The FBI promises a perpetual, futile drug war as it shuts down Silk Road 2.0

a reply to: fleabit

You admit that it is a losing battle, but say quitting is not the right answer?

Let's say you has a broken car that can never be fixed, would you keep spending money trying to fix it or cut your losses and junk the car?

Apparently the seized 400 or so .onion addresses, and 27 actual sites. 129 addresses were from one server in Bulgaria that appears to have been connected to child porn and other stuff worth serving justice.

www.dans.bg... (Bulgarian link)

originally posted by: fleabit
I don't quite get what people suggest. There is a problem with dealing with this underground drug trade, and it seems that many advocate that the government just "give up" because it's impossible to stop. So that's the answer.. seriously? Just give up and do nothing? Even if they only nab a handful here and there, it might be the impetus to cause others pondering do this to think twice. You have to fight it, even if it's a losing battle.

It's a losing battle, but it's a battle none the less... and quitting isn't the right answer.

Yeah you dont "get" it cause you miss most peoples point!

We dont actually think is a problem!

If people are stupid enough to take recreational drugs then let them.

Only problem I see is when CP and murder rear therdpe heads,

Well, whoever was dumb enough to start/use S.R 2.0 got what they deserved. When official documents from S.R 1.0 show that anonymity in the Tor network can be bypassed with a $100 equipment bough from ebay and still these guys go ahead with the 2.0 project. Not only that they go ahead and create S.R 2.0 on the most under surveillance country in the world. LOL
I can't possibly believe people are that stupid. S.R 2.0 was surely under surveillance since day one and now they are telling you the guy got caught because of gmail so that you keep using the compromised Tor network.

a reply to: wayforward

Lol, okay, thanks. I know about pain pills and whores outside of Vegas. Yeah, teh US gov't sucks, I agree.

The Craziest Things You Could’ve Bought On Silk Road, The Black Market Of The Internet

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, Silk Road is, or should I say was, an illegal Internet marketplace that sold all kinds of things, from unlicensed firearms and high-grade drugs to contracts that would hire you a hitman for $150,000.

Though the place may have been considered a goldmine for some, it was also a terrible website that allowed vendors to sell child pornography and initiate assassinations.

The online black market was eventually shutdown by the FBI after the entire operation was discovered. Although the founder, Ross William Ulbricht, was arrested, the FBI continues to struggle to seize over 600,000 BitCoins generated by Ulbricht from Silk Road transactions.

Below are the craziest things you could’ve bought on Silk Road, the black market of the internet. Check them out!

Drug war? Isn't the real reason we are in Afghanistan is to support the opium crop so that the CIA can run heroin to fund black ops? Maybe my tin foil hat is screwed on too tight? This is a conspiracy web site after all, a valid genre of sci-fi and not so sci-fi.

a reply to: Swills

That is not accurate. Even the original Silk Road took steps to rid themselves of child pornographers and assassins. It seems like every post you have made in this thread tries to tie the online drug trade to child porn and hit men. This bust took down some bad sites, see and translate the link in my previous post. It does appear their primary target was drug users, not the real criminals.

Supporters of the Dark Web and anonymous markets are opposed to that crap to and applaud the efforts of the ABCs when they do good. I just hope you realize this.

a reply to: Vehemens

Care to test that theory about 'them' being able to pin point the locations of a sample size of Tor users?

The Tor network has been infiltrated with the ABCs setting up many nodes. They have helped to make the network bigger, faster, and stronger. SR2 was infiltrated from it's inception, many already figured this.

Tor alone is not safe, it is just first layer.

originally posted by: Vehemens
Well, whoever was dumb enough to start/use S.R 2.0 got what they deserved. When official documents from S.R 1.0 show that anonymity in the Tor network can be bypassed with a $100 equipment bough from ebay and still these guys go ahead with the 2.0 project. Not only that they go ahead and create S.R 2.0 on the most under surveillance country in the world. LOL
I can't possibly believe people are that stupid. S.R 2.0 was surely under surveillance since day one and now they are telling you the guy got caught because of gmail so that you keep using the compromised Tor network.

Well no cause they have only busted a few dozen venders out of a low estimate of 500 likely around 2000.

It seems only circa 1% of sellers have been caught......LEO are bluffing.

Sure the NSA and GCHQ are huge surveillance resources Fact is LEO hands are servilely restricted when it comes to using surveillance on drug dealers. Unless they are involved in terrorism there powers are limited.

originally posted by: jrod

Tor alone is not safe, it is just first layer.

Exactly from what I have seen the best vendors used VPN, Tails OS, burn laptops and public wifi hot spots.
Tor wasn't even a line of defence just a means.

a reply to: jrod

I saw it first hand and doing a google search will show the reports. Why you all are trying paint Silk Road as some innocent victim is beyond me. Keep embracing ignorance on this topic.

Silk Road’s mastermind allegedly paid $80,000 for a hitman. The hitman was a cop.

According to the government, Ulbricht was duped: the man who arranged the first "murder" was really an undercover police officer. The government says Ulbricht wired $80,000 real dollars to pay for the murder, but he only got a fake murder in return.

According to the indictment, the undercover police officer first got Ulbricht's attention by posing as a large-scale drug dealer. The feds say the undercover officer complained to Ulbricht that Silk Road buyers "want very small amounts" of drugs, and that "it really isn't worth it for me to do below ten kilos."

Ulbricht allegedly offered to find the man a larger buyer, and put him in touch with one of the Silk Road's employees. The undercover officer allegedly sold the employee 1 kilogram of "a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of coc aine," receiving $27,000 worth of Bitcoins in exchange.

The indictment says Ulbricht then contacted the undercover cop (who was still posing as a drug dealer) to report that his employee had been arrested and had stolen funds from other Silk Road users. He allegedly told the officer that "I'd like him beat up, then forced to send the Bitcoins he stole back."

Later, he allegedly wrote "can you change the order to execute rather than torture?" He reportedly wrote that the employee "was on the inside for a while, and now he's been arrested, I'm afraid he'll give up info." He allegedly added that he had "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case."

Actually, the Alleged Silk Road Kingpin Hired a Hitman TWICE

There was already a lot of evidence that alleged Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht (a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts) was not the world's greatest guy, and the condemning information just keeps rolling in. Newly surfaced legal documents say that the 29-year-old ordered not one but two hits on former associates.

What a great guy to work for! I'm sure they are dark web sites that don't cater to hitmen and child porn but SR was guilty of such things.

a reply to: Vehemens
SR was my hookup for lorazepam. My doctor is a moron, I have to get it underground, since he refuses to prescribe it. Sucks for me I guess, still got enough to last at least a year, so I guess I have time to find a new source. They busted a few people out of thousands, sounds like their surveillance wasn't very good at all lol.

originally posted by: TKDRL
a reply to: Vehemens
SR was my hookup for lorazepam. My doctor is a moron, I have to get it underground, since he refuses to prescribe it. Sucks for me I guess, still got enough to last at least a year, so I guess I have time to find a new source. They busted a few people out of thousands, sounds like their surveillance wasn't very good at all lol.

You need to visits my doctor

a reply to: Swills

I have no idea what went on with that. I do know that undercovers on a case at that level will coerce highly illegal actions on high profile targets to build a case.

A little searching shows that the Ross Ulbricht was not charged for hiring at hitman: The mystery of the disappearing Silk Road murder charges. Interesting how Google still links everybody to the hit man story...

This thread is not about the original Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht. Anonymous market places will continue to pop up. It is a perpetual game of whack the mole.

The dark web is a reflection of society.

a reply to: crazyewok
Hopefully going to see my real doctor back in the bronx NY before next year. I only need like one a month, if that, nowhere near the addiction territory my doctor claims to be afraid of. Yet he passes out SSNRI and SSRI like candy, it's absurd really. Pushed it on me saying it would cure my insomnia and panic attacks, claimed it was not addictive. Tried to push it on my father after his mother died. He is either really dumb or really brainwashed by the pharm or something.

As for buying porn, only an idiot would do that. There is literally terrabytes of depraved porn and videos of all kinds on anon P2P for example. Like that video those psychos made killing homeless is there.

As a result of open source everything, transparency causes those that work in the shadows to try and stop those that want to operate in the open. Drugs are only a problem because people are scared of death. Doctors are scared of killing patients, afraid of getting sued. So they say...let the police be the doctor...let them kill and jail as my medical servants. Medicine maybe a cowards game right now, no integrity, just free drug samples, just drug sponsored news and media. If one operates outside the media and medical establishment then they take a risk, but with open source everything risk would be mostly the end users responsibility, not all of our responsibility, nor lawyers and doctors'. WE let these people disable society mostly without disability they would have less power and less influence, their line of work maybe to disable the brightest and most entrepreneurial among us. Silk Road hitman...pharma hit men killed 500,000 last year alone. Lack of transparency means more people die, lack of free markets and use of inflation on price warps the markets and society, it enables the federal reserve to run us into debt $17 trillion....lack of financial transparency makes a mockery of justice and the pursuit of happiness. I really don't like drugs nor how they can harm people....on the other hand I despise war and secret agendas. We are living in an era in which the power to make society honest exists to some extent but the will doesn't. Drugs are not an answer to lifes problems, but neither are lies. Lies in the form of deception in order to destroy people does not make justice it just makes us all liars....communism and socialism destroys transparency...war on drugs maybe the Berlin Wall of the modern era....it enables cures to be hidden and destroyed in favor of drugs that only manage the problem but don't fix it. People that hate transparency hate life, they seem to me anti-liberty, anti-American and anti-science. The difference between the old models where experts get together and work for years on solving problems can be eliminated when thousands get together over the net and publicly work together to solve a problem, this maybe why when people fund very large organizations they really make the problem worse....it incentives profit and large solutions under the control of bureaucrats, whereas the open source solution does the opposite, people band together to solve a problem, and the rate of the fix increases far more than any supercomputer could ever compete with. the old models of jailing people for something that could be managed with complete transparency seems an obvious example of wasted resources and hidden incentives to not fix the problem. If you work in DEA or some agency why would you want to stop your lifeblood of work? Same with Cancer research why would a drug company want to cure it when they can drug it? the groups with the least incentive to fix a problem have control over the financial and motivational aspects of it. Why would they choose to put themselves out of work? Open sourcing will and must bring this era to an end, mostly cause not doing so makes the world less safe, more dangerous, more risky....the incentive to make the world better will overcome the incentives to make the world more risky...it maybe the same with terrorism, terrorism only works on a closed source society, it never can work on an open source society...that society just routes around the terrorist and shuts them out of the system...drugs are not something that can be shut out, violence and dumb beliefs, but drugs seem the only real way to overcome human suffering and disease/sickness....fighting a "war" against tools that can do some good seems an incorrect way to win the war against disease.

Busting Silk Road 1, 2, etc. doesn't protect anyone or anything, it just gives LE funds to continue doing their jobs.

How a Russian Dark Web Drug Market Outlived the Silk Road (And Silk Road 2)

While it's most likely they have endured due to political climate between Russia and USA, plus maybe some good old fashioned bribery, the educated guess right now is that projects like Open Bazaar will soon make even RAMP obsolete.

a reply to: cohiba
Thanks for the heads up, I look forward to learning about this openbazaar. Sounds really interesting indeed.

The technical term for this is whack-a-mole. This is the same tired old war on drugs strategy which appears to be just about as effective on the web as it is on the streets. A society's appetite for drugs, including alcohol, is a symptom of a more serious underling social problem that cannot be fixed by throwing people in jail, enacting stricter laws or dumping billions of dollars into efforts that seem to have only made the problem worse. The dark web is not the problem, the problem is that there is a demand for the sort of stuff that drive drive people to use that and many other means of getting what they want. Drug dealers existed before the dark web and will continue to do so even if the entire dark web is taken down. Just a lesson from history.

The big engine makes money, win or lose, top FBI management facilitates the overall profit process. "War" is their biggest profit sector regardless where it plays out.

Its a change in "middle management", that's all, the drug empire is the third biggest revenue stream for global managers.

An example is opium production in Afghanistan. Under US aid four hundred new square miles of opium went into production, 2014 is the record year nearly tripling 2000 level production. People can search Google images "afghan opium production" to see the stats.

Same thing with Iraq oil production, it greatly increases under new US management. All those system merely experience the removal of the "middleman", the US profiteers and the banking sector do not care were the revenue comes from, the are the scientists of greed, and profit is the corporate goal that facilitates the new management system.

The "war on" this and that front end of the operation is to also expand the weapons sales, as that is number 1 on the global profiteering charts, oil is 2, opium is 3. Thus they go "hand in hand" for big bucks, and big expansion of all three systems, simultaneously.

The "silk road" is like any road, a concept, the names change, the network grows on the same concept. It never ends in this kind of management model, massive profit ensures it will continue, the ones grinding the gravy change are who change in the process of that expansion to monopoly in all sectors.

The FBI does whatever their corporate bosses tell them to do, just like the US government, and that fractal is present globally. The corporate monopoly is shelling under the Anglo-American "empire" model. In time everything will be under that trans-national corporate model, and that model is ultimately what world government actual power sectors consist of.

Mainstream media and adolescent academic propaganda have their own story. The global stats tell an entirely different story.

originally posted by: Swills
a reply to: jrod

I saw it first hand and doing a google search will show the reports. Why you all are trying paint Silk Road as some innocent victim is beyond me. Keep embracing ignorance on this topic.

Silk Road’s mastermind allegedly paid $80,000 for a hitman. The hitman was a cop.

According to the government, Ulbricht was duped: the man who arranged the first "murder" was really an undercover police officer. The government says Ulbricht wired $80,000 real dollars to pay for the murder, but he only got a fake murder in return.

According to the indictment, the undercover police officer first got Ulbricht's attention by posing as a large-scale drug dealer. The feds say the undercover officer complained to Ulbricht that Silk Road buyers "want very small amounts" of drugs, and that "it really isn't worth it for me to do below ten kilos."

Ulbricht allegedly offered to find the man a larger buyer, and put him in touch with one of the Silk Road's employees. The undercover officer allegedly sold the employee 1 kilogram of "a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of coc aine," receiving $27,000 worth of Bitcoins in exchange.

The indictment says Ulbricht then contacted the undercover cop (who was still posing as a drug dealer) to report that his employee had been arrested and had stolen funds from other Silk Road users. He allegedly told the officer that "I'd like him beat up, then forced to send the Bitcoins he stole back."

Later, he allegedly wrote "can you change the order to execute rather than torture?" He reportedly wrote that the employee "was on the inside for a while, and now he's been arrested, I'm afraid he'll give up info." He allegedly added that he had "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case."

Actually, the Alleged Silk Road Kingpin Hired a Hitman TWICE

There was already a lot of evidence that alleged Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht (a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts) was not the world's greatest guy, and the condemning information just keeps rolling in. Newly surfaced legal documents say that the 29-year-old ordered not one but two hits on former associates.

What a great guy to work for! I'm sure they are dark web sites that don't cater to hit men and child porn but SR was guilty of such things.

Gee, you've bought the whole package.. Sucked in.
Everyone knows there was a undercover agent with admin privileges who'd somehow gained the trust of the site operator when Silkroad 2 "rose from the ashes". The feds will auction off some seized bit coins and bust a few large dealers, the press will pump the headlines, making law enforcement look like heroes. etc etc... Silk road 3 is already operating (but probably a scam), there are literally hundreds of markets with better security absorbing Silk road's customer base. Wack a mole, whack a mole.
I'll put what I like in my body and expect legitimate harm reduction information, quality and honesty. You don't get that from going into the hood to score, you don't get that from the government and you don't get that from the media.
I suffer from anxiety and have used various internet sites to get the odd benzo. Life is easier just knowing you can calm yourself down when necessary. That's my choice. I'm an adult and I'm responsible.