hit website was a scam, and you tried to put a hit on yourself, could you be criminally charged with attempted murder of yourself?

microtherion• 7 years ago

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Hired_a_Contract_Killer

ogoffart• 7 years ago

I've read another article related to this about a year ago:

"The unbelievable tale of a fake hitman, a kill list, a darknet vigilante... and a murder": https://www.wired.co.uk/article/kill-list-dark-web-hitmen

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18767657

eindiran• 7 years ago

The Wired article on the original Silk Road back in 2012 was responsible for driving a huge amount of traffic to the site. Harper's has a smaller readership than Wired and fewer people are interested in pursuing hits than getting high (hopefully), so maybe that won't happen here, but I worry that the article will put these forums on people's radars. Thankfully the clearnet sites that track darknet .onion addresses usually avoid having sites like these listed.

paulpauper• 7 years ago

Now it’s easy to purchase bitcoins on any number of mainstream markets and “tumble” them so that their point of purchase is obscured. Similarly, thanks to Tor, accessing the dark web requires only opening a browser and enduring slower download speeds.

lol has the author tried buying bitcoins and then tumbling them? I would not call submitting tons of ID to buy and withdrawal $5000 of bitcoin and then setting up tor and getting a tumbler working to be easy, and not getting scammed in the process. Also tor and tumblers are not necessarily fully anonymous.

bilbo0s• 7 years ago

Also tor and tumblers are not necessarily fully anonymous

Money quote right there.

I'm not sure how many people consider using this sort of thing to skirt the law. But believing in the anonymity of anything on the internet while you're skirting the law has landed many a naive person in prison. Especially if that person was within the jurisdictional reach of the US government.

mirimir2• 7 years ago

Bitcoin Fog did pretty well during its run. It mixed Bitcoin from at least two huge thefts. At least one of them generated a huge Reddit crowd-sourced tracking effort. And as far as I know, nothing was ever tracked.

I do get that Monero is ~anonymous by design.

But then, how does one buy it anonymously? All I see are exchanges that implement KYC. Using bank transfers and credit/debit cards. Are there any cash by mail exchanges? Or even local meatspace exchanging?

na852• 7 years ago

In Canada you can buy btc in cash at any post office without ID.

ceejayoz• 7 years ago

How?

They appear to have an ID verification program Bitcoin exchanges are using (https://www.canadapost.ca/cpc/en/business/postal-services/di...) but I'm unable to Google up how you'd buy BTC there.

peterquest• 7 years ago

have these people not heard of monero?

tpmx2• 7 years ago

Potentially unpopular opinion: This is one of the reasons why we as a society can't afford to allow untraceable electronic money transactions.

Imagine the combination of perfectly untraceable money transactions with actual working low-cost swarms of facial recognition-based killbots/drones.

That's what, maybe 5-7 years away from now?

The risk here is that the cost of a hit could go down to very low costs, say between $1k to $10k per hit/murder. If it goes that low we're screwed as a society, especially if the transactions aren't traceable.

int_19h• 7 years ago

Thing is, it doesn't really matter what you "allow". There's no way to enforce it for these kinds of uses. A blanket ban can put it outside of purview of your average mildly curious common person for purposes like, say, buying recreational drugs. But if they have seriously decided that they want to murder someone, they'll find out how to make that payment - and you can't meaningfully trace that short of full online Panopticon (all connections wiretapped 24/7, all Internet access tied to secure real name ID).

There's a lot more coming. 3D printers similarly enable access to stuff that a lot of people would like to get banned, such as firearms and accessories to them. For example, it is already possible to 3D-print a high-capacity Glock magazine completely from scratch (the only metal part is the spring, and even that is bent to shape out of a suitable steel wire using a 3D-printed jig). And it costs about $200 one-off for the printer, and <$1 per magazine thereafter. There are already laws that make doing this illegal in some locations, but again - how do you actually enforce them?

Our societies will have to either go high-tech totalitarian, or learn to live with these possibilities. I hope it's going to be the latter; after all, past societies - before the growth of administrative state with its IDs, registries, accounting, and pervasive bureaucracy - already had to deal with a situation where it was very hard to track a determined criminal. But looking at the evolution of surveillance and police power laws in modern developed democracies and China, it's probably going to be the former.

tpmx2• 7 years ago

My informed gut feeling is that legislation is surprisingly efficient.

Your tangent on 3d-printing aside: If we decide to make cryptocurrencies illegal, I think that will solve like 80% of the problem. Given the tradeoffs involved, I think that's worth doing.

joshstrange• 7 years ago

So while I don't really participate in cryptocurrencies anymore I have a basic knowledge of how it all works and have read up on ETH contracts. Couldn't someone create a contract on the ETH network (my terminology might be off) that allows you send a message to contract with a name (maybe more PII), a date, and some amount of ETH to create the system Jim Bell hypothesized?

Obviously a big issue would be "death confirmation" as is how do we know X person is actually dead so we can pay out to the "winner"? I imagine it could be done through some kind of majority system but what incentive would other "donators"/"would be killers" have to confirm a death has happened if they aren't the beneficiary? I'm sure someone clever could think of some way to do it...

reidjs• 7 years ago

For the second part, look at prediction markets like Augur.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

Obviously a big issue would be "death confirmation" as is how do we know X person is actually dead so we can pay out to the "winner"?

Put people on the blockchain, obviously.

strbean• 7 years ago

Well this just gave me a chill down my spine. It isn't too crazy to imagine this happening.

wavefunction4• 7 years ago

Anyone could see who the "winner" is though I believe?

Random_ernest• 7 years ago

The problem you describe is not really solved (at least not to my knowledge) and is often referred to as the Oracle problem in smart contracts.

cryptozeus• 7 years ago

Jesus that was crazy to read...this guy is doing god’s work “There is just one reason that a local police department in Minnesota was aware that someone had paid an obscure site on the dark web to have one of its teenage residents killed, and that reason is Chris Monteiro. Monteiro, a systems administrator who runs I.T. security for a midsize firm in London, spends his nights as a white-hat hacker and independent cybercrime researcher, navigating the shadowy spaces of the dark web. Murder marketplaces have in recent years become both his signature area of expertise and his exhausting burden”

Imagine you can pay in bitcoin where AI drone and carry out the hit...all anonymous

LyndsySimon2• 7 years ago

Now imagine trying to be a politician in that hypothetical world. Make one person angry enough to kill you, and you die.

If you haven’t, I recommend reading “Assassination Politics” by Jim Bell. It’s an interesting though exercise.

milankragujevic2• 7 years ago

Black Mirror covered this scenario in S03E06: Hated in the Nation.

DrPhish• 7 years ago

In the 1942 Captain Future pulp "Outlaws of the Moon" [1], President Carthew was anonymously murdered by a drone.

[1] https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/have-no-fear-of-the-bayi...

wavefunction4• 7 years ago

I'd rather imagine I'm an average person who may have said something on an internet forum that set a nutter off if I want to be disturbed.

eprparadox• 7 years ago

another good one is the calvino short story 'Beheading the Heads'

krapp3• 7 years ago

Now imagine trying to be a politician in that hypothetical world. Make one person angry enough to kill you, and you die.

Politicians already more or less live in that world... it's why they no longer ride in convertibles with the windows down.

lopmotr• 7 years ago

They already have that threat from guns, and already have ways to protect themselves. Bulletproof glass would stop a drone too. Drones don't sound like a real problem compared to guns which somehow haven't assassinated every politician despite being remote controlled point and click instant killing machines that are also cheap and widely available.

gdhbcc• 7 years ago

That's a good thing. The risk of assassination is a core component of the balance of power between the state and the people.

schoen• 7 years ago

AI drone and carry out the hit

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots (a frightening horror mockumentary).

cerberusss• 7 years ago

Actually quite useful for euthanasia.

In my country, euthanasia is legal, but it's very difficult to stipulate it. For instance, saying you want to be euthanized when you get Alzheimer, is extremely difficult. Such a website could be a solution.

Broken_Hippo• 7 years ago

To be fair: it is pretty final. Part of the issue with, say, Alzheimers, is that though you might feel strongly about it when you write it, you might feel strongly as you want to live when you have Alzheimers. You leave the people euthanizing folks that don't want to die, which can feel more like murder than a compassionate act.

We need a better system for this. Sure, useful for this, but one's family shouldn't have to resort to what is technically murder to do this. There are surely other methods, like adding qualifiers to the Alzheimer's clause and verified on multiple occasions.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro-euthanasia, even in a few ways that aren't really socially acceptable. (Alternative to suicide, so long as it persists over some time and one has tried treatments. Oldish but healthy. And so on, so long as it is planned out).

espeed• 7 years ago

Mind your words. Imagine the world you want. The things you want to see. Not the world you don't.

tyingq• 7 years ago

A bit morbid, but how does that work? That is, Bitcoin for murder? Is there some kind of escrow, or do people just send a bunch of money hoping they get what they paid for?

gen_greyface• 7 years ago

The author talks about that in the latter half of the article, they just pay them hoping they get what they paid for even though there are clear signs of it being a scam.

boring_twenties• 7 years ago

There already exists at least one decentralized prediction market, Augur (based on Ethereum). Unlike centralized ones, anyone can make a contract about literally any future hypothetical event and then make a market in it.

This can easily be used to create so-called "assassination markets" (a Googleable phrase, not my own).

You could simply create a market like "Will so and so die before such and such date?" Then you place a massive bid order at 99.99% odds. Any would-be takers would then have to put up say $1, go out and kill the person before the specified date, and now they're sitting on tokens that are worth $10,000, because the market will resolve to "true."

mrandish2• 7 years ago

Since this kind of scam "murder for hire" site has been around the dark web for a while and apparently, there are people dumb enough to pay them something, one would hope that various law enforcement agencies have set up fake sites and are harvesting erstwhile 'clients'.

However, based on the article, there's an apparent lack of law enforcement interest due to jurisdictional challenges. Perhaps it's also harder to get govt funding for something as 'routine' as attempted murder vs headline fodder like pedos.

I imagine there might be an opportunity for a reality TV producer to create a "To Catch a Murderer" show along the lines of "To Catch a Predator." Once they have a real 'client', they could let the client know a date and time for which they'll need an alibi and then suggest a nearby location that has video surveillance by which the would-be client can establish their presence.

That creates an oppty for the host of the show to approach the client at the alibi location, ostensibly to return the client's money because there are 'problems' with the hit. The ensuing conversation would likely lead to some high ratings as well as broadcast-quality, multi-angle indictment evidence.

sillysaurusx• 7 years ago

"To Catch a Murderer"

Scene: a quiet house in the middle of suburbia of Nowhere, MO. The house is dark.

From the inside, someone hears a tapping at the window. The killer quietly slides the window up and through the frame.

Suddenly, all the lights come on and Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" starts blaring through a Logitech Z906 5.1 Surround Sound Speaker System. The killer immediately tries to jump back through the window, but – smack! – the window is shut. It's bulletproof glass, and has been remotely locked.

The song mutes. "Take a seat."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c1vWnF9bS4

idclip2• 7 years ago

thats like the plot of john wick, brilliant!

flafla2• 7 years ago

one would hope that various law enforcement agencies have set up fake sites and are harvesting erstwhile 'clients'

This is entrapment, and is therefore highly illegal and in my opinion immoral as well.

goatsi2• 7 years ago

It's not entrapment. Entrapment is a very narrow set of circumstances.

The key aspect of entrapment is this: Government agents do not entrap defendants simply by offering them an opportunity to commit a crime. Judges expect people to resist any ordinary temptation to violate the law.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/entrapment-basics-33...

muddi900• 7 years ago

Given that FBI is famous for catching terrorists 'red-handed' with bombs they provided, who were recruited to commit terrorist acts by FBI agents, and sometimes are mentally ill, I'd say the standard for entrapment is quite high.

mrandish2• 7 years ago

This is entrapment, and is therefore highly illegal and in my opinion immoral as well.

This would not be entrapment as I described it (emulating the site in the article). I agree with you that law enforcement has been guilty of egregious entrapment by hanging around conservative mosques initiating contact and actively promoting jihad, then encouraging any vaguely interested response to the extreme of supplying the idea, plan, accomplices and means.

What I described was a "murder for hire" site hiding on the dark web and requiring initiating and inquiry, responding positively, specifying the 'hit', paying in advance in bitcoin and finally supplying a name, address and photo of the person to kill.

While non-terrorists certainly attend conservative mosques, it's hard to see how someone NOT very interested in commissioning a murder accidently sends an inquiry, specifies the job, pays a hard-to-get currency in advance, etc.

ErotemeObelus• 7 years ago

Erstwhile means "former" not "potential."

Nextgrid• 7 years ago

there's an apparent lack of law enforcement interest

Imagine how better the world would be if all the effort, time & money spent on litigating bullshit like DMCA, piracy & patents was instead invested into solving real crimes like this.

hluska• 7 years ago

That’s one heck of a good idea. I’d actually subscribe to cable to watch that show.

ggm• 7 years ago

A headline designed to make me not want to.. click on it. Luckily reading the comments here got me much of the sense.

perl4ever• 7 years ago

I thought this might be about a viral facebook post that said something like "click here and a <something> will die" and how many people clicked.

idclip2• 7 years ago

What an amazing, jarring read.

rozab• 7 years ago

After a few minutes, Monteiro succeeded in hacking into the site with stolen administrator codes and installing an automated script that scraped the entire site every three hours and dumped the data on his server.

Ugh, fuck off. I think the big question here, the one that should be at the top of the article, is "Has a hit ever been purchased and carried out via darkweb sites", and the answer is "obviously not, lol".

TimonKnigge• 7 years ago

Someone didn't read the article :-)

While I was working on this story, journalists at BBC News Russia confirmed the first known case of a murder being ordered on the dark web and successfully carried out by hired assassins.

sandoooo2• 7 years ago

so this 'journalist' Brian Merchant has not been able to prove shit, but he felt comfortable enough to dox someone, full name, and accuse him of being a murderer based on 1. his ex's suspicions and 2. the fact that he refused to give an interview?

I suppose before you do this sort of thing you make very sure that your target is not rich enough to sue you for defamation.

jen729w• 7 years ago

It’s safe to assume that Harper’s legal team have a lot more information than we do, and that this information was sufficient for them to OK this story.

Don’t forget how complicated the world is. If something looks too simple to be true, it probably is.

sandoooo2• 7 years ago

I imagine the legal review goes like this: "he's not rich, he doesn't have a social media following, and if we spin this shit right everybody will think he's a creepy stalker-slash-murderer so nobody will stand up for him. What's he gonna do, actually put a contract out on us? Yeah, print that shit."

mirimir2• 7 years ago

I was sure that TFA would cover the US drone program. That's exactly how it works for the people controlling the drones. Just like a game.

sbussard• 7 years ago

Could natural language processing and machine learning feasibly identify who wrote the source code for dark web websites?

yosamino• 7 years ago

I don't know about NLP or ML, but the keyword you are looking for for the general process of identifying code authors is "code stylometry".

3fe9a03ccd14ca5• 7 years ago

Her father gave her a pocketknife, and her boyfriend gave her a bigger knife to carry in her purse.

Stories like make me appreciate that someone can purchase and conceal a small firearm (in most cities). All things unequal, a person with a gun is always extremely dangerous.

The police, after all, have no actual legal requirement to protect you[1] — and never forget that.

1. https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...

zeveb• 7 years ago

Miss Stern graduated high school in 2018, so she is probably too young to purchase or legally carry a pistol — that age is 21 across the U.S., to my knowledge and perhaps with a few exceptions.

I would agree that arming herself is a really good idea.

fosco• 7 years ago

Makes be think of slaughterbots based on some comments and concepts touched on here

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw

kolleykibber• 7 years ago

Interesting Story. Nice of the journalist to forewarn the suspect so any proof can be destroyed.

Suspect on linkedin I see. https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-fry-366693b2/

Click Here to Kill

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