@pharaoh
Even non TOR traffic is visible if you have the correct entrance and exit locations, and the US military and Intelligence ( and probably other countries) have those covered. Physically in the US there are two NODE points (Mae East and West) that all traffic flows through. The NSA mirrors all traffic at these points and diverts the streams to giant data centers. All data has information in data packet headers that is a leak to source and target devices and it is readable with the correct software. Most routers, etc only listen to known patterns but there are devices that see all header info. The access to these devices is severely restricted both in terms of knowledge of their existence and ability to acquire one.
It's extremely hard to actually hide. The best one can do is appear as small and unimportant as possible so they ignore you.
Yep. All of this is correct and it reminded me of reading about some of the Sicilian mafia convictions. A big boss who had been on the run for 30 years was caught last year and died whilst in a coma, in custody (he'd been battling cancer). But of course we are talking about major international players who are able to hide from the law for 30 years. Obviously a large part of this comes down to how mafia-type organisations work (as they are called in Italy, a rough English translation) but also because sensitive, top level information is written on tiny little notes, a bit like how some communications are done in prison I suppose. But these hugely wealthy crime bosses who are responsible for much drug traffic flowing through Europe with the help of global contacts actually communicate their most sensitive information on tiny pieces of paper. This guy was worth millions, possibly billions and was at least connected to billionaires.
And yes of course, no digital connections are completely hidden and I enjoyed your reply with the actual technical explanations as to how this is the case. There are the closed shell things and people are good at hiding themselves but if their actions are discovered then of course the various tech arms of the intelligence apparatus will try and breach whatever network has been created. I think with the darknet markets, basically only bother for small purchases and always assume that you will potentially be ripped off during any transaction and that an exit scam may be pulled at any time. But as has been said many times in this thread, unless you are moving enough either way to the point at which law enforcement would bother looking into you then you pretty much have nothing to worry about. This silly attempt at extortion would've only fooled a small number of naive people into actually paying up and anyone big enough to worry about law enforcement would just clean up before anyone really got onto them (if they were a big deal, law enforcement would likely already be onto them anyway - think about big shots you know or know of and what you know about them, then imagine what law enforcement knows about them).
I saw someone in another thread who was talking about ordering small packages from The Netherlands to another country with a couple of borders in between (maybe even just one, would need a map to be sure). Small packages which make it through and law enforcement aren't likely to give a shit about a gram of heroin for personal use, especially in the more liberal of the western and Northern European cities. But what interested me is that this package came from NL, which of course has one of most significant ports in terms of global commerce (Rotterdam), whether legal or illegal. It amazes me to think that that gear may have come from the same supply that was the smuggled across the channel into the UK in multi-kilo shipments. Maybe smaller OCGs buy a brick and sell over the Internet. It's a complex market and supposedly the Moroccans run much of the trade in NL so it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that they have smaller gangs running drugs via darknet markets and who are able to run away to Morocco if things heat up.
Anyway, I find this stuff fascinating.
Edit:
@Cheshire_Kat I didn't mean impenetrable by high level military/intelligence apparatus people. I meant closed off from "the public", as in most of us can access a darknet market and people could access a nonce site even via the hidden wiki. But there are closed shell systems used by highly secretive groups who try everything to keep their tracks hidden. But of course given that all of this tech was created by the military (the Internet itself, Tor and other similar systems to the latter) of course they could stumble across them, but I doubt any of us could (nor would we want to). Also I imagine that some of the peoe using closed shell type systems are actually a part of the intelligence and military apparatus themselves - I believe that they aid in facilitating much of the crime that they then investigate, much like creating conditions for a war and then going into that war. Iraq for example)
