Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/police-crack-down-on-silk-road-following-first-drug-dealer-conviction/

by iProject • 13 years ago

42 72 13 years ago

arstechnica.com

ahi• 13 years ago

Sounds like the police got lucky at customs. Apparently, "buy local" is a must when it comes to drugs.

benesch• 13 years ago

Exactly my thoughts. The quote from the manager of crime operations made me laugh:

> "Criminals are attempting to exploit the international mail system through online networks, but the recent arrest demonstrates that we are one step ahead of them."

Yes, you intercepted one transaction. Congratulations.

Cushman9• 13 years ago

Well, buy domestic. USPS only, to be precise.

RobertHoudin• 13 years ago

Can you explain what you mean, please?

duaneb• 13 years ago

There appears to be a lot of interest in the SR and not a lot of actual success in cracking down. One guy is a tiny drop in the bucket of that site.

squidsoup• 13 years ago

Pause for a moment and consider that one can purchase narcotics from an anonymised network using virtual money. There's no need to read speculative science fiction these days, you can just read the news.

betterunix5• 13 years ago

Those drugs still have to be shipped via a real postal system. Speculative scifi suggests that I will have a machine in my house that will produce drugs on the fly, with chemical reactions that are controlled by software.

stephengillie2• 13 years ago

So the drugs are 3d-printed? Maybe in pill form?

michaelbuckbee• 13 years ago

No need to wait for 3D printing, last night I was reading a short story [1] in which the players in an ARG earned experience points via the hand delivery of items from one player to another in the real world forming an alternative delivery system from the postal carriers.

Similarly, in Daniel Suarez's Daemon [2] he describes how a series of net connected people pass around individual parts that they have no idea the purpose of until they all get delivered to one guy who assembles them into a gun.

1 - http://www.amazon.com/Metatropolis-John-Scalzi/dp/B0058M5ZJ6 - "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood"

2 - http://www.amazon.com/Daemon-ebook/dp/B003QP4NPE/

jerguismi3• 13 years ago

Apparently SR forums gained almost 5000 new users last month.

http://imgur.com/a/asNew

The numbers from the store are unknown, and also I'm pretty sure it is very difficult to get a realistic volume from the sales.

wmf2• 13 years ago

"We perform a comprehensive measurement analysis of Silk Road... We gather and analyze data over eight months between the end of 2011 and 2012... We evaluate the total revenue made by all sellers, from public listings, to slightly over USD 1.2 million per month..." http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7139

jerguismi3• 13 years ago

Yeah, I know about that study. I'm still very sceptical that their estimates are realistic at all.

umbrella• 13 years ago

So he was caught importing drugs, told the police he ordered them from the Silk Road and therefor the police are cracking down on the Silk Road.

DanBC• 13 years ago

I never know from stories like this if law enforcement are hopelessly clueless or if they do know what they're doing but just not releasing details.

While the tech is probably secure it's easy for people to make mistakes that leak information; and while NSA or GCHQ probably find it easy to get that information they have no interest in doing so. So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes people make with Tor and Bitcoin?

betterunix5• 13 years ago

"So, do police agencies have people who know enough about the mistakes people make with Tor and Bitcoin?"

I met a researcher who did some work on attacking Tor, the results of which were given to law enforcement agencies. He was a bit light on details, but the basic idea of his approach was this:

1. You narrow down the geographic location of your target. Not hard in the case of the Silk Road, since there is a physical package being shipped.

2. You connect to your target's system, and modulate the latency of packets that you send. This is a covert channel.

3. You have a van rolling around the geographic region you believe the target to be in, and listen on wifi frequencies. When the covert channel is detected, you home in until you have located the target computer.

Obviously you can defend against this sort of attack by just not using wifi, although similar attacks at the ISP level are possible. Cover traffic helps with this, assuming the covert channel has low tolerance to noise (this may not be true; again, few details were given). It is also wise to avoid connecting from your house, if possible, and to use a public location where you can quickly shut down your laptop when you see the cops.

Or, you know, you could not sell large quantities of illegal drugs over the Internet, since it is basically asking for trouble.

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

Clever. Good to know they aren't totally clueless.

Cushman9• 13 years ago

Does this really work in the case of the Silk Road? Communication is completely asynchronous, the people sending and receiving packages never make a direct connection. You would need to find a geographic area for the server itself, which is presumably a closely guarded secret.

wmf2• 13 years ago

Prosecutions are public in many countries, so we can use that as a metric. If they knew what they were doing I imagine we'd see dozens or hundreds of Silk Road-related prosecutions. Or maybe Silk Road is mostly used by people who are too small-time for the police to bother with.

The FBI has an internal "manual" on Bitcoin that leaked a while back and they certainly have the skill to use various pre-existing open source tools to link addresses with names. In this case I wouldn't be surprised if Australian customs did most of the work though.

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

Talk about bad press for Bitcoin. Silk Road is probably the number one reason regular Joe's would ever hear them mentioned.

pippy• 13 years ago

To be realistic though, bitcoin is mostly used for gambling and drugs. Depending on your philosophy, the freedom it enables is far more important than what it's used for.

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

You pose an interesting philosophical quandary. If the freedom it enables is simply the freedom to gamble illegally and trade illicit goods, is that important...?

Do people make the argument that freedom is simply intrinsically good? Or do they argue, like with bittorrent, that the possible occasional positive uses outweigh the more common, primarily negative uses ?

betterunix5• 13 years ago

The only "good press" Bitcoin could get is if a major government started accepting it for tax payments, which is less likely than Chris Dodd being investigated for bribery.

Cushman9• 13 years ago

Somebody help me out here: Isn't Silk Road also the number one reason Regular Joe would use bitcoin?

abrkn• 13 years ago

Silk Road is a burden. Most serious Boitcoin discussion forums and chat channels will ban you for mentioning it. We're trying to change how cash transactions work, not help teens go to rave parties.

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

chirp chirp

anonymous• 13 years ago

I'd like some clarification on Tor, please. Namely, how can the silkroad's site operate without the owners being detected? AFAIK Tor has its own DNS with <hash>.onion, but don't those resolve to regular IPs? And if police have a normal everyday IP, can't they just imprison the site's owners directly?

throwaway125• 13 years ago

https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en

tl;dr hidden services are anonymous

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

tl;dr hidden services are the digital implementation of dead-drop as a transmission protocol.

Which is actually pretty neat.

Natsu5• 13 years ago

If they're smart, they'll just focus on compromising the site itself or using fake buyers/sellers. There are tons of ways to attack a site like that which do not rely on attacking tor.

bvdbijl• 13 years ago

No, they do not resolve the regular IP adresses

AnIrishDuck• 13 years ago

My understanding is .onion addresses "resolve" to the entry point of a Tor tunnel that takes you to the hidden site. The node sitting at the entry has no knowledge of where the traffic goes, just the next hop node.

dkulchenko• 13 years ago

But doesn't some node eventually have to know the final destination of the hidden server?

dobbsbob2• 13 years ago

this was already posted here a few days ago and everybody agreed this guy was a moron, and that no magic police tor tracing was used. He told them everything when customs found a bunch of drugs in a box from the netherlands with his name on it.

This definitely is not the first silk rd conviction plenty of ppl have been nabbed by customs around the world if you read the forums just they were smart enough not to say anything without a lawyer

Police crack down on Silk Road following first drug dealer conviction

Related Stories