[PSA/Article] 2015 study - Evaluating drug trafficking on the Tor Network: Silk Road 2, the sequel.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25681266

Full text pdf here.


Comments


[10 Points] ShulginsCat:

TL;DR - she crawled SR2 a couple of times, and by reading the item descriptions and vendor profiles she "concludes" that they might have connections to traditional drug cartels (as opposed to what? each vendor producing the drugs from scratch?!).

Not even a single lab test was done to confirm. Pretty speculative and largely useless information.


[9 Points] gwern:

FWIW, this paper has already been discussed extensively among the academics. (Why haven't you heard any criticism? Well, what's in it for them? Publish or perish. And it's notoriously hard to publish a criticism in a journal; for some reason, the editors don't seem to like it...)

The summary is that the paper is complete junk. Nothing in it is right. The crawl Dolliver is using was broken: it only fetched something like 1.3k listings out of 13k listings, primarily from the e-book section. None of the estimates, figures, or analyses take this into account and thus they're all wrong. It's a pretty breathtaking fail because Dolliver realized the problem and discusses it on pg14-15 when she notes that she only had 1.3k items in her crawl but the categories added up to more like 13k, but then boldly proclaims it's not a problem because she looked into it, speculates SR2 was merely falsifying the count, and she definitely hasn't messed up but - rather - made a remarkable find! It's unclear how she was "investigating further" - certainly my SR2 crawls disagree in the strongest possible terms with the claim, as do everyone else's....

(There are other issues beyond that, but that's the most important one, which renders the others moot.)

I emailed Dolliver about this over a month ago when I first saw the preprint, several times, and I've offered to share my full SR2 crawls so she could fix the paper or at least check. She has yet to reply.

I still wonder how this paper could have made it through peer review with lines like

Further, when considering the historical total number of transactions having taken place on Silk Road 2 up to the point of data collection, drugs accounted for a mere 1% of total items sold.

(That is not a typo; it really says "1%"! I know, I know. Also, it's idiotic to try to make any claims about historical total transactions based on one or two snapshot crawls, especially about a market as pathological & badly run & scammer-ridden as SR2.)