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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
If any government is willing to get you specifically your odds are always quite low, no matter if you understand IT security or not. It suddenly becomes a whole life matter. And not even terrorists with money and armies can hide completely and forever from a bigger government like the US.
The problem is that at some point you must and want to interact with other people and each time you do that you increase the chances to leave a trace or do a mistake.
Silk Road relied on Bitcoin and escrow among other things, and presumably the successor will do as well or better with payment security. So it's not quite as simple as "go where the money flows and arrest anyone selling". How do you propose to trace payments? Maybe some careless operators will be nabbed but they are already harder targets than the guy on the street corner, and those following best practices will be more elusive than that.
Kudos to these guys for undermining victimless-crime laws.
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. ;)
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.
11 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 44.5 ms ] threadThe 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?
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that at some point you must and want to interact with other people and each time you do that you increase the chances to leave a trace or do a mistake.
Kudos to these guys for undermining victimless-crime laws.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655457
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. ;)