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.
Growing up, my family was friends with a guy who later became a murderer. He seemed like a good guy at the time (had a cool model train setup in his basement) if a bit curmudgeonly.
The whole thing was a tragedy, and I believe he was at least a little bit mentally ill by that point. Sad.
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...) 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.
If you think 'the nth amendment' is more effectful than than any other ad copy, then you haven't been paying attention.
> he’d [DEA agent] loved the physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a tactical vest, clearing some broke-down row house on some broke-down block and catching some dealer in the bathroom, cuffing the guy before he could wipe his ass
In a just society, this criminal would be in jail or mental hospital (if he couldn't control his aggression). In ours, he's given a badge and a gun.
Federal lawl enforcement organizations lost legitimacy decades ago, if they even ever had it (eg DEA, ATF). They should not be judged on the bad actors they do catch, but by the ones they create and the victims they steamroll with impunity (even a stopped clock is right twice a day). The only recourse a sane person has is to avoid helping, promoting, funding, or otherwise supporting their existence.
I'd rather our society not fall apart, but the feedback loop became disconnected quite some time ago. The longer this cancer goes on, the uglier the transition.
> “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.
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.
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.
As I understand it the point isn't to prosecute for those drugs, as the recipient would have the defence of no guilty knowledge. Instead its to justify the search warrant, which merely requires probable cause that the drugs are on site.
This is why if you are purchasing something illegal online and shipping with USPS, you're supposed to wait a couple weeks to open the package. You're also not supposed to sign for these packages either, so getting them shipped to a personal mail box is usually better.
You can claim you didn't know there were drugs in the package if you don't open it and don't sign for it.
Most people would open any package addressed to them, regardless of knowing who it was from.
The idea that opening a package implies that you know its contents is yet another dubious legal fiction used to transmute the rule of law into the rule of gangs.
Opening a package addressed to you is not a crime.
Opening a package addressed to you with illegal items can leave you open to possession charges if you don't immediately report the items.
There is some grey area involving whether or not you should know they are illegal, and is entirely up for interpretation - being gifted a bouquet of poppies is still different than holding on to a pillbox of opiates though.
Immediately "report" - to whom? Of course I know the programmed response you're implying. But it's based on having an above-the-law ambient authority that does not exist in our basic legal system. Furthermore, the idea that a person is obligated to report anything at all to police is an anathema to a free society.
By doing anything other than destroying it themselves, the recipient is engaging in conspiracy and distribution. You're also assuming they can quickly identify what the substance is, and also immediately understand every applicable law. Of course we're out in the weeds here, since we've accepted the premise that simply possessing a substance (with no mens rea) can be a criminal act!
In an environment of legal contradictions you're never in the clear - you can only kowtow to the biggest gang and hope they're merciful. But let us not corrupt our own sanity by internalizing their farcical justifications.
It's not, though. He ordered the drugs, meaning that all the needed was confirmation that it was really him that ordered the drugs - signing for the package is enough evidence. That's enough for an arrest anyways, and probably enough for probable cause.
Can we stop jerking about how the cops are the REAL criminals here? DPR was in no way a good person.
>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?
It's not that it's hard to do, it's that the author and the publication decided not to write it that way.
This is what's called a feature story, it's the classic form in which long form monthly magazines tell stories. If you don't like this form of writing there are many other styles available to you, such as the very neutral and factual NY Times or AP style, or the more conversational style popularized by blogs, for example.
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"?
This is certainly not what most people prefer. People enjoy embellishment and emotions demonstrated in storytelling.
But I guess it can depend a lot in the skill of the storyteller. Something most people are not good at these days because we don't require good storytelling as much as we did pre-technology days.
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 ?
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.
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.
>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?
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?
I'm of the opinion that the brain is very plastic. I feel like if you surround yourself with enough things that run contrary to your current beliefs your surroundings will leak in, without you being aware of this change at all. Psychologists have already shown that things such as violent media have immediate effects on the psyche, why would opinions etc. be any different?
I've noticed that with lies I maintain personally, I start to believe them over time. This is why Eliezer (LessWrong) is so against lying - it's hard enough to reach the truth when you're explicitly trying, let alone when you sabotage it on purpose. With lies I need to keep, history starts rewriting itself. I remember things differently than reality. OTOH, that's how I maintain a few secrets (nothing that useful really) - I "truly" believe them when taking to friends and family.
This might be why it's so hard for people to maintain cover. In this article, we see Ross dying to tell people. Now if he had been involved with a BTC exchange and done a few illegal things, I dunno, would that be enough? He could let that slip without letting on more. But it's super hard and I suck at it, so...
I'm sure real agents have better training and ways to cope. It'd be cool to see training materials.
You have to live your cover just like in the Americans TV series and in real life one uk based KGB agent ran a very successful fruit machine company - he apparently joked he was the only millionaire KGB officer.
40 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 3038 ms ] threadI 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.
It blew my mind when I first encountered it.
Growing up, my family was friends with a guy who later became a murderer. He seemed like a good guy at the time (had a cool model train setup in his basement) if a bit curmudgeonly.
The whole thing was a tragedy, and I believe he was at least a little bit mentally ill by that point. Sad.
If you are thinking that this looks like an end-run round the fourth amendment, then you have been paying attention.
> he’d [DEA agent] loved the physical thrill of bursting through a door at 6 am in Doc Martens and a tactical vest, clearing some broke-down row house on some broke-down block and catching some dealer in the bathroom, cuffing the guy before he could wipe his ass
In a just society, this criminal would be in jail or mental hospital (if he couldn't control his aggression). In ours, he's given a badge and a gun.
Federal lawl enforcement organizations lost legitimacy decades ago, if they even ever had it (eg DEA, ATF). They should not be judged on the bad actors they do catch, but by the ones they create and the victims they steamroll with impunity (even a stopped clock is right twice a day). The only recourse a sane person has is to avoid helping, promoting, funding, or otherwise supporting their existence.
I'd rather our society not fall apart, but the feedback loop became disconnected quite some time ago. The longer this cancer goes on, the uglier the transition.
> “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.
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.
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://www.vice.com/read/i-interviewed-the-fraudster-who-fra...
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybe...
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.
You can claim you didn't know there were drugs in the package if you don't open it and don't sign for it.
The idea that opening a package implies that you know its contents is yet another dubious legal fiction used to transmute the rule of law into the rule of gangs.
Opening a package addressed to you with illegal items can leave you open to possession charges if you don't immediately report the items.
There is some grey area involving whether or not you should know they are illegal, and is entirely up for interpretation - being gifted a bouquet of poppies is still different than holding on to a pillbox of opiates though.
By doing anything other than destroying it themselves, the recipient is engaging in conspiracy and distribution. You're also assuming they can quickly identify what the substance is, and also immediately understand every applicable law. Of course we're out in the weeds here, since we've accepted the premise that simply possessing a substance (with no mens rea) can be a criminal act!
In an environment of legal contradictions you're never in the clear - you can only kowtow to the biggest gang and hope they're merciful. But let us not corrupt our own sanity by internalizing their farcical justifications.
Can we stop jerking about how the cops are the REAL criminals here? DPR was in no way a good person.
>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?
This is what's called a feature story, it's the classic form in which long form monthly magazines tell stories. If you don't like this form of writing there are many other styles available to you, such as the very neutral and factual NY Times or AP style, or the more conversational style popularized by blogs, for example.
But I guess it can depend a lot in the skill of the storyteller. Something most people are not good at these days because we don't require good storytelling as much as we did pre-technology days.
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 ?
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.
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.
... 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?
Also, you might find this interesting: http://www.seeing-i.co.uk/
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
This might be why it's so hard for people to maintain cover. In this article, we see Ross dying to tell people. Now if he had been involved with a BTC exchange and done a few illegal things, I dunno, would that be enough? He could let that slip without letting on more. But it's super hard and I suck at it, so...
I'm sure real agents have better training and ways to cope. It'd be cool to see training materials.