

U.S. busts Tor drug market, arrests eight - cypherpunks01
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/17/us-usa-drugs-internet-idUSBRE83G01Q20120417

======
pjscott
That's a shame. These guys' lives are going to be seriously messed up by this,
and from the drug list, it looks like they were selling fairly ethical stuff;
according to the article, they sold "LSD, ecstasy, fentanyl, mescaline
ketamine, DMT and high-end marijuana".

~~~
Retric
Ecstasy is horribly nasty stuff. People rarely OD, but it can vary quickly do
significant and permanent brain damage with heavy use. The real problem is
when the symptoms show up they are basically permanent. Honestly, prolonged
heroin use is significantly less harmful, the only good thing about ecstasy is
the unpleasant side effects and fairly long high limit how much people take.

~~~
jmtame
There are two major misconceptions around MDMA, both funded by flawed
government studies. The first misconception is that MDMA causes "holes in your
brain" but this study was debunked. The original claim was based on the notion
that MDMA "destroys up to 80% of your serotonin neurotransmitters
irreversibly." This was shown to not be true for two reasons: a much larger
study (the largest study ever conducted on MDMA use) showed that it's only
possible for MDMA to affect up to 5% of your serotonin levels, and it's
reversible after a period of weeks or months of nonuse.

The second major misconception is that MDMA causes Parkinson's. The original
study was retracted because the drug manufacturer mislabeled the MDMA bottle
as Methamphetamine, a completely different drug. They gave the Methamphetamine
to monkeys instead of MDMA.

I would recommend checking this out:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvNCijeYlI>

Skip to part 3 if you're wanting to get to the scientific studies.

~~~
Retric
I gave a little more detail here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850923> But, while the holes in the
brain and Parkinson's where not accurate there is significant evidence that
MDMA causes issues and it's not old enough for a lot of long term issues to
show up.

PS: My mother has a PHD in neurology with a focus on brain development and
MDMA is the drug she was most frightened of. Not that that actually means much
in the grand scheme of things, but she has done a lot more literature review
of MDMA than I or I suspect anyone on HN has done.

~~~
jmtame
Nobody knows what happens to long term chronic users of MDMA. But we do know
that the propaganda that was spread by US government funded studies has been
debunked. Scare tactics should be treated with strong skepticism. Before club
users got their hands on it and it got banned in 1985 (against a federal
judge's recommendation nonetheless), MDMA was a perfectly acceptable drug used
by monks, priests and therapists for couples therapy.

Edit: can you please link up the studies you're referring to?

------
cypherpunks01
Wired Article: [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/online-drug-
market-...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/online-drug-market-
takedown/)

Cali DA press release:
<http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2012/045.html>

Full indictment (66 pg. pdf):
[http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/04/WILLEM...](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/04/WILLEMSIndictment-
FILED.045.pdf)

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milesskorpen
5,200 orders valued, in total, at $1M. Over a ~2 year period. That's it?
Hardly seems like much of a story. Particularly since Tor is of limited use
when your system depends on electronic payment systems.

~~~
BigTigger
I believe they were using bitcoins to anonymize some transactions.

The hardest thing for a regular consumer I would think would be finding a drop
point. Drugs and things sent through the mail would be fairly easy to track to
a consumer who could then be charged for possession.

~~~
rorrr
> _Drugs and things sent through the mail would be fairly easy to track to a
> consumer_

Yeah, how?

~~~
simcop2387
Assuming they found them in the mail during transit using xray or some other
method since they were in canada, shipping to US goes through customs which
has special rules allowing that, then they can look at who is receiving the
package and then they get them to squeal on who the dealer was.

~~~
rorrr
I don't think they x-ray every single package, that's just impossible, and who
would look at all the x-rays.

So even if they do it,

1) your chances of getting caught are extremely low

2) i don't think you're liable for receiving a package (though you may be for
keeping and not reporting it).

~~~
simcop2387
Yea it's certainly a complicated situation for both you and the police to
figure out. The problem is I don't think I'd trust them to not try to strong
arm you into confessing and saying who it was, assuming you did order them
even if they couldn't prove it.

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rdl
I'm curious how they attacked this network -- I'd assume the payment side is
still the easiest, and they could look for some patterns and then set up
physical surveillance at WU or other locations to catch cash transactions.

~~~
TillE
> accepting payment through PayPal

Uh. How did they expect to remain anonymous with a PayPal account?

~~~
plessthanpt05
hahaha...seriously? with PayPal? i suppose it could (maybe) be done with
prepaid credit cards, but still.

~~~
rdl
Use forged documents for everything (including your bank accounts), and keep
really small balances. Maybe also do business accounts, ideally also with
forged info (particularly for US businesses, people don't check the documents
very well). I assume PayPal does lazy checking, and will not check a low
balance account as much.

Linkability is the real enemy of anonymity.

------
aviv
If these guys were using e-gold or some other alternative payment system, the
Feds would raid the currency operator's offices as well and seize servers (as
they have done in the past). Not so with PayPal and Western Union (I'm not
disagreeing with the lack of such action).

------
redthrowaway
When I saw the title, I immediately assumed it was Silk Road. _That_ would
have surprised me, as the operators have no part in the actual business, and
all trades are conducted with bitcoins. If Silk Road went down, _that_ would
be news, as they really embrace strong crypto and opsec.

------
xal
8x life in prison for $1M in drug trafficking?

~~~
tibbon
Costing society probably $100K/yr/each to imprison them.

~~~
ajays
Nope. It costs close to $30K/year to imprison somebody in the US. So make that
$250K/year to imprison this sorry bunch.

~~~
GFKjunior
In California it was $50,000 for the 08-09 year. But if you read the footnote
it states "since 2000-01, the average annual cost has increased by about
$19,500." Almost a $20 thousand increase in 8 years, I'd hate to see what it
is now or worse in another 7 years.

We have to add in the cost of Correctional Officer salaries and the Wardens
who can easily make over $220,000 a year.

[http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/...](http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/6_cj_inmatecost.aspx?catid=3)

------
thinkdevcode
So were they actually selling the drugs or were they just operating a
marketplace similar to Silk Road?

Also, why the hell would they use PayPal?! At least SR uses bitcoins.

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donniezazen
Reuters.com pulled it off.

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joshu
Web page is dead.

Was this silk road? I've been meaning to scrape prices from there as a pet
economics project.

~~~
jmtame
No, the project was called The Farmer's Market. While it operated on Tor, they
accepted payments over PayPal which completely breaks the anonymity chain.
Silk Road is still operational and uses other security mechanisms (in addition
to a decentralized, digital anonymous currency) to further anonymize
transactions, running all payments through a tumbler.

~~~
joshu
Someone should write up a tour guide to the deep dark web.

I doubly wish I was indexing silkroad's prices, so we could see the price
impact this event has.

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duaneb
Why on earth would an online drug marketplace use traceable currency? Silk
road got it right using BC.

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loverobots
Looks like Hushmail was their weak point. Feds got court order from Canada
based on treaty and it flowed from there.

But yeah, between advertising, shipping, getting paid and moving money around
it's hard to stay anon .

~~~
cookiecaper
I never understand why people have such a fundamentally difficult time
grasping the concept of plaintext and/or subpoenas. If someone knows enough to
trade drugs on Tor, they definitely should be using strong encryption on
anything and everything pertaining to it, including email.

Month after month handfuls of new stories come out about someone outed and/or
owned by emails or other plaintext communication that was not encrypted or
cryptographically signed. You'd think it'd sink through after a while.

You have no reasonable expectation of security for anything that is not fully
encrypted with vetted, real-world strong encryption. While you may _want_
something to stay under wraps, you're just leaving it there for the taking
unless it is stored on permanent storage only in encrypted form.

~~~
rorrr
My theory is that only idiots get caught. If you read the article, it was a
tiny operation considering the global illegal drug market. They only sold $1M
worth of drugs in three years, that's silly.

They didn't catch some big fish criminals, they caught some idiot kids who
thought they could easily make money.

~~~
Blunt
"My theory is that only idiots get caught"

No, only idiots do this to begin with.

~~~
reustle
As much as I agree, do you realize how big the active drug trade is? There are
a lot of very smart people out there.

~~~
wisty
It's about half the size of the _legal_ (pharmaceutical) drug trade, which is
big.

Taking out a group with $1 million revenue is like taking out a local
pharmacy.

~~~
cookiecaper
Maybe there's value in the fact that this was an Onion service that was
targeted specifically -- are the Feds trying to send a message about Tor? Was
this whole operation hinged on the PR or was there some strategic value to
taking out the group (assuming your analogy to a local pharmacy holds true,
which I don't necessarily believe)? Perhaps the Feds were scared _because_ Tor
was involved and wanted to strike before the defendants wised up and went
totally dark with more anonymous payment schemes (anyone using PayPal
obviously has no reasonable expectation of anonymity), knowing that PayPal et
al only keep records so long?

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drivebyacct2
No way, "high-end marijuana". Crazy. Extremely dangerous!

~~~
api
It's dangerous to compete with state-protected real drug cartels.

In all seriousness... does anyone think the present-day prohibition racket
isn't just as corrupt as what was going on in the 1920s? Drug Enforcement
Agency... who do you think they're enforcing for?

It's almost impossible that it wouldn't be that corrupt. There is just _too
much freaking money_ involved, the stakes too high, for massive numbers of
people to _not_ be on the take.

~~~
taligent
Seriously. Why don't you just wake up and get a grip.

The majority of the countries on this planet have similar drug policies to the
US. They aren't all corrupt and in many countries the policies are quite
effective. So to rant on like a crazy person about corruption and conspiracies
just makes you sound unstable. There are many practical areas that the US can
focus on like better border controls rather than opening up the can of worms
that is legalising all drugs.

~~~
thinkdevcode
There are quite a few studies that show the correlation between legalizing
drugs and domestic crime - Portugal being one of the most cited - and it's
been shown that legalizing drugs actually decreases crime. We should be
sending drug addicts to rehabilitation centers... Not prison, where drugs are
rampant and only further increases the drug addicts dependence on narcotics.

~~~
icebraining
Nitpick: Portugal didn't legalized drugs; "we" just decriminalized the
possession of small quantities. It's still a crime to grow, cook, distribute
and sell them.

