Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/did-shutting-down-the-silk-road-make-the-world-a-more-dangerous-place/280270/

by dchs • 13 years ago

134 157 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

cottonseed2• 13 years ago

Better to ask, has the war on drugs made the world a more dangerous place?

venus• 13 years ago

I wonder if there is anyone who believes - really believes - it has not.

The war on drugs is kind of this diorama encapsulation of everything that is wrong with our politics, media, and society.

sker• 13 years ago

I suppose that's a rhetorical wondering. There's plenty of people who think the government can do no wrong, even here on HN.

stinkytaco• 13 years ago

The war on drugs is certainly dangerous. Making anything illegal makes it dangerous because it invites both the violence of the state, plus the violence that occurs in the absence of the state. The question is whether the danger the war on drugs has created is worse that the danger of those drugs being legal. Fortunatly, we have a very nice test bed here in the United States where we did make a dangerous drug illegal and then legalized it again. It would be interesting to run those numbers...

GhotiFish3• 13 years ago

Well. I'm not convinced it did, myself.

If prohibition didn't happen 1920s for the americans, would Al Capone never of being born?

Really these prohibition laws give lowlifes something to fight over, and the fightings dangerous, but who says they wouldn't be fighting anyway?

Does it make life more dangerous. Maybe not.

Does it make it more dangerous for me? Maybe.

edit: Ouch. Looking forward to that rebuttal.

hackerboos• 13 years ago

Yes. Some senior police officers here in the UK realise this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24320717

cottonseed2• 13 years ago

Around the world, see: leap.cc (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition). However, this voice is still soundly in the minority. I remember when the pot decriminalization ballot question came up in Massachusetts. Law enforcement came out loudly against.

HPLovecraft2• 13 years ago

Do News Story Headlines Always Have To Ask A Huge Rhetorical Question?

HPLovecraft2• 13 years ago

http://alexleo.tumblr.com/post/5244455384/newyorktimesheadli...

Coincoin• 13 years ago

I like article titles with rhetorical questions because I don't need to read the article.

bigdubs• 13 years ago

The answer is always "no", and you can keep doing what you were doing.

corobo• 13 years ago

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

dingaling• 13 years ago

Today in our supplement: Is Betteridge's Law always true?

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

As the article itself said, successor sites are inevitable (and there are at least two that are thriving right now in SR's fallout).

Those who prefer online black markets over physical transactions will simply migrate to the new marketplaces and consequently turn them into the "new Silk Road".

The only true effect, perhaps, will be people taking security even more seriously. I read a statistic at some point that approx. 80% of SR users didn't use PGP (The Daily Dot sources this claim, otherwise I cannot validate it).

pyre• 13 years ago

80% of SR users didn't use PGP

I find this to be dubious. How does PGP relate to SR usage? When people communicated with SR vendors, did they use email (where PGP might matter) or did they use the SR software? Did their forum software allow people to sign their posts? How was this information sourced? Was there just an informal poll on their forums?

cbhl• 13 years ago

PGP isn't just for email. PGP can be used to sign and/or encrypt messages wherever you publish them.

PGP would be useful in ensuring that SR isn't tampering with your messages between any two parties on the site.

lmm2• 13 years ago

The site recommended buyers use PGP to encrypt their on-site messages to sellers (including their mailing addresses), so that even SR admins wouldn't have access to them. It's slightly cumbersome but really the only way to do secure messaging on the web, as the lavabit story shows.

gwern• 13 years ago

I find this to be dubious.

I don't. People are lazy and don't want to use PGP because it's confusing and hard. PGP-related questions were some of the most common help problems, on /r/SilkRoad, people would regularly mention not encrypting their address (ranked up there with early finalization for being incredibly frustrating for those of us who knew what we were doing), and the Atlantis CEO stated that like 90% of Atlantis users relied on the Atlantis-provided PGP encryption rather than encrypting it themselves.

When people communicated with SR vendors, did they use email (where PGP might matter) or did they use the SR software?

SR had an internal message system, much like Reddit's PMs. You would copy the public key off the vendor's profile page on SR (or possibly from a thread on the forums), you'd ASCII-armored encrypt your address to the public key, and paste it into an address form field during the order process. You'd do the same thing for a regular PM.

Did their forum software allow people to sign their posts?

Sure: ASCII armor, remember. Any forum which allows you to type in text, allows PGP signing of messages. Few people bothered, except for important statements like from DPR about new rules or .onion addresses or stuff like that.

codyb• 13 years ago

I believe there were actually already competitors to the silk road long before this happened. Something called Atlantis Marketplace[0]?

Although that appears to have been shut down as well and perhaps absconded with users money[0].

If you go here[1] (reddit) you'll see postings for a "sheep marketplace".

I went to the silk road once. Definitely very interesting to check out. It's pretty amazing 1.2B dollars worth of transactions were concluded there.

All in all I'm totally against the drug war even if I don't feel the need to order meth or lsd online.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4773902/shuttered-undergro...

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/atlantis/

PaulHoule• 13 years ago

Well, I'm sure you're going to be able to buy weed no matter what.

ianstallings• 13 years ago

Amen to that. Mind if I do a J?

BashiBazouk3• 13 years ago

Did Silk Road even put a slight dent in street drug sellers in the first place? I would be surprised if street level sellers and buyers are internet savvy enough to use a service like this. SR looks more like the ideal system for savvy college students and young techs to specifically avoid the street level market.

jtbigwoo• 13 years ago

Right. Just requiring the use of tor prevented 95% of the population from using SR.

carlob• 13 years ago

Make that 99.5%.

epi82• 13 years ago

I'm not doubting, but why?

fragsworth• 13 years ago

I doubt that. If you don't care (or know) about anonymity or security, it was extremely easy to access the Silk Road through a web proxy with a simple Google search.

Touche• 13 years ago

Street sellers get their supply from people up the food chain who are savvy enough to use SR. I've not sure who you think the sellers on SR are, but they weren't mom and pops. As for the buyers, yes most likely white collar addicts.

BashiBazouk3• 13 years ago

I would think up the food chain deals would not have taken place on the street in the first place. More replacing the house level deal with SR.

3pt14159• 13 years ago

I've never done drugs in my life, but most drug users using SR were not addicts. They were just drug users.

tymski• 13 years ago

Do you really think that a seller would pass up the opportunity to use a service like this that would net them far more than they probably make as well as it being much safer for all parties? Of course not, it only requires some googling to figure out how to use it.

BashiBazouk3• 13 years ago

And a computer. And an internet connection. And enough computer experience to get tor running. And enough savvy to find SR's address in the first place. And a customer base with all of the above. I think my point stands...

lmm2• 13 years ago

I suspect at least some of those savvy college students and young techs would be buying in the street market if SR didn't exist.

acomjean• 13 years ago

Shutting it down certainly didn't help the US Post Office.

Not a silk road user but being able to anonymously contract hitmen (and hitwomen) doesn't seem to make the world safer..

nickpinkston• 13 years ago

Yea, but to honest the Silk Road hitman business is probably like 10,000x smaller than the drug business - maybe more.

GhotiFish3• 13 years ago

My understanding is that Silk Road did not have a hitman business. I remember the site laying out explicit rules such that "nothing may be sold that could be used to hurt another human being." I believe that was the phrasing anyway.

I that made sense to me, as it was inline with DPR's philosophies. However, my peers have said he had another site for stuff like that. Maybe they're mistaken? Anyway, I know that stuff wasn't on SR.

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

Stupid question and a stupid argument. Buying /selling drugs is illegal, so is buying /selling fake docs etc so why would anyone expect FBI to let such a service operate? Especially when sales numbers reach $1+ Billion and when the owner gives Forbes interviews saying FBI can't catch him?

Let's get back to basics: FBI is supposed to enforce the laws. They do have some leeway in prioritizing, but a $1.2 Billion market is way too big not to attract enforcement.

Now about the war on drugs...

ralish• 13 years ago

I think you've possibly misinterpreted the argument the author is making. My interpretation wasn't that he was being critical of the FBI for shutting it down; of course they had to shut it down. Rather, the criticism is of the laws and policies that are in place which dictate that the FBI had to shut it down in the first place.

As the article notes, law enforcement has been given a "hopeless task", where if you subscribe to the view that Silk Road actually made buying and selling drugs safer (as I do), shutting it down has made the whole business less safe at direct risks to citizens of many countries. As you note, the FBI had to do this, but it's a huge indictment of our drug policy that this is the action they are compelled to take given the result.

Which brings us back to the war on drugs...

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

Silk Road actually made buying and selling drugs safer (as I do), shutting it down has made the whole business less safe at direct risks to citizens of many countries

I got his point correctly, that's why I said it isn't up to the FBI to choose a safer way for people to buy/sell drugs. That it's not their mission. Congress of course can change the laws

ryanSrich2• 13 years ago

Because shutting down a service where the majority of exchange is conducted with an adequate amount of peace only forces such exchange into streets where volence is often unavoidable.

bsullivan013• 13 years ago

Fine, FBI should let me smuggle all the Colombian cocaine through NJ/NY ports so the violence along the Mexico border is eliminated.

john_b3• 13 years ago

I wonder what the size of the combined Colorado+Washington marijuana marketplace is. Maybe not $1.2 billion, but I'd bet it's pretty sizable, and the DoJ decided not to enforce federal law there.

The main difference in my eyes is that the DoJ is ultimately not worried about Colorado or Washington doing something "crazy" and legalizing all drugs, because they're part of the U.S. and ultimately dependent on the federal government. Silk Road was independent and sizable, and thus a threat.

MattyRad2• 13 years ago

Extra-legal violence is often a part of black markets.

Curious turn of phrase. Extra-legal violence meaning "violence outside of the government," which implies that there is intra-legal violence, "violence within the government," which may be referring to how the government coerces its citizens to not transact drugs, by means of violence (that is, the government will arrest/hurt you if you do not comply), and that somehow that is more appropriate or noble.

Also it may be somewhat jokingly implying that the government's violence is "extra legal," meaning "more appropriate with respect to law." I wonder if the author had this is mind when they wrote the article. I don't mean to start a huge libertarian rant about government violence/coercion, only to point out that the sentence could have a clever hidden meaning.

hvs• 13 years ago

While I'm a libertarian, it doesn't require a big political discussion to debate whether the government generally has a monopoly on the legal use of violence. That also doesn't require that "legal" somehow implies "noble" or "appropriate". I guess my point is that the author almost certainly has a libertarian leaning, so I'm not sure that the phrase's meaning was all that hidden.

lisper• 13 years ago

somehow that is more appropriate or noble

Not "somehow". There's actually a theory behind it: when the government does it, it is (nominally) done according to the rule of law. In a democracy, that means that the people have condoned it, at least indirectly, and so it is less subject to the whims of a single individual.

You may not agree with this theory, and the theory may not actually apply in practice. But the distinction between individual violence and government violence is not completely arbitrary.

harshreality• 13 years ago

The quote meant violence tied to the dealings of groups operating in extra-legal markets.

peterjancelis• 13 years ago

It means that for black markets transactions, which are made illegal by the state and thus impossible to discuss in the open, more peaceful ways of settlement (e.g. arbitration) are not available.

This implies that instead of a doctrine of proportionate response, you end up with a binary system where you either get away with petty theft until you don't, because the guy you steal from has had enough and wants to end you.

In concretu: If Silk Road was legal, the owner would have reacted with a lawsuit in the court system. It's not, so he had to resort to violence.

diminoten• 13 years ago

Intra-legal violence is violence otherwise captured by the legal system. Your domestic abuse, your bar fights, most muggings - your clear-cut and attributable crimes that happen within the legal framework of society. The "workflow" here is: commit a crime -> crime is reported or discovered -> perp is charged -> due process -> conviction/acquittal.

Extra-legal violence is violence that exists outside of the law's traditional reach. Your mob hits on other mobsters, your drug dealer getting robbed, gang warfare, etc. This stuff almost never goes through the legal system; how would a drug dealer report what was stolen? This workflow is more like: commit a crime -> get away with crime. Or, commit a crime -> beget more crime as retaliation of previous crime, repeat ad nauseam.

So what the writer is saying is that with black markets come a lot of violence that takes place in that second category listed above, mostly because reporting the violence incriminates the victim.

pak4• 13 years ago

Here's a question for the techno-libertarians stepping up to say the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road. Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet? Life, liberty, freedom from discrimination, due process--these things I understand, and there are well supported philosophical frameworks (rule utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian etc.) for deriving them from first principles. I can also understand a society guaranteeing a right to privacy in limited circumstances: crimes affecting children are one obvious example, records of education and medical treatment are another. In each such situation, the benefits, harms and impact on the rights of the public and the individual have been weighed.

But an anonymous free-for-all exchange being a natural right? We aren't born anonymous. In the "state of nature," without government, we are in no way anonymous. The fact that the internet sometimes allows us to be is in fact a very artificial circumstance that society has allowed to happen. Whether we like it or not, governments are ultimately the overseers that permit networking infrastructure comprising the internet to be built. That isn't some natural right any more than building a nuclear weapon in my backyard is a natural right. Society has weighed the pros and cons and decided that this particular set of technologies is on the whole good. That it might in fact want to limit the level of anonymity on the network seems reasonable, in the same way that making people put license plates on their cars is reasonable.

I'm not supporting the idea of a government ID to access the internet (although some first-world countries already require some level of this), or nationwide surveillance a la China or the NSA. Anonymity no doubt has societal benefit, in that it has fostered great works of creativity (from Mark Twain down through Anonymous). Unfortunately, society depends on accountability, and accountability and anonymity are competing principles in the construction of a just society. Neither of them are natural rights on their own.

mrbgty• 13 years ago

The idea that we aren't naturally born anonymous is a little frustrating. We aren't born anonymous to everyone but we're born anonymous to most people we don't have a personal relationship with. Those we have personal relationships with have more reason to not do us harm than some organization on the other side of the world.

pfortuny• 13 years ago

There are two different concerns here which I think your abstract setting is mixing, probably involuntarily:

a) Privacy and secrecy are part of normal personal relations. Any means of communication can be used to maintain secret conversations and this is something one should strive for because confidence and trust between individuals cannot exist in a never-private environment.

b) On the other hand, the need for society to regulate contracts is there. A contract is not (has never been, at least in the West) a secret affair: it is something which society recognizes and whose terms can only be enforced if the mutual agreement is in some sense "public" (i.e. if it can be naturally known by society). So secret contracts cannot be lawful and in this I agree with you that secrecy in "civil" matters makes no sense (you would need a "secret police" and/or "secret judges" to enforce contracts, that is a parallel society, which as mafias have proved time and again, is a problem, not a solution).

So privacy and secrecy are natural and necessary for interpersonal non-public (i.e. extra legal) relations. Not so for "public"/"civil"/"contractual"... ones.

Notice that buying and selling is a "contractual" relationship (i.e. a willful, free, interchange of benefits with possible adverse consequences. It is the adverse consequences that require the legal environment and their being "public"/"accountable for").

carbocation• 13 years ago

There is a longstanding tradition of pseudonymous public communication. The Internet didn't invent anonymity (though that's unfairly dismissive of your point). Anonymity probably goes back as far as our ability to communicate in written language and probably before then (not that we could have any such record).

ctb_mg• 13 years ago

This is a very valid question and one worth thinking about. For one side, I would submit the following points for discussion.

Accountability is indeed important for society, but lately it seems governments have been immune to accountability.

It would be nice if we were able to sustain a happy medium on the internet where identity could be known and also have no need to be afraid of persecution for legal actions (aka, being placed on a "watch list").

However, I don't see the world governments heading in that direction. With interest in wide scale surveillance, they are building the framework for a minority-report style pre-crime system.

So it seems we may need to protect ourselves from this using anonymity. I won't mind being accountable for my opinions when the governments themselves become accountable for ignoring "innocent until proven guilty".

MattyRad2• 13 years ago

The issue at hand for "techno-libertarians" is not necessarily about privacy, but rather about life and property.

There are three issues that libertarians will tend to agree are most important, which is usually summarized with being a natural right to life, liberty, and property.

1) The government forces companies to hand over customer information (property).

2) The government forcibly outlaws citizens to engage in certain commerce (property).

3) The government forcibly bars people from consuming goods they want (life).

To greatly summarize these three issues:

1) Whether the data is considered to be owned by the company or ourselves, either way it is private property and should have an extremely high barrier to acquire through a warrant.

2) Free trade is an obviously libertarian principle.

3) You own your body, and you are free to consume unhealthy substances as such, which is a fairly accepted natural right.

Privacy in an of itself is not necessarily a natural right, rather, the data owned by you or a company is considered private property.

revelation• 13 years ago

People seem to forget this is just the internet. It's a communications medium. Anonymity in communications are certainly not a unique feature of the internet, you can hide your caller id, and a letter will still arrive without a return address. The basic idea being that you can't shoot someone in the face by merely communicating, and I'm pretty sure you can still not commit a violent crime over the internet alone. Communication mediums are the safest thing in the whole wide world.

Your whole intellectual stance from which you approach this topic is off. History is very clear on this: the biggest enemies of justice have been governments and state sponsored entities, every single time. The concept of "natural rights" is motivated by protection against the government.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

The concept of "natural rights" is motivated by protection against the government.

That's why natural rights are so difficult to defend. Their entire basis is anti-change.

jellicle• 13 years ago

History is very clear on this: the biggest enemies of justice have been governments and state sponsored entities, every single time.

If that were true, which it isn't, why did humanity create governments?

pak4• 13 years ago

Both of your points are hyperbolic claims with no warrant.

Communication mediums are the safest thing in the whole wide world.

Even though this is a strawman, since my arguing to the contrary does nothing to support that anonymity is or isn't a natural right, you're still completely wrong. Perhaps I can't literally shoot someone with a computer, but all kinds of violence is inflicted by communication. You can harass, threaten, and blackmail simply by communicating. The internet has been used to inflict sexual abuse, aid hate crime, and transmit child pornography. It can also be used to steal, commit fraud, and induce an unsafe panic (think of shouting fire in a crowded theater). These are all non-physical but violent acts; incidentally, anonymity aids in perpetrating every one of them. Saying that the internet is inherently safe, much less the safest thing in the whole wide world, is patently false.

History is very clear on this: the biggest enemies of justice have been governments and state sponsored entities, every single time.

Perhaps you can add up the numbers and claim that more suffering has been inflicted in total by governments (in the course of wars, or whatever, some of which were more justifiable than others) rather than isolated individuals. You'd have a serious sampling bias, though, because we generally owe recorded history to the presence of a government, and people seem to have preferred throughout recorded history to form governments rather than live as individuals. So while this is a nice setup for an anarchistic manifesto, unless you are seriously willing to give up government and then move to Antarctica (which has pretty bad Internet, I'm told), it doesn't really make sense for this discussion.

VladRussian22• 13 years ago

The concept of "natural rights" is motivated by protection against the government.

yes, there is no natural rights in Nature, except may be the right to run as fast as one able to away from the next up in the food chain.

The current stage of human society is akin to a situation when a pack of predators and a herd of prey make an agreement that the prey willn't be hunted as long as it stays withing specified bounds. The pack will also protect the herd there from other predators. It is a win-win for both parties - the prey get relaxed and spend all its energy grazing and procreating and thus becomes fatter and the herd's headcount grows tremendously (the bounds were extended several times and now it is a pretty complicated patchwork), while predators hunt smaller percentage (the ones who can't keep themselves inside the bounds) of the much bigger herd of much fatter/slower/tastier prey with total amount of meat consumed by predators being higher than before the agreement.

The herd with time starts to believe that not being hunted down while inside the bounds is the natural right.

The predators sometimes can't resist and snatch some very tasty prey from inside the bounds - as long as such transgressions are kept below some low percentage, the herd wouldn't make big fuss of it to avoid risk of destabilizing of the agreement that works so great for the herd (true story, some members of the herd even have time and energy now to develop various theories about the thing they call Universe and why a prey and a predator got created(or evolved?)) .

ArbitraryLimits• 13 years ago

But an anonymous free-for-all exchange being a natural right? We aren't born anonymous. In the "state of nature," without government, we are in no way anonymous.

No one's ever been 100% anonymous in the physical world before, but by the same token the government can't watch 100% of what 100% of all the people do in the physical world either.

On the Internet apparently the only way to make sure you can be anonymous _ever_ is to make it so you're anonymous _always_.

ferdo12• 13 years ago

governments are ultimately the overseers that permit networking infrastructure comprising the internet to be built...society depends on accountability

There are two conflicting thoughts here. If we're not entitled to the same anonymity that those spying on us have, then we're servants, not members of a just society.

We can have a government as overseer of communications or we can have a just society. We can't have both.

It's an adage so old that it seems trite but it's still true: We can have Liberty or Security but if we pick Security over Liberty, we'll lose both.

slg2• 13 years ago

We can have Liberty or Security but if we pick Security over Liberty, we'll lose both.

I hate this false dichotomy. It simply isn't true as we give up a wide range of liberties in order to live in a safer world. That is what laws inherently are, rules that limit an individuals ability for the greater good of society. Whether is it preventing people from driving down a highway at 100 mph, whether they can grow and consume marijuana, or whether they can expect that all their internet communication is 100% private, we simply need to do an analysis of the costs and benefits to figure out if a particular liberty is worth giving up to give us a particular level of safety.

macspoofing2• 13 years ago

Here's a question for the techno-libertarians stepping up to say the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road...Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet

Techno-libertarians would care more about the right of individuals to freely trade with each other. Anonymity is merely a necessary component of trading controlled substances under an oppressive regime.

I think most libertarians would agree there is no intrinsic right to anonymity.

return02• 13 years ago

there is no intrinsic right to anonymity

wouldn't the opposite be against individual liberty?

john_b3• 13 years ago

"I think most libertarians would agree there is no intrinsic right to anonymity."

As a libertarian, I disagree. The ability to converse, trade, and move about privately is intrinsically necessary to support other fundamental rights. In my view, anonymity (which is just a special case of privacy where a person chooses to reveal no personal information) as an intrinsic right is derived from this necessity.

gobengo• 13 years ago

There is a difference between arguing in favor of a natural right vs a civil right, and both are valid things to argue for in a society.

natural - I have an inherent, inalienable right to this civil - Regardless of if its natrual, I only want to live in a nation that has this other right protected. So I'll fight for it.

Your argument assumes that techno-libertarians are only arguing a 'natural right' toward anonymity.

manicbovine5• 13 years ago

But the Silk Road wasn't truly anonymous because buyers had to disclose their address to at least one person. It's surprising that so many people were willing to send their addresses to anonymous criminals who could, at any time, turn into DEA informants. Furthermore, vendors must mail the package; seeing as how it's not terribly hard to see where packages come from, many vendors are probably vulnerable to simple surveillance of some mailboxes in a region.

These people were only getting away with it because law enforcement lacks the resolve and infrastructure to prosecute small scale buyers. To put this another way, we could hold them accountable, or at least introduce risk associated costs into the system, but law enforcement choose not to. (After browsing SR enthusiast forums, it starts to seem as if the whole community is predicated on the common belief that buyers are immune from risk... it's delusional!) If I'm wrong, and it's not so easy to bust these people, then I'm sure we'd just legislate a solution.

I'm getting at this: Real world actions do not automatically become anonymous because they're coordinated online. That's not my most brilliant observation, but the consequence is that, aside from digital crimes (DDOS, website defacement, copyright infringement, child porn), internet anonymity doesn't generally enable us to significantly screw up the so-called meatworld with complete unaccountability unless we're exploiting the government's technological time-lag.

So when I talk about internet anonymity, I'm trying to speak of our right to communicate anonymously. That's it. I think the same is true for most people.

Finally, I just want to add that "natural rights" have no scientific basis in our current understanding of the universe. Objectively, cultures confer rights to their members; it's probably an adaptive mechanism involving many factors. In a strict materialist and scientific world, "natural right" is a broken concept.

smacktoward• 13 years ago

the Silk Road wasn't truly anonymous because buyers had to disclose their address to at least one person.

Did they really? I never used Silk Road so I can't say from experience, but it seems like it'd be more likely that they had to disclose an address, not necessarily their address. Like, "ship it to this P.O. Box" would qualify as disclosing an address, without necessarily giving up their actual place of residence.

If Silk Road (or sellers using Silk Road to connect with buyers) was actually verifying addresses and then requiring people to post their real, legal place of residence, that's just... wow. I'm trying to imagine how dumb you would have to be to agree to that when you know what you're about to do is illegal. Pretty dumb!

EDIT: Though now I'm wondering, if the DEA were able to track a drug transaction back to a P.O. box, how hard it would be for them to get the name and legal address of the person who took it out. Would they need a warrant? Are there anonymous mailbox services?

betterunix2• 13 years ago

"Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet?"

From the natural right to free speech. Anonymity systems rely on people transmitting particular messages in particular ways, whether online or offline. When someone makes an anonymous statement to a newspaper, they do so with the assistance of the reporter who writes the article -- that reporter is repeating what someone else said, and not publishing the person's name. Tor, anonymous remailers, and related systems all operate on the same principle: by running a Tor relay or a remailer, you are agreeing to repeat the contents of a message without its headers.

"Whether we like it or not, governments are ultimately the overseers that permit networking infrastructure comprising the internet to be built"

True, but only on a technicality -- the government also allows us to have computers in the first place. The truth is that we do not need the government to "allow" the Internet; the Internet would be a lot slower without the government allowing fiber and coax to be put along public streets, but we could have built an Internet of point-to-point wireless links without having to ask permission (using only ISM bands, IR, and optical systems, for example). The government could outlaw such things, but that does not mean that the lack of such laws is an allowance, unless you think that all your rights are things the government allows (how dare you breath without thanking the government for allowing it?!).

pak4• 13 years ago

From the natural right to free speech.

Hmm, I like where you started with this, particularly in suggesting that a free press requires anonymous sources and authors. It is really interesting to see how the Supreme Court has historically balanced this societal interest against individual rights in cases on e.g. libel, slander, whistleblowers, and so on. The tricky part is in claiming that all of this applies to the extent that you believe to communication specifically on the internet. One could argue, and this is the justification for the earliest wiretapping laws for phone systems, that electronic communications increase convenience but also the potential for abuse, and if people need sacrosanct anonymity there is nothing preventing them from sticking to meatspace communication methods.

This is kind of like the conflict between rights granted for free movement within the U.S. and the security requirements for travelers to show ID before boarding planes, etc. Is plane travel a natural extension of the right to free movement, or can you safely tell such people they need to walk, drive, etc.? It is a tricky call.

we could have built an Internet of point-to-point wireless links... The government could outlaw such things, but that does not mean that the lack of such laws is an allowance, unless you think that all your rights are things the government allows

Also an interesting point, but within a certain context, isn't it hard to separate what I'm allowed to do from the government's protection of my doing so? This is the problem that less-government people face when waving their hands and claiming that everything could still work. It is hard to comprehend how much the collective safety and regulation of common goods provided by the current system affects what we currently do. For instance, if everybody started making microwave dishes that burned each other's pets and gave people cancer, I think we would begin to regulate those ISM bands more tightly. When I breath, am I not breathing clean air because the government won't let the factory down the street burn rubber tires out in the open and my neighbors from building or buying cars that spew fumes? I'm getting kind of hyperbolic here, but I guess my point is that the Internet that would exist with ZERO government support, and that includes eliminating all the transactions of currency for goods that keep those net-meshed wireless routers and computers running, creates a very different picture of the Internet from the one that exists now, if it would even function at all.

return02• 13 years ago

Is there such a thing as "natural right"? Isn't everything that can exist natural?

'Accountability' is sort of relative though: Nobody would disagree that a hit man should be held accountable for murder, but what about the random person who bought some recreational drugs? In this case , one could claim that anonymity protects the person from unjustified but lawful prosecution. What would be the reaction if if silk road had restricted itself to sale of recreational drugs only? Would it be just to shut it down?

fjabre• 13 years ago

I think we're off topic. This is more about the war on drugs and how it's an epic fail and continues to be.

I'm a techno-libertarian and I hope that one day all drugs will be legal again, albeit highly regulated and taxed so we can all reap the benefits of that market instead of wasting trillions trying to suppress it.

karzeem2• 13 years ago

The other responses to this would probably be agreeable to most "techno-libertarians", but I don't think they're quite correct as to how this natural right is derived.

They don't actually posit a natural right to anonymity specifically. The core idea is that the only moral use of force is self-defense. Therefore, it would be immoral for people to use force against you (in this system, laws are considered force because the government backs them with the threat of arrest) if you're not using force against them.

"Anonymous communication being a non-violent act, it is immoral to use force to suppress anonymous communication" ~= "the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road"

jmilloy2• 13 years ago

My first reaction is that fallacies and double standards abound, in this brief description. Can you point me to a more in depth reference, so I can inform myself before trying to reply?

For example: Is it moral to aid someone in their self defense? How are groups of people treated in relation to individual people? Under what circumstances, if any, is responsibility transferable? At what point are my actions no longer force (even though the results of my actions might be)?

john_b3• 13 years ago

"We aren't born anonymous. In the "state of nature," without government, we are in no way anonymous."

Using "natural states of being", however defined, to articulate rights in unnatural states of being (i.e. modern society) is a fallacy. It presumes that a natural state of being naturally endows people with all their rights, and that the arbitrary social systems that have evolved on top of that natural state have systematically deprived people of those rights. In some cases, this has happened, but it is not an inviolable law.

For example, in the "state of nature" women are born weaker than men, but that doesn't mean that men have a right to drag them back to the cave and do what they want with them.

"Society has weighed the pros and cons and decided that this particular set of technologies is on the whole good. That it might in fact want to limit the level of anonymity on the network seems reasonable, in the same way that making people put license plates on their cars is reasonable."

"Society" is not a monolithic, homogeneous organism whose will is absolute and omniscient. Society is composed of many subcultures with differing ideologies that change over time. "Society" has not decided to "limit the level of anonmymity" on the internet; it is only some factions within it that believe that should be done. The worrying aspect is that these factions often promote it as a public good (using the same "societal consensus" language you have invoked) that only fringe groups like terrorists and pedophiles oppose. As long as indifferent factions (which most ordinary people fall into) are more swayed by this kind of fear mongering than by a desire to prevent the machinery of the destruction of their rights from being built, the minority faction that argues that privacy is unnecessary or even dangerous will exert a disproportionate level of control over our entire society.

pak4• 13 years ago

Using "natural states of being", however defined, to articulate rights in unnatural states of being (i.e. modern society) is a fallacy.

You're absolutely right, I'm muddling the concept of natural rights by doing that. (John Locke would be very disappointed.) The point I was trying to make was that many people do not realize that anonymity is something that society has to actually construct infrastructure for and support. To justify doing that, anonymity would either have to be deemed a "natural right" (something society considers every citizen is justly due, like in the US Bill of Rights) or the benefits and disadvantages must be weighed in every circumstance. I'm claiming that it is the latter and questioning why techno-libertarians usually assume the former. Then I'm raising that possibility that the calculus may just work out against allowing anonymity on some common communication mediums like the Internet.

As to your second point, yes, I agree that fear-mongering is unfortunately one of the many ways that minority viewpoints can hold sway over the public debate. I can't see much of a solution to it except time and a more robust democratic system, where you hope that eventually reason and the silent majority will prevail.

etherael2• 13 years ago

Life, liberty, freedom from discrimination, due process--these things I understand, and there are well supported philosophical frameworks (rule utilitarian, Kantian, libertarian etc.) for deriving them from first principles.

Well, if you take liberty as an understandable goal worth pursuing; true free speech is only possible when the speaker is anonymous, that is, free from the repercussions of anything that they have said so they are able to say anything that they desire or believe.

In exactly the same way, true free markets are only possible when the participants are anonymous. Of course, some random anonymous person speaking freely or attempting to engage in commerce with you on the net is extremely suspect at first glance, but just because you can't link a person's speech or market activity to a meatspace identity to point a gun at, doesn't mean that person can't accrue a reputation for accurate analysis in speech or fair dealings in a market.

Look at Bitcoin itself for an example of the reputation of anonymity; Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but he has a reputation far beyond that of your average random anonymous person if he chose to use his keys again to launch or endorse any other project. Silk road, Black market reloaded and the newly activated proxy stock ownership services on Tor similarly allowed people to accrue market reputations which had real value and were linked to an identity that they controlled, but simultaneously did not paint a target on their backs for people who wanted to sanction or extort them with violence in meatspace.

In both examples, true free speech and true free markets are only enabled by breaking the link between an entity and their meatspace representation which is extremely vulnerable to coercion vs their cryptospace representation which has almost unlimited free reign to do and say what they choose within that cryptospace without vulnerability to coercion.

This is the ideal being pursued by anonymous cryptocurrency denominated markets; freedom from the friction of predatory parasitic elements that prey upon existing semi-free markets coupled with the ability to still hold market actors to account for their actions by way of their building a digital reputation and that reputation being a thing that they value and protect.

So, if you value REAL free markets and REAL free speech, anonymity should be a desirable goal.

malandrew3• 13 years ago

    "In the "state of nature," without government, we are in 
    no way anonymous."

Not really true. Pre-government issued ids, you could literally walk into many towns all over the world and people would simple have to trust that you say you are who you are. That was the ultimate anonymity, since all identification proffered up could only be done voluntarily.

mentos• 13 years ago

If we supplant all street markets for drugs with online ones, will we be trading drug/gang/gun related death with a higher incidence of drug related deaths from overdose/drug abuse?

I'd imagine there would be net less deaths in a world where Silk Roads were allowed to exist. Thats not to say that drugs should be made legal, but we shouldn't wage a 'war' on them. I know drugs aren't safe but the last time I checked, wars aren't either?

And theres no way sites like Silk Road aren't inevitable. Its a more attractive approach to being a street dealer and how many street dealers are there in the world?

I'd imagine in another decade one of the thousands of SR copy cats will have (likely accidentally) made all of the right decisions with respect to anonymity and be the defacto online drug hub.

Reminds of the opening scene of Layer Cake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5tzSks5lTI

DanBC• 13 years ago

I know drugs aren't safe

...and keeping them illegal adds to the danger.

Heroin is an unsafe drug, but impure heroin, injected with a needle that has been used and "cleaned" multiple times increases the dangers.

Making sure that heroin is hard to get makes people turn to other drugs. (Because addicts are addicted, and drug addicts take drugs.) One alternative to heroin is the Russian drug krokodil - desomorphine - often made using a variety of weird things.

CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES

(http://www.krokodildrug.com/what-is-krokodil-drug-how-to-sto...)

EDIT: MORE HORRIFIC IMAGES

(http://www.democracyindistress.com/2011/09/warning-graphic-p...) (apologies for partisan source)

dwaltrip• 13 years ago

I know drugs aren't safe

All I can do is sigh when I read statements like this.

twrkit• 13 years ago

The whole Drug War is a colossal waste of time and resources. Those who choose to indulge in narcotics will continue to do so, despite the legality or accessibility of their preferred substances. Of course, the fact of the matter is that an entire industrial complex has sprung up to wage this "war;" the DEA, weapons and surveillance equipment manufacturers, and many local and national LEO, among countless others. In short, it's a very Big and profitable business. So despite any logic or rationale for maintaining a "safe" venue to conduct narcotics trade, there will always be resistance from the entrenched lobbyists and business interests.

swamp40• 13 years ago

I think one of the unintended consequences of shutting down Silk Road so publicly will be that the existence of the Tor network is now being advertised to lots of people for the first time.

A lot of regular people are probably now saying, "Wait, I can actually buy drugs online without getting caught or ripped off?"

We'll see if there is another spike in the Tor users after this news cycle: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html

llamataboot• 13 years ago

One doesn't need to assert any natural rights. Once can make a completely utilitarian case for the decriminalization of controlled substances. In fact, nearly all available evidence points in that direction -- it is increasingly hard in w a world full of data to make the case that criminalizing substance use offers any utilitarian benefits at all. It makes the drug market a more dangerous place, controlled by violence. It destroys the lives and the communities of substance users by incarcerating them for long lengths of time. Etc etc etc. I don't need to lay out all the facts here, they are plain to see for anyone who looks into them.

dllthomas2• 13 years ago

Decriminalization of drugs does not answer the entire question - other illegal commerce was taking place there.

ufmace2• 13 years ago

Maybe in some rhetorical sense, but not in any measurable way. Silk Road was enormous for what it was, but it's nowhere near even a tiny fraction of the global drug market. It's probably still tiny compared to the drug market in any large city.

tsax2• 13 years ago

Worldwide global drug market is estimated to be around $350B/year. SR did around 1.2B over 2.5 years. So yeah a tiny amount, but a huge amount considering it just started couple years back and needed technical sophistication of bitcoin + tor + pgp to use.

malandrew3• 13 years ago

The author raises an interesting point, you could easily write a headline that says "Online Black Market The Silk Road Helps Keep More Than One Billion Dollars of Drugs Off Our Streets"

Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

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