Silk Road forums

and yes, it does matter if your ISP can see you're using Tor, just ask Jeremy Hammond the lulzsec hax0r that ended up in prison because the FBI agents parked down the block triangulated his wireless signal and timed when he signed on to tor and when his nym popped in on Sabu's snitch IRC channel

It's not like they were going around pen tapping every Tor user until they found Hammond. They knew who to pen tap in the first place. If used properly, Tor will prevent you from being identified. Hammond got busted because he ran his mouth and revealed too many personal details. So don't do that, on this forum or anywhere else.

Hammond also had a persistent presence on the IRC channel, which made a low tech correlation attack on him easy. That is considerably harder if you're posting on a forum or sending emails, or just browsing around.

Lastly, Hammond was involved in multiple hacks on high value targets, including stealing a million dollars through fraudulent credit card charges. LE won't be doing that kind of investigation on people buying a few pills over the internet. What happened to Hammond should not be in your threat model.

See, now someone like this I don't mind helping.

The two most important things you need to learn are how to get bitcoins safely and how to use PGP. Bitcoins will depend on where you live, there will be different exchanges and ways of going about it. However, Bitinstant has been the most popular method for a few months. A lot of people send their coins through several ewallets, but I recommend using a proper mixing service or two.

For PGP, if you're on Windows, here's a good starting guide:

http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=131.0

(Although a few experts on the forum recommend using GPG4USB instead of PGP4Win, but you can switch later. That guide is good for a start.)

Once you have your keys, you can ask someone to send you encrypted messages in PGP Club, which is here

http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=30938.0

Your vendor should take care of discreet packaging, you just need to pick a shipping location and PGP encrypt that address when you send it to the vendor.

Read the reviews. Many of them will tell you about the quality of the product, packaging methods, etc. I'd say spend a good week just reading reviews and settling on some vendors you want to try.

To be honest, you should be fine if you simply delete the files. LE is not going to do a long, expensive forensic analysis of a small time drug user's hard drive. They don't have the resources, and you're not that important. You're not Bradley Manning or a terrorist or somebody involved in a multimillion dollar ponzi scheme. Those are the kinds of people where they would look in the free space of the hard drive for deleted files.

Depends on where you live and other factors. In general a few grams of marijuana is too small to bother with a controlled delivery.

Unless your ISP is actively blocking connections to the Tor network (in which case you would need bridges), you have nothing to worry about.

Guru, that's some good info you dug up, but it should be noted that a lot of Terms of Service are copy-pasted boilerplate. I've seen a lot of it in the cheap web hosting market where any teenager with $20 to spare can become a reseller. Nobody reads that stuff, least of all the service provider.

No, it won't be counted as a refund or show up in your buyer stats.