Silk Road forums
Discussion => Silk Road discussion => Topic started by: Thekla1 on July 01, 2013, 07:46 pm
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Hi, good journalist (Drugs 2.0),
CLEARNET http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/01/closing-down-drugs-websites
(sorry couldn't work out how to just extract text to cut n paste. But go read)
Take care
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Here's the article in full
The subversive world of online drug dealing presents its own problems
Encrypted websites selling illegal drugs may render prohibition obsolete, but their profit-driven nature could be just as harmful
Mike Power
Mike Power
guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 July 2013 19.00 BST
A nameless admin at Atlantis, a website selling everything from magic mushrooms to marijuana to crack cocaine, posted an advert on YouTube last week. The video was swiftly taken down, but not before about 40,000 people had seen it, copied down the strange URL and gone off to investigate. It's part of a bold new marketing campaign to allow people to easily buy illegal drugs, wherever they are in the world. Whether that's a good or bad thing is debatable.
Atlantis is a competitor to the Silk Road, an underground online market where drugs are bought and sold openly, sent to users under plain wrap in the mail. But where the Silk Road hides and does not share its URL very widely, Atlantis is shockingly blatant and comes over like a cocky web start-up. It is paying dividends: the site's owners claim to have processed half a million dollars in deals since March. There are allegations that it is a honeypot, drawing in ex-Silk Road vendors by charging lower fees, and offering proprietary encryption, rather than demanding that users learn PGP software (Pretty Good Privacy). This means the site's owners might be able to see where dealers on the site are sending drugs to, and identify customers, or listen in on email conversations and begin to expose dealers. Might the DEA have set up a bogus site to ensnare the unwary?
While nothing any government does around privacy should surprise us nowadays, from indiscriminately recording our every thought and whim, to spying on the grieving parents of murdered children with the aim of smearing their characters, the emergence of Atlantis and sites like it into the mainstream does raise the interesting prospect of a new war on encryption. Encryption software, most commonly PGP, scrambles your mail, making it impossible for a third party who does not own two special "keys" to read your mail.
Now the Prism and Tempora cats are out of the bag, and it's dawned on almost everyone what fools they've been, I'd guess that governments will soon be very keen to control encryption and will use the drug problem as a straw man defence for their next wave of intrusion. Note to government, it didn't work last time. To quote John Callas, who helped invent PGP with Phil Zimmerman: "PGP is just math, and you can't ban math."
In the UK, though, encryption can be a de facto crime under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the Labour-era assault on civil liberties. Refuse to hand over the private keys to your private files and you can and will be jailed. IT website The Register reported in 2009 that the first person jailed under part three of Ripa was "a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no criminal record". Found with a model rocket as he returned from Paris, he refused to give police the keys to his encrypted data: indeed, he refused to speak at all, and was jailed for 13 months. Six months into his sentence the man was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and does not know when he will be released.
It's pretty easy to see what the initial official response to sites such as Atlantis will be. There'll be a concerted media campaign to scare people off. A few big busts of users, plus an attempted and likely very public assault on Bitcoin, the anonymous currency used to pay for the drugs.
But Bitcoin is essentially unassailable, because the currency has no central bank, and is made and maintained by a network of users. There's now enough of it in circulation to become a closed and private economy. Bitcoin is divisible into eight decimal places – 0.00000001 BTC is the smallest amount that can be handled in a transaction – so there's plenty of spare capacity. Perhaps an attack on Tor might work? Tor is the anonymising software that enables these markets to be hosted and accessed secretly. To quote Andrew Lewman, the Tor project's spokesman:
"Our code is all open source, everything we do is open source, and is mirrored all over the world. So even if, for whatever reason, let's say the paedophile-terrorist-druglords and the four horsemen of the apocalypse take over Tor and that's the majority usage, then the current Tor network could shut down, and just like a phoenix it will get born again. Then maybe we'll have 10 or 1,200 Tor networks because everyone starts running their own."
The only way to tackle online markets such as this is to make postal procedures hugely onerous. But that costs. The Royal Mail is about to be privatised and no one wants to invest. With 96% of itsstaff supporting a strike and opposing privatisation, it's hard to see workers agreeing to new requirements to scan every piece of post for drugs. In any case, queues in understaffed offices are so lengthy and the entire process of posting a letter so redolent of the frustrating world before the net there would be a customer revolt.
And there's no way sniffer dogs can tackle the circa 70m pieces of just domestic post at the sorting offices each day. When I was researching my book on the internet drugs trade, the Royal Mail refused to answer even the simplest questions about steps taken to identify packages containing drugs. The reason for that, postmen have told me privately, is that there are none. There's a new Russian anonymous market, that has just come online too. There will be many more, since prohibition makes their operation profitable and their use logical.
Free market economics, whose rules of supply and demand we so conspicuously ignore in this vast sector of the economy, make simple herbs and plant extracts or simply produced chemicals worth many millions of pounds per tonne. And so there will always be a market. That market has now been virtualised: Drugs 2.0 – click here to buy now.
But while I smile in disbelief at the defiance and subversion of sites like Silk Road and Atlantis, I can't help thinking that this cavalier dismantling of the failed and discredited prohibition model, replacing it with another system driven by private profit with no regard to people's health, risks exposing people to similar harms as prohibition did. Note past tense.
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I'm glad to atleast see the ending presenting it in a semi-favorable way. Prohibition isn't about keeping anyone safe. :p
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Thanks for sharing this...I'm so glad SR and its users aren't so blatantly vocal about what we're doing. Atlantis can go kiss off into the air. They will be an even bigger target for LE b/c they put themselves out there, virtually thumbing their nose at straight society and the drug czars. We will remain calm, cool, and collected. What's so ironic about it all is that Bitcoin, Tor, PGP, are open source...the manual is out there for anybody to manipulate. That must drive the Powers That Be crazy...the control lies in the hands of the people, not them.
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I'm glad to atleast see the ending presenting it in a semi-favorable way. Prohibition isn't about keeping anyone safe. :p
I'd emphasize the semi though: "replacing it with another system driven by private profit with no regard to people's health." Certainly vendors and SR work on a model of profit--vendors want profit, they why they vend, but this statement overlooks the pretty constructive community at work behind SR, which includes vendors, who are concerned with buyers'/users' health. I mean, take a look at the Drug Safety sub-forum. It seems like a bit of a cop-out on the journalist's behalf to overlook a pretty major part of SR, the community.
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Yea, I initially thought, "Atlantis? That might be interesting."
...until I read that part about the built-in-encryption.
No thanks, that's bullshit.
I'd like my info to be as inaccessible as possible. In my opinion, even one person with my personal info is too many, and if I could figure out a way to do all of this without telling even the vendor, I would.
If Silk Road had their own built-in encryption, I wouldn't be here.
HoneyPot indeed...
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I'm glad to atleast see the ending presenting it in a semi-favorable way. Prohibition isn't about keeping anyone safe. :p
I'd emphasize the semi though: "replacing it with another system driven by private profit with no regard to people's health." Certainly vendors and SR work on a model of profit--vendors want profit, they why they vend, but this statement overlooks the pretty constructive community at work behind SR, which includes vendors, who are concerned with buyers'/users' health. I mean, take a look at the Drug Safety sub-forum. It seems like a bit of a cop-out on the journalist's behalf to overlook a pretty major part of SR, the community.
As someone who opted for reading and researching on Erowid as a better education than the standard public high school curriculum (though I haven't kept up with that site or other drug forums until SR revived my interest), I was impressed right away as I browsed these forums and actually found intelligent discussion and civil dialog, with users demonstrating a keen awareness of harm reduction philosophy, as well as vendors showing real integrity by taking an active concern in providing clean, safe, and high quality products to discerning consumers.
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Thanks for sharing this...I'm so glad SR and its users aren't so blatantly vocal about what we're doing. Atlantis can go kiss off into the air. They will be an even bigger target for LE b/c they put themselves out there, virtually thumbing their nose at straight society and the drug czars. We will remain calm, cool, and collected.
Attention to Atlantis brings attention to online drug marketplaces, i.e. Atlantis, SR, and BMR, among others. It seems whoever is in control at Atlantis, they are feverishly fishing for the type of membership that SR took years to build up, and their greed is clouding their ability to discern between what is safe, and what is profitable. Personally, I would never join. I simply do not trust their judgment, from what I have seen thus far. I would not be surprised if the owner was extremely young (18-19) and lacked the knowledge of computer security that is required to run such a site. As has been discussed in the security forums (and years before), there are vulnerabilities in tor, especially in hidden services. Outright posting an ad on (for god's sake) Youtube indicates little regard for security, as no competent owner of a hidden service would want to increase overall attention to his/her site. It's desparate, weak, and, worst of all, incompetent. That is my take.
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From the end of the article:
I can't help thinking that this cavalier dismantling of the failed and discredited prohibition model, replacing it with another system driven by private profit with no regard to people's health, risks exposing people to similar harms as prohibition did.
So private profit = bad. And private profit = no regard to people's health (without helpful government regulation and control of course!)
It's this kind of garbage thinking which leads to more government, more controls and more police. After all, only government can protect us from evil private profiteers and the unclean products that they sell us. :o >:(
Fact is that I haven't been poisoned and no one else on SR has ever been poisoned AFAIK. Many even sell kits to determine product quality. It really angers me when people out there, like this writer, promote bullshit to feed their own egos and beliefs. How about presenting some evidence that people on SR have been poisoned by bad batches sold by established vendors? Oh I forgot. That doesn't matter. With all due respect: fuck off, Mr. Power!
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I'm glad to atleast see the ending presenting it in a semi-favorable way. Prohibition isn't about keeping anyone safe. :p
I'd emphasize the semi though: "replacing it with another system driven by private profit with no regard to people's health." Certainly vendors and SR work on a model of profit--vendors want profit, they why they vend, but this statement overlooks the pretty constructive community at work behind SR, which includes vendors, who are concerned with buyers'/users' health. I mean, take a look at the Drug Safety sub-forum. It seems like a bit of a cop-out on the journalist's behalf to overlook a pretty major part of SR, the community.
That^ really is a flaw to the article. SR does have bad people who fit the writer's description. I don't think they are a majority. The good people who take time to post in the forums and vendor feedback provide a tremendous resource for both product quality assurance and responsible drug use education. The educational aspect of SR really impresses me as something the people of the world need so badly for personal safety. Such education is intentionally withheld by mainstream society to such an extent that great harm to peoples bodies and minds has resulted over a long time period. SR is not the only online resource for this education, but it is rather accessible, and I think, growing in popularity. Thanks Goodness for SR :-)
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from the forums , my dealings as a buyer, and my dealings as a vendor, The road is full of terrific people. which begs the question: Why are they at war with genuinely good people?
the worst drug traffickers in the world are the governments
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from the forums , my dealings as a buyer, and my dealings as a vendor, The road is full of terrific people. which begs the question: Why are they at war with genuinely good people?
the worst drug traffickers in the world are the governments
I agree with you silo. One bit of evidence that there is an American cartel is the CIA
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from the forums , my dealings as a buyer, and my dealings as a vendor, The road is full of terrific people. which begs the question: Why are they at war with genuinely good people?
the worst drug traffickers in the world are the governments
Yea Korlea needs to had the meth over to america we need it STEM students are using that pussy shit adderal. IDK worst ones have to be the ESOL ones.
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Thanks for the share :) Seems like Atlantis is a whole lot of fuckery.
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the worst drug traffickers in the world are the governments
I agree with you silo. One bit of evidence that there is an American cartel is the CIA
The pharma cartel and it's lackeys in the Universities are even worse. They have their PR agents in every possible insitution.
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Thanks for sharing this...I'm so glad SR and its users aren't so blatantly vocal about what we're doing. Atlantis can go kiss off into the air. They will be an even bigger target for LE b/c they put themselves out there, virtually thumbing their nose at straight society and the drug czars. We will remain calm, cool, and collected. What's so ironic about it all is that Bitcoin, Tor, PGP, are open source...the manual is out there for anybody to manipulate. That must drive the Powers That Be crazy...the control lies in the hands of the people, not them.
I fail to see the difference compared to what Atlantis has done and the actual police and media combined.
Atlantis used youtube, the media and police happily advertise it on television.
Deep down i dont think anyone gives a shit, if they did, why even advertise it.
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Not really sure what the journalist is getting at but one thing's for certain, there will be a second war on encryption. The only question is, how will governments attack it. It's not as if they can simply try to regain control of the techonology. But they are concocting some plan. There's no doubt about that. Having people going about there business in private just won't do.
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Not really sure what the journalist is getting at but one thing's for certain, there will be a second war on encryption. The only question is, how will governments attack it. It's not as if they can simply try to regain control of the techonology. But they are concocting some plan. There's no doubt about that. Having people going about there business in private just won't do.
Privacy will be obliterated in time.
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What could the Feds realistically do in the short term to show they are making progress?? It would have to be done at the level of the U.S Postal Service. It is our own government that acts as drug mules, and that must embarrass those at the top. I've heard of lawsuits being filed, and also dismissed against UPS and FedEX for doing the same things. UPS, if I recall correctly, actually made a commitment to stop delivery of packages they believed came from online pharmacies. Back in the mid-00's I was a fervent customer of domestic online pharmacies that delivered contolled medications overnight via FedEx. I had FedEx deliveries coming 3-4 times a week...there is not doubt in my mind those FedEx drivers knew what they were delivering to me. It was always a 'wink, wink, nudge nudge see you tomorrow buddy' sort of transaction. It was almost comically absurd. Around 2007 many of these online pharmacies were shuttered and my days of easy, front door delivery were over for awhile. But FedEx trudged along....I came to find later that FedEx is a huge contributor to campaigns of elected officials, often the same officials who reaped campaign donations from pharmaceutical companies. This couldn't have been a coincidence and may have played a role in why FedEx never was properly sanctioned for being a defacto drug delivery service. With the billions of pieces of mail going thru our national system, the stretched budgets, and short-staffed departments.....i believe it would take a miracle to reform the USPS to elevate drug interdiction as one of prime importance......................but if it so happens, FedEx, or some new private delivery corporation started by secret partners of (say) Dread Pirate Roberts could step right in and come to our salvation. The SR will thrive as it is destined to do. ;D Just idle musings.....yet I remain optimistic! Cheers.
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from the forums , my dealings as a buyer, and my dealings as a vendor, The road is full of terrific people. which begs the question: Why are they at war with genuinely good people?
To that question, I do not have a definite answer. It's just my thought on it, but it's almost like they misunderstand competition in a free market sense.
From a business and profit-generating standpoint, competition is a good reason for them to get into the business of facilitating drug-related transactions. However, they're competing not vendor vs vendor on the same platform, they're competing platform vs platform in the same market. And clearly they've already scared away many of the serious businessfolks who would buy and sell on their site simply because they tried to fast track their platform to SR's level, and will (in my prediction) never reach SR's level of usability and trust, and will disappear equally as flashy and quick as they came.
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Anyone have a link to this new Russian site?
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With the billions of pieces of mail going thru our national system, the stretched budgets, and short-staffed departments.....i believe it would take a miracle to reform the USPS to elevate drug interdiction as one of prime importance......................but if it so happens, FedEx, or some new private delivery corporation started by secret partners of (say) Dread Pirate Roberts could step right in and come to our salvation. The SR will thrive as it is destined to do. ;D Just idle musings.....yet I remain optimistic! Cheers.
Thankfully our politicians are unimaginably greedy. Putting money into USPS reform would mean diverting money from their own pockets, not only for the reform, but also for the loss in business USPS would experience. But, by the time something like that was even possible, DPR would be working on a system to deliver drugs using drones ;)
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I've heard of Atlantis, I've never had enough interest to have ever visited their site. I've read that some vendor from there was recently blatantly advertising on YouTube, I never bothered to check it out. Although I did think about that one for long enough to be momentarily semi-shocked at the sheer stupidity of a clearnet ad for a hidden service. Especially on a site as visible, well known and with as much traffic as YouTube.... I mean, wouldn't it have been a lot easier and cheaper to have just bought some web space from Go Daddy for a couple of bucks and opened it on the clearnet? Where they advertise? Until the moment passed and I realized that there is probably more going on there than just stupidity and it's most likely much more sinister than stupid.
It was mentioned in the article that there is already speculation that perhaps this is a honeypot, and I tend to think that's exactly what it is.
It just doesn't make any kind of sense for someone to take the time, thought, energy, as well as they would need to have a considerable amount of knowledge, etc.. not to mention shell out whatever money it would cost - in start-up alone - plus whatever other costs must be associated with opening a full functioning blackmarket website site as a hidden service on TOR, then advertise it on YouTube along with giving out what I gather from the article in the Guardian was it's .onion url. Add those two opposing actions with the fact that they suppesedly tell their sellers and buyers that they don't need to bother encrypting their own information because the site will do it for them?
Whole operation just reeks of a DEA sting... or honeypot. I just hope that no one from SR goes over there and starts writing in their forum (assuming they have one) and unintentionally - perhaps by possibly getting too comfortable - gives out any details of this site not already well known to what could very well be one of SR's greatest adversaries. (Just one of my many opinions....)
Of course, I could be totally wrong... then again there's always the chance that I'm not....... err on the side of caution if you don't know exactly who is behind the site and what their true motives are....
;)
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Anyone have a link to this new Russian site?
Try: [CENSORED: scam link]rky4es5q.onion
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With the billions of pieces of mail going thru our national system, the stretched budgets, and short-staffed departments.....i believe it would take a miracle to reform the USPS to elevate drug interdiction as one of prime importance......................but if it so happens, FedEx, or some new private delivery corporation started by secret partners of (say) Dread Pirate Roberts could step right in and come to our salvation. The SR will thrive as it is destined to do. ;D Just idle musings.....yet I remain optimistic! Cheers.
Thankfully our politicians are unimaginably greedy. Putting money into USPS reform would mean diverting money from their own pockets, not only for the reform, but also for the loss in business USPS would experience. But, by the time something like that was even possible, DPR would be working on a system to deliver drugs using drones ;)
Thank you Romero - the image my mind conjured up at the last bit of your post suggesting drones delivering drugs for SR... just hit me in a way that for a couple minutes there, made me literally L.O.L! :D
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Anyone have a link to this new Russian site?
http://ramp2bombkadwvgz.onion
Russian Anonmous MarketPlace aka RAMP
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@garrincha My apologies, I misread your question regarding the link. Glad fiveotwo got you the one you were looking for....
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I've heard of Atlantis, I've never had enough interest to have ever visited their site. I've read that some vendor from there was recently blatantly advertising on YouTube, I never bothered to check it out. Although I did think about that one for long enough to be momentarily semi-shocked at the sheer stupidity of a clearnet ad for a hidden service. Especially on a site as visible, well known and with as much traffic as YouTube.... I mean, wouldn't it have been a lot easier and cheaper to have just bought some web space from Go Daddy for a couple of bucks and opened it on the clearnet? Where they advertise? Until the moment passed and I realized that there is probably more going on there than just stupidity and it's most likely much more sinister than stupid.
It was mentioned in the article that there is already speculation that perhaps this is a honeypot, and I tend to think that's exactly what it is.
It just doesn't make any kind of sense for someone to take the time, thought, energy, as well as they would need to have a considerable amount of knowledge, etc.. not to mention shell out whatever money it would cost - in start-up alone - plus whatever other costs must be associated with opening a full functioning blackmarket website site as a hidden service on TOR, then advertise it on YouTube along with giving out what I gather from the article in the Guardian was it's .onion url. Add those two opposing actions with the fact that they suppesedly tell their sellers and buyers that they don't need to bother encrypting their own information because the site will do it for them?
Whole operation just reeks of a DEA sting... or honeypot. I just hope that no one from SR goes over there and starts writing in their forum (assuming they have one) and unintentionally - perhaps by possibly getting too comfortable - gives out any details of this site not already well known to what could very well be one of SR's greatest adversaries. (Just one of my many opinions....)
Of course, I could be totally wrong... then again there's always the chance that I'm not....... err on the side of caution if you don't know exactly who is behind the site and what their true motives are....
;)
You have hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Thanks OP for the infoo
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Thanks for the link guys!! I know people here are fiercely loyal to DPR and SR, but being a relative newcomer to the whole deepnet thing I have no qualms in at least checking out what others have to offer. For SR to have a monopoly on internet drug dealing would probably be a bad thing as far as buyers go, IMO.
I still think SR is the greatest website ever devised BTW!!!
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Just checked out RAMP and guess what? It's in Russian. With seemingly no option to switch to English. I don't think DPR will be overly concerned by their competition, apart from,maybe, an exodus of Russians from SR! LOL
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Just checked out RAMP and guess what? It's in Russian. With seemingly no option to switch to English. I don't think DPR will be overly concerned by their competition, apart from,maybe, an exodus of Russians from SR! LOL
Russia's mail system is broken, so instead of shipping they are actually doing dead drops around the city, to abandoned buildings and such :)
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Well at least this journalist is on our side, Im sure hes buying some of his own goodies on the road as well :D
I like the way he big upped sr and made atlantis sound dodgy and shit. It is true though:P
I bet hes reading this now anyway, seeing as hes been doing his investigative techniques, Ahh well life goes on.
Hff
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I only heard about SR, BTC and Tor through the media! ;) Around the start of the year, I think. The article I read was basically reporting that SR was the drug-dealing website that LE had no way of shutting down, and explained that the anonymity of it all was preventing more arrests. So it's not as if the worlds' media was oblivious to deepnet drug-dealing before the Atlantis stunt.