Quote from: onufri on May 09, 2013, 08:23 amIt sounds like the vendor was compromised because of his poor tradecraft (per pine above) rather than because of any technical innovations on the part of the police. Human beings are extremely powerful at pattern recognition  no amount of encryption in the world is going to save you from face-to-face recognition.That's right. It is like people's perception of CCTV and facial recognition systems, they assume the computer has supernatural levels of intelligence or god-like powers when in fact it is more like a half blinded human with far too much time on its hands. In practice it is detective work that gets results, that applies whether you're an actual detective or a vendor doing his/her homework.Quote from: BajoZero on May 11, 2013, 03:18 amWhat good is a tradecraft model when faced with the classic police work of the Cybercrime Centre of Excellence? :))Quote from: Dr.Deemz on May 12, 2013, 05:10 amthese 50 are raping me. German postoffices put more work in than americansQuote from: constantskeptik on May 09, 2013, 04:10 amThe germans are too efficient, while U.S. Post offices are lame.The Germans and Japanese are both societies with a high average I.Q. They also have a culture which encourages intellectual labors. Probably those two statements are equivalent. Any race between LE agents and Darknet agents shall be more athletic than elsewhere, so you should all watch the press of those countries carefully to keep ahead.Australia is not what it seems in my opinion, it is simply that they are irrational about objects leaving and entering their country. It is not SR and the darknet markets specifically that cause a high package interception rate, it is that they are phobic about foreign things in general. They have a tendency to misallocate resources because of this, it is a general rule and not an exception. I appreciate this sounds crazy, but there is compelling stories (nothing to do with drugs or post) to suggest some Australian LE are unhinged and that a large number of Australians are only tangentially linked to reality. I like Australia and Australians, so it is with regret that I have to say that the politics of nationalism could go from dysfunctional to nasty there. Sometimes a whole society can get a contagious like madness for no apparent good reason, and I think something like that might be starting.As for America, it has huge resources dedicated to LE so it is bound to turn up results eventually regardless of how good they actually are. America's obsession with security has its roots in the fact it is a far more violent society than most of the other civilized countries. The issue of drugs with correlation/causation and so on has been conflated with violence and this is why they are also disproportionately obsessed with our method of employment. The fact of the matter is that there are some uncomfortable truths that liberals and conservatives want to avoid at all costs. The most visible drug dealers are blacks. Nobody on a television screen mentions this extremely obvious fact, but books are filled with it. They are not the most important players by a long shot. But they are by far the most violent and our culture constantly emphasizes a strange connection between machismo and drugs, even a celebratory one such the music videos on MTV. We avoid talking about this or taking it seriously as a prime motivator and concentrate on "crazy making" drugs. The liberals think the drug war is a culture war based on race, and the conservatives think that drugs cause just cause violence in society generically because they need some scapegoat and any mention of race or geography (generally speaking Southerners are (a lot) more violent than Northerners) is taboo. This is because they both want to avoid the real issue at all possible costs, which is that genetics must have something to do with violent crime as well as culture. If you combine both culture and genetics you arrive at the reason for America's unusually high rate of violent crime for a Western nation as well as the distribution patterns of crime across geography and race.Science has plenty of data to back up the reasons why violent crime occurs. None of it is inexplicable. Some cultures and races have higher levels of testosterone than others. There is no great mystery here. It is just a society in denial. Asians, Caucasians, Blacks and Hispanics don't just have different cultures, they also are just different by nature and as a result have different kinds of problems. Until we can all sit down and rationally discuss how to solve our problems without rancor, by looking purely at the data, we cannot solve our problems. This is not a "blame" game, this is a get-our-shit-together game. I mean lest we forget, although caucasians are responsible for less violent crime per capita, they are at the same time responsible for much higher levels of what I'd tag as "institutional violent crime". These are those infrequent but curiously periodic outbursts of organized violence within society. Something similar happens even more infrequently in Asian culture (this is the explanation for the "social harmony" obsession), although when it does happen it's even more dramatic. No propensity excuses the excesses of the others. Once that is realized the Drug War will end proper and we can all go home. Really we make profits because a large subsection of society is being illogical, and once our society becomes more analytical at the ground level our arbitrage points shall come closer together until they disappear.tldr; Cultural relativism and racism are equally stupid and harmful ideas in the Drug War. One is because it neglects and thinks the solution to a problem is to ignore its existence, the other because it creates social norming which generate a self fulfilling prophesy. If we really live in an Age of Reason then society needs to RTFM and look at the data head on. The real economic function of the drug vendor is to normalize prices when society gets the arithmetic wrong. It is society that has the broken model, not the vendors. And fuck that MTV shit, machismo has done nobody any favors, any smart vendor knows to avoid those kinds of people like they were carriers of airborne cancer. Thank God for SR, that's what most of us think, because without it some people would have got the chop by now, the law of averages is much more friendly on an anonymous marketplace where culture, race is irrelevant.