Silk Road forums
Discussion => Shipping => Topic started by: rosshalde on October 02, 2011, 09:15 am
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I see a lot of Europeans unwilling or cautious about shipping to Finland, Sweden or Norway. These are all Schengen countries though, is there something special about their border security?
Also, Nordic countries are well known for their internet penetration, which makes the fact that there are no vendors in these countries puzzling. If there are some problems moving product north in Europe I'm pretty sure that any vendor operating within the Nordic countries would have no trouble moving product within the whole Nordic market because the border security between Nordic countries is even more lax than Schengen.
So, anyone know anything about the 'Nordic blackout'?
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I was wondering the same, since I have never had trouble getting my packages there.
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Do you have experience with Finland Mitanox?
About a year ago Finnish customs added this in their arsenal to support the k9s: hxxp://www.smithsdetection.com/IONSCAN_500DT.php
This move was probably related to the fact that the World Customs Organization's Director General is currently the ex-head of Finnish Customs and Smiths Group is heavily involved with the WCO. Other users are the Federal Burea of Prisons, Transportation Security Administration (not calibrated for narcotics), ABLE Freight, and Customs and Border Protection(they have 1 which was shipped to San Francisco, probably went to the Mexico border?) in the USA, Lufthansa Cargo and Corrections Victoria (Australian prisons) and by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistam.
Probably other users too but those were the only ones I could find. The technology used is Ion Mobility Spectrometry, it can detect trace amounts of drugs on envelopes by taking a sample and ionizing the particles in the sample, passing them through a drift space and analyzing them based on their mobility pattern. Its weakness is low chemical specificity meaning false alarms and it's vulnerable to high amounts of dust, humidity and temperature changes.
Patents: hxxp://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5227628/fulltext.html
hxxp://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2008/0101995.html
Detection limits:
Narcotics Mode
Cocaine 0.5 ng
Heroin 3 ng
Amphetamine 0.5 ng
Methamphetamine 0.5 ng
Ammonium nitrate 1 ng
MDA 0.3 ng
MDMA 0.3 ng
HMTD 2 ng
TATP 10 ng
THC 0.5 ng
LSD 4 ng
PCP 0.3 ng
Paper discussing clandestine laboratories and detection methods: hxxp://www.css.drdc-rddc.gc.ca/cprc/tr/tr-2008-04.pdf
IMS units are susceptible to contamination; some contaminants with low vapour pressure may remain inside the detector for minutes, even hours or days. Low temperature operation allows neutral water molecules in the sample and drift gas to attach to analyte ions to form multimolecular ion clusters, thus altering the mobility of the analyte ion and introducing errors into the reading. Since trace amounts of water are near impossible to eliminate from the spectrometer, it is common practice to add water at a concentration of 10 ppm to ensure reproducible responses
At least it should become less effective as winter comes...
Bureau of Prisons operation procedure for the system: hxxp://www.bop.gov/locations/institutions/ccc/CCC_ion_spectrometry_device.pdf
Prior to performing a confirmation test the operator must perform a "clear" test to eliminate the possibility that equipment contamination caused an initial positive test result. The operator will remove the original gloves worn and replace with new ones. The device will then be cleaned with a pre-saturated wipe. If a negative test cannot be obtained the SIS department should be notified for troubleshooting, maintenance, or repair of the device.
These things costing 50,000$ I assume that their maintenance is expensive as hell too. I'm theorizing that it would probably be very cost effective to send out fake packages that are designed to jam these systems if you can just figure out how to do that (cost effective in the sense of costs to the attacker vs the costs to the customs agencies). But I've got no more ideas.
EDIT: I forgot this: http://www.yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2011/09/nain_huumeet_kulkeutuvat_suomeen_2873548.html
It's drug routes into Finland and through Finland, which seems to indicate that the current prime suspect drug exporting countries into Finland are Holland, Germany, Spain, Poland, Estonia and Russia, from which you could make the guess that packages from these countries are at a higher risk of interception than from other countries.