
How the FBI made the world a more dangerous place by shutting down Silkroad 2.0 - edward
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/11/06/how-the-fbi-just-made-the-world-a-more-dangerous-place-by-shutting-down-silkroad-2-0-and-a-bunch-of-online-drug-markets/
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tptacek
The same argument is better directed at drug prohibition writ large, and seems
intellectually incoherent when focused selectively on individual enforcement
actions.

Too, there's something galling about the idea of militating for forbearance
for the drug market that serves primarily the wealthiest actors. Before we
turn a blind eye to what are in fact gigantic organized criminal conspiracies
operated by the kinds of people who will happily slap $70,000 on the barrel
for a vanity electric car, maybe we could take a hard look at sentencing laws
and early release programs.

Finally: it's an easy sleight of hand trick to suggest that the "darknet"
traffic solely in substances, as if allowing them to operate unimpeded would
have only the effect of getting some of the drug trade off the street.

~~~
mike_hearn
_Finally: it 's an easy sleight of hand trick to suggest that the "darknet"
traffic solely in substances_

Absolutely. For example these sites routinely sell guns into parts of the
world with strict and popular gun control policies. Ask an average man on the
British street if their country is being made safer by sites that let anyone
easily buy guns that are delivered to the door, and see what response you get
...

~~~
gwern
Not _that_ routinely... Guns have developed a reputation for either being
scams or the seller getting busted routinely (almost all the BMR busts were
related either to poison or guns), never sell well (which is why SR1 shut down
its Armory section after a few months - no sales), and around half the markets
outright ban sales of them (see my census [http://www.gwern.net/Black-
market%20survival#data](http://www.gwern.net/Black-market%20survival#data) ).

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joosters
The FBI raids might actually be giving free publicity to these kind of
markets. People who had never heard of them have now read news stories about
the markets and might now seek them out.

After all, the services that sprang up to take the place of the original silk
road soon grew bigger than the original site. Perhaps the same thing will
happen now with whatever new services now emerge?

~~~
modo_
I think that you're right. The FBI has (so far) only managed to take down
three of the top six darknet markets[1]. It seems likely that the majority of
the sellers from the shutdown sites will move their operations over to the
remaining three; bolstering their sizes and attracting more customers.

[1]:
[http://www.digitalcitizensalliance.org/cac/alliance/content....](http://www.digitalcitizensalliance.org/cac/alliance/content.aspx?page=Darknet)

~~~
zanny
The FBI is acting as a good litmus test of the security and confidentiality of
these sites as well. If they got three but the others are still running, then
maybe it means it is harder for them to find out where or who is running those
sites.

You would hope eventually we can use this evolutionary process to see
completely opaque black markets emerge. Or you may not hope, depending on
purview.

~~~
ceejayoz
> If they got three but the others are still running, then maybe it means it
> is harder for them to find out where or who is running those sites.

Maybe they're running the other three. :-p

~~~
avn2109
Strictly speaking it's a joint venture with the CIA :p

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danbruc
You can disagree with current drug laws and desire a change, you can say that
the actions the FBI has taken made the situation worse and be correct with
that, but you can not blame the FBI for doing so, because they are just doing
what they are expected to do given the current laws.

~~~
ahallock
Why are those who follow immoral laws not accountable?

~~~
rayiner
There are "immoral laws" and there are "immoral laws." Mandatory female
genital mutilation is an "immoral law." Making drugs illegal might be bad
policy, but I don't think it rises to the level of immorality.

The fact is that drugs have externalized effects, whether you're talking about
peer pressure to engage in drug use, crack babies, broken homes, or drug
addicts committing crimes to feed their addictions. It's a pretty widely-
accepted that society has a right and legitimate interest in policing things
that have externalized effects. It may be the case that it's futile to make
drugs illegal--that criminalization creates worse societal harms than drug
use, but that doesn't make the laws immoral because there is no denying that
drug use does in fact cause societal harms. Drug laws are in that sense no
different than gun control laws or liquor laws. They may or may not have the
intended effect, but it's hard to deny that they address real societal harms.

~~~
smokeyj
Reporters are getting their heads chopped off in Mexico. How about the
morality of propping up violent drug cartels?

~~~
mike_hearn
The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime; the idea that
Mexico would become a peaceful utopia overnight if only you could buy crystal
meth at your local supermarket doesn't have much evidence to support it.

~~~
smokeyj
Could you try making a principled argument in favor of prohibition? I haven't
seen much evidence to support it.

~~~
tptacek
That's a dramatic shift of the goalposts, isn't it? His argument was that
ending prohibition wouldn't immediately make Mexico a safer place. It wasn't
that prohibition was itself an intrinsically good idea.

~~~
smokeyj
A dramatic shift of goalposts would be equating not having your head chopped
off with utopia.

His argument was not that prohibition wouldn't end immediately, it's that "The
Mexican cartels don't _only_ engage in drug related crime".

This is a correct statement. Cartels also profit from sex prohibition, but I'm
not sure why this justifies anything. Hence my request for a principled
argument. Maybe you can help out.

~~~
tptacek
That's a very uncharitable summary of the comment you replied to, and also a
stretch, since you're the one introducing "utopia" in the the discussion.

I have an easier time mounting a principled argument against prostitution than
for drugs. Here it is:

Adults in western societies compete with other adults in the market (in its
broadest sense). You can see this, for example, in every job interview.

Usually, competition is benign.

Some forms of competition are not benign. We've decided for example that the
competitive tactic of cornering a market and using that position to fix prices
is malignant.

As a public policy matter, we allow the market to operate freely except in
those cases where the competition becomes malignant.

As a public policy matter, we've decided that it's malignant to allow the form
of competition where the winner is the person most willing to compromise their
sexual integrity.

We can do that even while understanding that different people have different
notions of what comprises "sexual integrity". That's because we recognize that
if you allow competition based on sexual compromise, the market races to the
bottom, and we operate at the lowest common denominator of "sexual integrity".
The market punishes people for not compromising. That emergent property takes
on the coercive force of public policy.

In the same sense as there's no _intrinsic_ moral problem with buying a
specific amount of, say, lysine, but there is with buying all the lysine and
fixing prices, there's no _intrinsic_ moral problem with exchanging money for
sex, but there's an emergent problem with allowing people to compete based on
their willingness to sell sex.

Put more simply: legalizing prostitution would be at least in some sense (and
I think probably in a very powerful sense) coercive of poor women, and
particular poor single mothers who have an extraordinarily powerful obligation
to finance the upbringing of their children. Not selling your body would
become a luxury. It's terrible public policy that allows that to happen.

It happens, obviously, regardless of the policy levers we pull. But society as
a whole doesn't create the expectation that people can/should do that. That
would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.

Preemptively: you asked for a principled argument, by the way, not a
dispositive one.

~~~
smokeyj
"the idea that Mexico would become a peaceful _utopia_ overnight if only you
could buy crystal meth" \- Mike_hearn

Mike didn't just shift the goal post, he packed it up, shipped it via fedex,
and had it smelted.

~~~
tptacek
You're right. I'm wrong. I retract that part of my comment and apologize.

~~~
smokeyj
All good. Regardless I'm interested in reading your position on sexual
prohibition. I'll take a closer look later.

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throwaway7808
""" More to the point, if you're buying drugs online you're not supporting
local drug dealers and the crime and violence that typically accompany open
air drug markets, particularly in inner cities. By cutting those sellers out
of the equation, you're seeing a net reduction in violence overall.

~~~
danielweber
"Buy local! Except for drugs!"

How do you actually get your drugs if you buy them on Silk Road? Do you have
UPS bring the MDMA to your door?

~~~
shawabawa3
> How do you actually get your drugs if you buy them on Silk Road? Do you have
> UPS bring the MDMA to your door?

Yes. Typically it comes in "stealth" packaging to prevent it being detected en
route. If it wasn't for tor being so slow it would be basically the same flow
as ordering something off amazon

(or so I'm told)

~~~
kissickas
There's a bit of added friction on the Bitcoin end as well, don't forget.

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Dirlewanger
One can only hope that for the coming decades (not years) that those who put
such policies in place (and those who continue to enforce them) will be
rotting in the ground, and more forward-thinking people will begin to realize
the irreversible damage the War on Drugs has caused (and continues to cause),
and start to undo such shit policies. Hopefully that wasn't too much of a run-
on sentence.

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venomsnake
The real "more dangerous" argument is that the next gen sites will be even
better, better hidden and more secure. They will evolve. So we will be in a
situation where they will have to crack on everyone rights to bust this
darkernet (situation I don't like), and with the way the security agencies are
acting lately I doubt that they will think twice about it.

~~~
neltnerb
I'm a bit confused as to what the alternative is from their perspective. If
they infiltrated the site, and it was doing things that are illegal, they'd be
horribly negligent to not act on it. It would be the equivalent to the "Fast
and Furious" scandal when spun by news agencies. We can disagree with the
morality of drug laws (I think they're horribly misguided and incoherent), but
what else can they do?

I think the best we can hope for is that they do the job we asked them to
through the laws we put in place without violating other laws we put in place
to protect civil liberties. If they're doing that (...) then it seems like
this was their only ethical* choice.

Assuming they're following the laws protecting civil liberties (...), the
decision on whether or not the upside of shutting down a few markets balances
the downside of hardening the others is way above their pay grade.

* where ethical is defined as I imagine the individual law enforcement personnel are obligated to view it

~~~
Nursie
If enough investigators and enforcers started to kick up a fuss or outright
refuse to enforce the current drug laws I bet we'd see change pretty damn
fast.

A lot of them would lose their jobs first, but if they were principled enough
to take that stand... we'd be in a better place.

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jedunnigan
This is likely an erroneous argument with little evidence to support it.
Violence between street dealers and drug consumptors is unlikely to be the
largest source of drug related violence. After all, if the street dealers
started killing their custies than no one would buy from them. It's bad for
business.

Instead, most heinous drug violence happens between cartels and gangs at the
levels of production and [major] distribution [pipelines]. These darknet
markets are usually filled with well off youth buying drugs for themselves and
their buddies who alternatively would have been unable to source the drugs or
would have texted their neighborhood dealer to meetup in a McDonalds parking
lot.

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soylentcola
Slightly off topic but did anyone else find it weird/funny that in the first
graph showing total listings by drug, alongside more "official" names for
substances like MDMA, LSD, and amphetamine, they listed "weed"?

I mean...I understand using common terms that have become de facto names (like
"marijuana" instead of "cannabis") but "weed"? That's like making a list with
Morphine, Oxycodone, PCP, and Blow.

I dunno...maybe it just tickled my "one of these things is not like the other"
sense since the list wasn't all slang terms but rather more accepted labels
with a single street/slang name.

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at-fates-hands
This reminds me of back in the 1980's when the government was knee deep in
breaking up the mafia.

Several academics suggested it was a bad idea because the Mafia kept a lot of
the other gangs and cartels in line since they ruled so much territory. By
dismantling the larger mafia families, they were unknowingly giving free reign
to a lot of the smaller street gangs who openly advocated violence and
couldn't handle all the power they were being given.

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shittyanalogy
None of this is research it's gut feeling spewed by an effected individual.
It's easy to say that online marketplaces reduce street violence but with no
research to back it up it's meaningless. Prohibition can be detrimental to the
society around it but you can't solve the problems with gut instinct.

~~~
undersuit
Just because it's an online website hosted on Tor doesn't make it completely
unique. We've had black markets before, and we have research on what black
markets do.

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yc1010
I doubt the FBI cares, lets not forget that for a long time they put a blind
eye on organized crime (Mafia etc) while spending 100% of their resources
looking for communists in every bush.

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Havoc
Not sure I agree. Nobody is putting that genie back into the bottle no matter
what they do & by extension this supposed "benefit" is also not affected imo.

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Tloewald
How the _Washington Post_ these days seems to have become _random_ (in the
excellent sense that Bill Gates uses the term).

~~~
GotAnyMegadeth
> in the excellent sense that Bill Gates uses the term

Which sense is that?

~~~
Tloewald
Random is his worst put down -- someone who is consistently wrong actually
conveys information.

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stefantalpalaru
_Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus!_

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spacemanmatt
This is why "law enforcement" is a bankrupt concept. It does not care about
safety or rights. It is a tool for kings.

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pistle
"A strong argument can be made..." but the OP never does such a thing nor
contextualize it, so linkbait it is.

The title is breezed over, as a topic, in the article. Looks more like WP
blogger likes to get high and is miffed.

~~~
Multics
Cool _ad hominem_ , bro.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Not true - its the content vs the title that's being criticized. Which strikes
to the heart of what 'linkbait' means. Or is calling out linkbait considered
'ad hominem' and thus gets a free pass now?

