

DarkMarket: The Silk Road successor police can’t shut down - jamesxwatkins
http://metronews.ca/news/toronto/1017866/darkmarket-the-silk-road-successor-police-cant-shut-down/

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paulhauggis
You won't need to shut it down. Just go where the money flows and arrest
anyone selling illegal goods/services. Eventually, when sellers know that it's
too risky, they just won't sell there anymore.

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melville_X
The point is that hunting people down protected by TOR and privacy laws in the
postal mail system, one of the few practical privacy laws left, is still
technically possible, yes...but it is expensive, time consuming and requires
sophisticated police work.

The drug war is already failing without these huge roadblocks. It will always
still be possible to exploit endpoint security. Given the resource limitations
of law enforcement, maybe we should focus those resources hunting down
important crimes such as creators of child porn or people engaged in violence
crime?

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stcredzero
_The point is, hunting people down protected by TOR and privacy laws in the
postal mail system (one of the few practical privacy laws left) is technically
possible...but is extremely expensive, requires sophisticated police work, and
is time consuming._

Good old-fashioned police work involving the postal system was how some Silk
Road vendors were nabbed. It won't matter how secure your market is, if the
authorities want you bad enough and you don't know how to do secure mail
drops.

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melville_X
They cherrypicked a few out of thousands and Silk Road was a tiny tiny
percentage of the drug market. What will happen when they are 10x the size?
Will that type of law enforcement scale?

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stcredzero
Since the legwork was done on a local level, yes, it could scale at first.
You'd just need a Federal level agency to forward information to the right
locals. You don't have to nab all the perps, you just have to nab enough of
them to change the expected cost-benefit equation.

Also, adding levels of indirection only increases enforcement work linearly.

What you'd end up with are just a few organizations with the resources and
expertise to outcompete other operators in terms of opsec and secure
fulfillment, while wannabes and new operators serve as fodder for enforcement.
Somewhat like today's situation.

Also, since enforcement depends on local enforcement, local corruption will
increase.

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melville_X
Great point. They federal level infrastructure is pretty far from having that
capability at the moment. As long as systems like one linked in the article
are coming, the only natural response by the state is to establish an large-
scale NSA-style hacking and network forensic agency working domestically.

There is no way they'll let digital black markets exist without creating a
super-expensive heavy handed machine to attempt to stop it. Whether it is
practical or not.

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INTPenis
The title is just silly and unrealistic.

People said the same about silkroad, and look what happened.

Saying something like this can't be shut down is like saying there's an
unhackable system out there. And really, historically, these online drug
markets have been much more short lived than AFK drug enterprises. They have
really lived by the rules of startups in that sense. ;)

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erikb
Did the media industry shut down Bittorrent yet? Nope. Did the IT sec
community was able to shut down Conficker after it went peer-to-peer? Nope. So
going peer-to-peer is actually pretty invincible with today's methods I would
say (although I am not an expert!) The question is whether or not they can
implement the details well enough in this peer-to-peer market.

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dublinben
This site has already been discussed three days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655457)

