FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests owner

^ I totally agree with this people just want it to be like ebay they can choose any drug order multiple things at once and have a choice of who they buy it from which brand etc. It will be hard for any other site to get to the level of access and variety SR was allowing buyers to have.

It would be good if you could just buy everything from one vendor aswell more like amazon than ebay where your dealing with individual different ones. This is obviously unlikely to ever happen lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh68DDUYVPM

StoryCorps interview with the 2 of them. Gets interesting about 16mins in.
 
Dresden said:
Busting Silk Road is a big win in the War on Drugs for the government's side.
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Maybe, yet they seem to be losing the ultimate battle which is public position. More and more people are opposed to the War on Drugs. Hell, a majority of American's now support legalization of Marijuana. Small victory in getting mandatory minimums rolled back etc etc.

Ultimately, I do not look at it as an "us vs them".. the ultimate goal has to be to continue to convince the average citizen that drug use is a health, nor criminal issue.
 
Mandark said:
What a remarkably sensible comment about this: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/03/silk-road-drug-selling-website-fbi
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Thanks for the article, my one point is it fails to mention that when a government is sensible. It can be quite good when it comes to operating harm reduction efforts. Medical Marijuana, Prescription Heroin, Programs, Methadone Clinics, state funded Bupernorphine, Needle Exchanges, Drug Courts, Quality Public Treatment. Are all examples of what sensible government can do for both users and society at large.

"Government" is an institution, people power it. It can serve as either good or bad.

Now as for small time buyers being arrested, its very doubtful. The resources do not exist to bust a guy who ordered a bag of weed on SR. I have no idea what type of networks operated on the SR, but if they were large enough it might be of some interest. Only time will tell to be honest, but we have seen things like this go down before (maybe not on this scale) and the small buyers are just not targeted (yes, I know about the 20 or so UK arrests in WebTryp)
 
tyrael said:
Also glancing at the security holes already known in the network, to me they seem over-comable. I think if the code for Tor was made available; an upgrade/update/security-fixing would be a lot easier than something from scratch (considering the success) imo.
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Tor is open source:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git

There was also a comment a while back saying "The feds are willing to ship 1kg of coke", no, they would have shipped sugar or something.
 
VolcanoPreston said:
...
Atlantis may have failed but if they had held on just a few more weeks, they'd now be sucking up all of Silk Road's trade and Litecoin would be exploding.
...
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Atlantis was tipped off on the DPR/SR bust ahead of time.
 
VolcanoPreston said:
Do we have a source for that?
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Atlantis staff;

We have some terrible news. Regrettably it has come time for Atlantis to close its doors. Due to security reasons outside of our control we have no choice but to cease operation of the Atlantis marketplace. Believe us when we say we wouldn't be doing this if it weren't 100% necessary.
...
There will be lots of conspiracy theory's springing up here and no doubt the honeypot ones will continue but I can only say as the first and only "employee" of Atlantis I never believed any of it to be true based on my communications and general vibe of those I dealt with. At the very least I was contacted by people "pertaining" to be LE so unless LE were looking to flip someone working for LE I don't know any more.
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http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1mtcb1/dpr_atlantis_spokesman_on_the_atlantis_shutdown/

It seems likely that the Atlantis owner was asked for details about DPR that would be incriminating and was threatened by LEOs with blackmail.
 
tyrael said:
Why aren't we all being investigated/in jail?

Personally I've found those with no/limited technical knowledge of the "Internet" (protocols [TCP, IP - yes TCP and IP are different protocols, its not one although people do write "TCP/IP", HTTP, HTTPS, etc]), networking (the OSI model [layers 1-7]........................................
Go and hand-code, from scratch, the TCP/IP routing algorithm* and we'll talk (means we'll be on roughly the same technological level).
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Wow thats so impressive.
I know you're smart but not smart enough to know that if you were being investigated you wouldn't know about it! that's how it works. they don't notify you and say "dear so and so we are investigating you , please continue as you were , we will let you know when the investigation is over and whether we will be pressing charges or not"
just because someone isn't to your technical level doesn't mean they can't have a valid opinion or that you can dismiss what they say by being arrogant.

You only know what you know, you have no idea of the capabilities of government, what snowden revealed is likely just the tip of the iceberg of the surveillance.
Government Trackers, Malware, Cookies,key stroke recorders etc.. If LE were to get a list of all IP's accessing BL how hard do you think it would be to figure out the identities of those using it.

Anyways I'm far from an IT guy but I'm also not into tinfoil hats , all I'm saying is it's a possibility and it wouldn't surprise me, so people should exercise caution online. For all those that think LE won't bother with someone buying a few g's think the fuck again, they might be busy now but that shit is in the books. If they can get you for any reason they will no matter how trivial, their whole existence isn't to protect and serve but to find reasons to arrest people. thats not a speculation on my part
 
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bennyZA said:
I don't think for 1 second that the FBI or the DEA has remotely enough man power. This was a targeted operation. Take down SR, scare a few people, bust a few vendors, move on. Which do you think is the bigger danger, Mexican cartels shipping tons of meth, coke, and heroin or some SR users. The FBI's not going to handle the individual raids. There job's even more important. They will certainly pass on what they know about vendors, but users!? I don't think so. That UK site had unencrypted addresses and credit cards on file.
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Just going on past history - it wasn't a UK site that got busted it was an american site. And the DEA passed on every detail of every user in the UK and demanded the UK cops bust their doors down. If you think they've got more relaxed about drugs in the previous 7 years than ok, I hope you're right. But my advice is for fucks sake make sure your house is clean - just in case.
 
I reckon Ismenes advice is good advice & anyone with a history on SR would be wise to adhere to it. As a precaution.

On the other hand, if you've got a bit of weed & half a tab of acid in the fridge, I doubt they'd throw the book at you & I suspect that sheer number of customers on SR makes busting even 1% of them close to impossible.

I do not expect that the precedent set by the operation after which Mr Ismene names himself will be repeated in this case because of the size of the task & the manpower limitations of law enforcement. The Ismene operation was a much, much smaller one & since then the amount of internet based distribution has gone through the roof & continues to grow exponentially despite losses such as this one. In fact, the exposure of SR will bring even more people to the world of internet drugs through media reporting of the story, but this is an excellent excuse for law enforcement to frighten off potential customers with a few high profile busts of SR vendors & buyers. But I suspect it would be a token effort & is not likely to cause small scale vendors & buyers any trouble because it's simply a logistical nightmare to trace & prosecute small time types.

Ismene's advice still stands & I'd take it if you have any concerns about your ID on SR beng compromised or if you have transacted recently & happen to be in possession. Better safe than sorry!
 
And delete tor off your computer(s) incase they happen to check your computer. Seriously tho, i doubt they are going to go through everyones houses that ever ordered off SR, maybe some of the larger vendors, I doubt even that personally, but who knows. For end users they may as well bust some people on the street. Easier than getting search warrants for 100,00+ people (or however many, i just picked a number at random lol).
 
They will go for the low hanging fruit. It is hard to penetrate cartels but here they are with order details and addresses. All they need to do is say "this person ordered xg of substance Y and they still live at 123 fake st., can we have a warrant? You think the judge will say no?
 
^^ I'm not trying to play the arrogant smartass but - imo - the safest way to run something like Tor is to have it on a small capacity, inconspicuous usb key (thumb drive); preferably embedded into a secure, relatively easy to use Linux OS distribution designed for such purposes. Encrypting your filesystem within the USB drive with a sufficiently long password is also essential.

This way, if you wish to access Tor, the rest of your attached storage and internal drives are cut off and inaccessible (unless you manually choose to mount them, but I don't see why you would). What's great about this method is that only that USB key + your RAM is used as storage. And when you shut off your PC after you're finished, the Linux OS will usually re-write your RAM with zeroes in case someone like the pigs wants to oink their noses in your tower and check for evidence. And if you're really worried, make sure that USB key is never found again in working order.

For the record, I didn't write the above information because I want anyone reading this to know how to break the law; on the contrary, I'm writing this as a means of letting you know one way you can minimize the chances of possibly having your freedom unjustly taken away from you because of these ridiculous draconian drug policies we continue to refer to as law. And I'm sick and tired of seeing people sent off to prison because of plants, pills, powders, shards, etc.
 
WOW! I just heard of this. And i've gotten stuff from there before. I hope they don't go after the users. or the small time users. Cause i saw some people were in the 20-30k range of money spent on the site. I was like, whoa! lucky bastards! But after this, maybe not so lucky. I wonder how the FBI/NSA did it. But we all know there will be others. There are 2 open sites now like SR, So idk...close one and like 3 open up. And then there are all the sellers who might still deal with people who have their emails.
I'm reading the SR forums now, and people seem to think it's been hacked instead of seized by the government. So who knows? Maybe it just got hacked...Until i see it on the news(This would make a HUGE news story), I'm gonna remain optimistic.
 
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Ismene said:
Just going on past history - it wasn't a UK site that got busted it was an american site. And the DEA passed on every detail of every user in the UK and demanded the UK cops bust their doors down. If you think they've got more relaxed about drugs in the previous 7 years than ok, I hope you're right. But my advice is for fucks sake make sure your house is clean - just in case.
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Good advice, but I do not think those arrests occurred because the "US demanded the UK" make them. They occurred because the individuals ordered 2C-I which was illegal in the UK. I do not think many, if any end purchasers of that website were arrested in the US. I cannot be certain as details were murky. That being said, vendors and large scale buyers should be concerned. Hell, anyone that engages in illegal activities of any type should be concerned.

Also, recently the US had "Logjam" or whatever it was called and I do not think it resulted in end users being arrested either.

What I think is most likely is that the US/UK/EU nations use this case as an attempt to strengthen some type of law.

http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/research_chems/research_chems_info1.shtml
 
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