The Dutch Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie or OM) currently is looking for ways to stop, scare, hinder and prosecute both vendors and (likely to some degree) customers operating within and from Europe. This is an outline of their international 3-point plan; which is not an official release but was given as an statement on DNM's from the OM to an journalist of volkskrant.nl; one of the leading newspapers in the NL.
PROJECT: ITOM (Illegal Trade on Online Marketplaces)
Source: Dutch only, sorry: http://static3.volkskrant.nl/static/asset/2014/Reactie_Openbaar_Ministerie_6685.pdf
Released 2 days ago
1 . Hindering and stopping vendors, administrators and shutting down hidden markets. Along with serious measures to track down and prosecute vendors. The Hague's Prosecution service which is leading ITOM will soon be holding coordinated international joint operations in the following months (to attempt to take down markets and/or vendors). The involved countries and agencies have already held meetings about this plan in the last few months
2 . More scrutiny on outgoing and incoming pieces of mail within and from the Europe. This will not just involve customs but also mail and postal services themselves before they even leave the sorting center (by the sound of it). It also needs to become much harder to anonymously send drugs through the mail through more thorough investigations and putting up several roadblocks to keep it from being this easy. According to this paper plans for this have already been set in motion since late 2013 but not fully. So this will likely be ramped up.
3 . Chasing the "Bottleneck" that is Bitcoin and de-anonymizing cash out methods and ways to turn Bitcoin into cash. They are also making it sound as if they are going after, or at least investigate those who purchase Bitcoin to a certain degree, because to their reasoning there are very little legal ways to spend bitcoin. ITOM soon will also propose a new law or rule-set regarding Bitcoin exchanging and transactions, this is their final mention regarding this point, no other information given.
Funded by the EU(!) in cooperation and planning with the following agencies:
Pretty much every single Dutch investigation agency except the dutch Homeland Security equivalent AIVD
LP, DLR, FIOD, FP & OM (NL)
Europol
Eurojust
FBI (US)
ICE (US)
BKA (DE)
StA (DE)
PGdR (PT)
NCA (UK)
NBI (SE)
This is a partial list, not all agencies where named
And border forces (Custom Inspection) of the following countries:
- Estland, Finland, France, Spain, Italy, Letland, Litouwen, Poland, Austria...(paper is ended in "And so on" likely meaning every other country within the European Union which does not have an agency directly cooperating).
I hope this serves as a warning. We should have seen this coming, and we should also see what is coming in the next few months to years. Having good OPSEC, not leaving any traces and taking this more serious should be incredibly important to all of us, especially those in Europe.
Here's an additional piece of information about Dutch vendors in particular. It reports that the Dutch online drug trade is rivaling the income from the legal coffeeshops:
Translation through google:
And as a final note, lets not forget that ISP's can see if you are or have been using TOR. In combination with this.
The normal OPSEC standard should be upgraded to some higher security levels for all of us.
I just want to smoke some fucking weed god damn
it's really not this fucking serious