
The Rise and Fall of Silk Road - Libertatea
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/
======
MichaelGG
>Force was an athletic guy, and coming up through the agency he’d loved the
physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a
tactical vest

... So he literally likes being a jackbooted thug.

Anyways the main takeaway, again, is opsec. Use delayed messages instead of
chat. If for some reason you have to write to people and talk to employees,
invent another persona that you use. Not just on the surface, but underneath.
So you're posing as DPR, but talking about paleo and how the FDA food triangle
sucks? That's your real persona leaking through. Instead, pickup someone
else's point of views, location, cultural references, etc.

Same happened to one of the Lulzsec guys. "Yeah I was in jail for pot" (or
something like that). Bam you just leaked like 10 bits of ID right there. But
if he had said "I got arrested for heroin possession but struck a plea because
I was X years old" \- you just provided fake bits. And if an agent was
thinking they're so clever picking up on these bits, they've now narrowed down
their search to people that aren't you.

I wonder how deep this goes - do criminals do this often enough that LE is
actively trying to figure out what personal details are fake?

~~~
treetoppin
I've often wondered what happens psychologically to people who inject "noise"
into their virtual personas to evade being identified. Does the fake persona
start to leak back into their everyday personality? If you do this long term
does your personal identity start to erode?

~~~
walshemj
The BBC did an interesting two part dramatization on Kim Philby recently not
sure if its been on PBS

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0406w88](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0406w88)

They actually showed Philbys press conference where he was proclaiming his
innocence - still used as a training aid apparently

------
PaulAJ
Note how Curtis Green was raided: they delivered some drugs, then searched his
house on the grounds that he was in possession of drugs. This is a standard US
Postal Inspectors tactic: it was used many years ago (see
[http://totse.mattfast1.com/en/law/high_profile_legal_cases/a...](http://totse.mattfast1.com/en/law/high_profile_legal_cases/aabust.html))
and it looks like it is still being used.

If you are thinking that this looks like an end-run round the fourth
amendment, then you have been paying attention.

~~~
tptacek
It does not seem likely that evidence predicated on an unsolicited drug
shipment from USPS would survive in court.

~~~
fweespeech
[http://theadvocate.com/home/7031641-125/postal-
investigators...](http://theadvocate.com/home/7031641-125/postal-
investigators-target-drug-trade)

> “The trick is figuring out who’s supposed to receive it,” said Chief Deputy
> Tony Bacala of the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office, whose deputies
> arrested a St. Amant man in June after he accepted a package containing
> marijuana.

> From there, law enforcement officials arranged for a “controlled delivery”
> of the package to Allen and later found marijuana, equipment used to
> cultivate marijuana and steroids during a search of his residence,
> authorities said.

They don't seem to concerned about that part.

~~~
simplicio
Those weren't "unsolicited". The Feds intercepted them, and than let the
delivery go through. But the packages originated with the Suspects business
partners, not the Feds.

The original article is annoyingly unclear, but I'm pretty sure that's the
case with Green as well. The Feds didn't send a fake package, they just
followed a package they'd interecpted.

I don't really think there's a problem with this practice. Having a bunch of
packages with drugs addressed to particular residence seems like reasonable
grounds to get a search warrant for that residence.

~~~
fweespeech
The problem is, they aren't really proving they are "solicited". They are just
proving they were sent to an address.

I can ship 5 packages to your address and it'd trigger the search is the
standard of evidence they are using. Its how people have been swatted.

[http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/06/the-fly-has-been-
swatted/](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/06/the-fly-has-been-swatted/)

[http://www.vice.com/read/i-interviewed-the-fraudster-who-
fra...](http://www.vice.com/read/i-interviewed-the-fraudster-who-frames-
people-for-heroin-possession)

[http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-
cybe...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybercrime-
underground/)

The only reason he didn't get swatted again was because _he called the police
because before it happened because he was monitoring the people_. [Hint: He
has been swatted before]

This is precisely why this "standard of evidence" is such bullshit. It can be
used to harass anyone and is.

------
cliveowen
>Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola
and powdered mini doughnuts. Fingers frosted synthetic white[...]

>Green waddled to the door, his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, following
attentively.

How do the authors know any of these (useless) details? They weren't there. Is
this a factual recount or fiction?

I hate it when these failed novelists try to make a run-of-the-mill story
sound like an Hollywood movie. Next time, just stick to the facts and save me
a couple of pointless pages of unsubstantiated claims. Is is that hard to do?

~~~
serve_yay
Sometimes I think I'm bonkers because I want things like this to be an
ordered, bulleted list of what happened and that's all. Have you ever been in
a group where someone is telling a story and wished you could hear it without
all the dumb narrative flourishes, instead just "this happened, then this,
then this"?

~~~
joshu
I want to do a news site like this someday.

------
Harkins
Wow. Not in a good way.

Sorry to cut ahead in the story, but Agent Mark Force is under indictment for
abusing his position to commit theft and fraud. It is ridiculous to think of a
long-term officer talking to the police without a lawyer. The idea that he
would talk to a reporter is flatly unbelievable.

All this stuff about him sitting up and taking notice in a briefing or musing
on his career or fluffed pillows is straight-up invented. Making up stories is
not journalism. Reading this can only mislead people. This is a terrible take
on an incredible story.

~~~
Tloewald
You're jumping to conclusions. It's possible the details are accurate (or at
least come from the horse's mouth).

You don't know what the reporters got from interviews or when. He may well
have been interviewed earlier, or advised by his attorney that cooperating
with a piece that would portray his earlier actions in a positive light
couldn't hurt him.

I don't know how high WIRED's standards of fact-checking are. Customarily,
they'd need two independent sources for any statement of fact. (I believe the
_New Yorker_ , at least, cleaves to this standard.) I suspect this presages a
book on the subject.

------
amyjess
This whole thing is so bizarre.

I went to college with Ross. I didn't know him personally, but we had a few
friends in common (even looking at his Facebook page now, we have a few mutual
friends, and I know others who were friends with him but don't have him on
FB).

To think that something as huge and infamous as the Silk Road was created by a
dude I went to college with just blows my mind.

On top of that, the article also mentions Richard Bates, who I knew
personally. We were in some of the same clubs, we had a couple of classes
together, and we were even friends for a short time before we had a falling
out, involving Richard treating one of my best friends like shit and then
treating me like shit when I tried to play mediator. After that, the
aforementioned friend and I ended up coming up with a few juvenile nicknames
for Richard Bates based on his name... I don't think I'll post them here, but
you can probably guess, because his name is very unfortunate. By the time I
graduated, Richard wasn't very well-liked... IMO, he wasn't a good friend or a
good person.

As mind-blowing as Ross was, this was even more shocking, and it's still hard
for me to believe that Richard, somebody I personally knew, was part and
parcel of the Silk Road.

~~~
testingonprod
You sound like you have a knack for stumbling upon all the right people

~~~
def_illiterate
You might find this interesting. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-
world_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment)

It blew my mind when I first encountered it.

------
fredgrott
I have some questions:

1\. Recently it has been revealed that USPS photos ALL mailed articles to
store the send and rec metadata. Are 3rd party shippers under the same blanket
secret surveillance ?

~~~
sjg007
Why would they not be? It is all meta data.

------
jmkni
Haven't even read the article yet but had a quick scroll through to see how
long it was and already enjoying the graphics!

