Silk Road forums
Discussion => Shipping => Topic started by: Kappacino on March 25, 2012, 12:29 am
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I'm wondering if anyone here with the tech know-how could elaborate on the feasibility of future high tech postal scanning machines that can detect substances much more accurately than they are currently able.
As far as I am aware, not all mail is scanned anyway especially domestic packages. But I find it hard to believe that they would let anything onto a flight without first checking it at least roughly (perhaps I am wrong?)
I am under the impression that current scanning technology only allows for rough readings indicating whether something is metallic, plastic, or natural material etc, however this is only an educated guess and the research I have done so far isn't proving very fruitful. If this rough picture were true though it would mean that all types of dried fruit/mushrooms/food stuffs/etc would look exactly the same as a bag of weed under the scanner (and would therefore explain why almost all international deliveries make it through, even if they are scanned.)
However with the progression of modern technology I don't see it as too farfetched that there could be a machine that could identify the exact substances in any given package... which is something that would render the whole drug based SR enterprise redundant especially if customs agencies found a more practical way of scanning more and more incoming and outgoing items. To be honest I am paranoid enough to think this is worth consideration.
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Funny, I was researching that very thing this week. IMO the manpower that would be required to physically watch the screening process would be more than USPS can handle. They can't even handle the work load now. It would be interesting to find a non-metallic wrapper that would pass that type of screening though.
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Funny, I was researching that very thing this week. IMO the manpower that would be required to physically watch the screening process would be more than USPS can handle. They can't even handle the work load now. It would be interesting to find a non-metallic wrapper that would pass that type of screening though.
But what if no man power was required? If the entire process was automated.. The mail would only have to be loaded onto conveyors and if the machine was accurate enough it could just divert off packages that they are 100% certain contain drugs.
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I would think that there would be a lot of false positives if it was completely automated. I would HOPE the letter mailing public would get all up in arms over having their packages seized and opened based on a machine. OTOH the public constantly disappoints me, so wtf do I know hehe
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So I know this is going to sound a little Sci Fi but.... I was in the army and I did a few tours in Iraq and obviously we know theres a huge issue with Ieds and Carbombs ect. On my last tour we were being trained to use this little machine that can smell explosive materials... no fucking joke. It was extremely sensitive and I cant really remember all the mumbo jumbo, but during training they put fake c4 in a car and were like 50-75 feet away and it picked it up. they said if its windy it can go even farther due to the scent traveling down wind.
The contractors were there teaching us about it and also said they are in the process of building one that will do explosives and drugs. I think this will be the future of the mail and also airports. Im not gonna give what year this was but it was over 2.
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holy $hit, were you working for Skynet?? ;)
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So I know this is going to sound a little Sci Fi but.... I was in the army and I did a few tours in Iraq and obviously we know theres a huge issue with Ieds and Carbombs ect. On my last tour we were being trained to use this little machine that can smell explosive materials... no fucking joke. It was extremely sensitive and I cant really remember all the mumbo jumbo, but during training they put fake c4 in a car and were like 50-75 feet away and it picked it up. they said if its windy it can go even farther due to the scent traveling down wind.
The contractors were there teaching us about it and also said they are in the process of building one that will do explosives and drugs. I think this will be the future of the mail and also airports. Im not gonna give what year this was but it was over 2.
These were probably ion mobility spectrometry explosives detection systems which are already used by the USPIS and homeland security to screen mail, they are just using profiles for narcotics in addition to explosives for that use.
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Although I can't give any specifics, I know extremely wealthy people who work high up in the technology sector, and last time I was hanging out with these guys in Hong Kong just drinking and chatting about various things, the subject of future postal scanning technology came up. According to one of them who is an inventor, such technology (unfortunately completely automated :-\) IS very much in the works and at the time was already in prototype/testing stages, at least in stricter countries like Japan, Singapore and Malaysia.
This was back in 2009, so I'm not sure how things have progressed since and like I said I can't give any specifics on what companies are working on these technologies or name any names, I don't want good friends of mine whacked just for doing their jobs they legitimately think they're doing to make the world safer, to prevent explosives/uranium and biological agents and such from being sent in the mail. They don't necessarily realize it would also make it harder for people to send things like weed in the mail also, perhaps if they did they would deliberately screw up the project ;) Of course even if they were whacked it would make no difference, they have competitors meaning some company sooner or later is going to come out with more or less the same technology.
The silver lining here folks, at least for now and the near future, is that they all agreed that the technology would be far too expensive to implement on a wide scale say in a country like the US, because the government doesn't have the money to spend implementing this new, expensive to produce technology at most airports/mail sorting centers. But maybe within 10 years or so, this type of automated scanning technology might become prevalent in many countries and it will make things hard for us SR fans >:(
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great deal of information in this thread
The Art of Smuggling
http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=12208.msg114788#msg114788
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I don't think we have to be concerned with that problem here in the US as long as the shipment is domestic.
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I don't think we have to be concerned with that problem here in the US as long as the shipment is domestic.
Read my post above. Unfortunately, if technology progresses some day maybe a decade or two from now you may be wrong even with regard to domestic orders, albeit I think it will be a LONG time before you have to worry, especially when it comes to domestic orders. However, if the technology I mentioned in my above post is implemented on a nationwide scale in many countries someday, when it becomes feasible for governments to do so and the technology is cheap enough to mass produce and install, it would be used for automatically scanning post not only at airports, but domestically at major sorting centers as well. :-\
Scary thought, but hey at least it's not coming anytime soon. We also have plenty of time to think of ways to counter it ;) When I spoke with those guys who are experts about the aforementioned future technology (which already exists but for now and the near future is too expensive to manufacture/implement) we got into quite a bit of detail about it because I was intrigued to pry them for as much info as I could, not being in that sector myself.
NOTE : Edited for spelling and grammar errors, I wrote this right after waking up after sleeping only a few hours, but my points are all valid, please if anyone out there knows more about how the technology has progressed in the last few years, post articles here about it so we can all keep one step ahead.
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Hi all. I watched a natgeo docu once that showed bees and wasps doing the job of "sniffing out".
just a quick search found this http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/1027_051027_bombsniffwasps_2.html
i'm sure there's alot more info on this.
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This technology WILL exist at some point, its inevitable, the only question is when. And I think it would be very difficult to get around.
I wonder if you register a courier business you have to agree to scan all the mail. In fact yeah you must have to, otherwise big time drug traffickers could just register a courier business and then if they got caught claim that they are simply a courier service and the package does not belong to them.
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Just saw a documentary a few weeks ago by CNBC. The program was "Crime Inc.: Prescription Pills." While the show was almost entirely about American pill mills and addiction to precription meds, there was a short segment at the end that I found very interesting, about people who buy their pills online from pharmacies outside the US.
There are five international points of entry for mail coming into the US. At those facilities postal inspectors can X-ray the mail and send packages to a very well-equipped lab for analysis. The X-rayed mail shows just what's in the package. Postal inspectors found a package that was nice and flat on the outside -- about the thickness of several sheets of paper -- but had pills hidden inside. And oh yeah, no-one made a mention of having to get a warrant.
No mention of machines that sniff for illegal substances, but the X-ray technology in use was enough to pick out all sorts of "hidden" contents.
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And oh yeah, no-one made a mention of having to get a warrant.
Probably because they don't need one.
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Budgets of drug cartels are bigger than budget of US agencies to fight with drugs..
There will be always method to smuggle drugs.. only winning they can get is when they legalize drugs.. if not it's already lost fight.. anyway going back to topic.
There is a method i know.. give me 100 kg of cocaine and i can smuggle it by mail using fedex or dhl or anything else to any place in the world.. they can use dogs (that will smell nothing even if they get their noses 10 milimeteres from transformed product) , xraying it will give nothing too... even police keeping it in their hands will tell you it's not cocaine.. It's transformed in to something then after smuggling it's transofrmed to cocaine again.. This method is used by someone from years now... shipment was not sized even once.. It's all about clever using of chemistry and properities of some substances... It's not hard and expensive (if we are talking about even small 10 kg shipments) to transform it in both ways if u know how to do it.. And i am not talking about smuggling in alcohol etc (they have machines that can tell you there is cocaine inside without even opening bottle.. offcourse there is a minimum amount needed inside mixed with that alcohol or even those machines will not catch it, but i will not go into boring technical details).. or in plastic figurines... or in things made from coke (dogs would sniff it). Anyway at the moment shipments of coke are delivered by dhl , fedex etc. Before they will get really expensive equipment with really complicated process to check packages for that method (if they even do it in future in which i doubt... as this method is used for years they even know a little about it but they are doing nothing...) there will be another one..
So it's a fight in which goverments will always lose.. becasue we are always a step before them...
Sorry for my english.
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Budgets of drug cartels are bigger than budget of US agencies to fight with drugs..
There will be always method to smuggle drugs.. only winning they can get is when they legalize drugs.. if not it's already lost fight.. anyway going back to topic.
There is a method i know.. give me 100 kg of cocaine and i can smuggle it by mail using fedex or dhl or anything else to any place in the world.. they can use dogs (that will smell nothing even if they get their noses 10 milimeteres from transformed product) , xraying it will give nothing too... even police keeping it in their hands will tell you it's not cocaine.. It's transformed in to something then after smuggling it's transofrmed to cocaine again.. This method is used by someone from years now... shipment was not sized even once.. It's all about clever using of chemistry and properities of some substances... It's not hard and expensive (if we are talking about even small 10 kg shipments) to transform it in both ways if u know how to do it.. And i am not talking about smuggling in alcohol etc (they have machines that can tell you there is cocaine inside without even opening bottle.. offcourse there is a minimum amount needed inside mixed with that alcohol or even those machines will not catch it, but i will not go into boring technical details).. or in plastic figurines... or in things made from coke (dogs would sniff it). Anyway at the moment shipments of coke are delivered by dhl , fedex etc. Before they will get really expensive equipment with really complicated process to check packages for that method (if they even do it in future in which i doubt... as this method is used for years they even know a little about it but they are doing nothing...) there will be another one..
So it's a fight in which goverments will always lose.. becasue we are always a step before them...
Sorry for my english.
Salomon, you are a BADASS and a LEGEND. My hat is off to you sir, much respect. I LOVE that there are always people, like the Cartels as you mentioned, who are always 1 STEP AHEAD AT LEAST ahead of the feds. Your english is very good, I appreciate you sharing with us your experiences and insider knowledge on this interesting subject. Keep fighting the good fight man for our side and bringing us users our product ;)
Best wishes & I wish for Santa Muerte to bring you good luck in the future also. Salud!
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So I know this is going to sound a little Sci Fi but.... I was in the army and I did a few tours in Iraq and obviously we know theres a huge issue with Ieds and Carbombs ect. On my last tour we were being trained to use this little machine that can smell explosive materials... no fucking joke. It was extremely sensitive and I cant really remember all the mumbo jumbo, but during training they put fake c4 in a car and were like 50-75 feet away and it picked it up. they said if its windy it can go even farther due to the scent traveling down wind.
The contractors were there teaching us about it and also said they are in the process of building one that will do explosives and drugs. I think this will be the future of the mail and also airports. Im not gonna give what year this was but it was over 2.
I can confirm this first-hand.
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think there's soomething called metal laminate bags those will work to counter it i believe
if the military/gov't gets new scanner technology, they also get new technology to counter it for themselves. it's just a simple matter of acquiring that tech or modelling it
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Wow, nearly everybody in the thread is barking up the wrong tree, no disrespect, just from the numbers point of view alone. The government is really not this powerful, hell, nothing is.
The technology available to detect drugs with 100% accuracy *already exists*, and has existed for many years. Yaosh and the other guy can attest to that. You can detect down to a nanogram of drug residue without difficulties with a machine that costs a couple of thousand dollars. Ion spec is a very cool piece of gear.
There are at least three basic problems that prevent it being implemented, one of which is intractable short of Orwellian governmental measures.
First the obvious:
1. The logistics problem. The technology, even completely automated, takes at least 1 second to work, 15 seconds to a few minutes is far more common today. So, there are at least two hundred billion pieces of mail traveling around the States per year. That's just for standard USPS, nothing else.
Think about that. If each piece of mail was scanned, 1 second per piece of mail, that would be two hundred billion seconds, which is = 6,337 years.
Clearly an efficiency upgrade is required, ahem, about 3 orders of magnitude. And the detection of drugs is just the beginning of the logistics problems for the post office, think of the procedures the post office needs to do next. They need to dust for fingerprints, run lab IDs, file paperwork. Even if drugs represent a vanishing small amount of the mail and there is no false positives, that means a backlog to end all backlogs.
Second, the non-trivial:
2. Let's say it takes 1 microsecond to scan each piece of mail, one millionth of a second. Now it takes 2 or 3 days to scan everything. LEO goes 'yay us', time to put boots on the desk and take a well earned break?
Nope.
Drug residue is like DNA, it kinda gets everywhere, which is why the first thing forensic scientists worry about is contaminating crime scenes or samples. Cash money is 80% - 95% of the time having detectable amounts of cocaine on it. Also weed and MDMA, but to a lesser extent. Now, people post cash in the post in Europe, the USA, all the time. So... Hello Mr False Positive times a zillion.
Remember, the smart vendors on SR are using HDPP plastic, vaccum packing and heat sealing it several times. The amount of drug particulate leaving the packages per second is measured in the tens or hundreds of nanograms. It gets worse over time and in hot climates, but it's still an extremely small trace amount. The most common way vendor packages get picked up by drug detectors, is their package handling procedures aren't done in the right order or in the correct way, and this is easily fixed by adopting a rigorous packaging procedure. I call these vendors "reverse package profiling engineers", because it's actually more sophisticated than most people imagine. People carelessly slinging dope into ziplock bags will eventually get caught. A proper vendor has a defined cleanroom-like staging area to package and looks a bit like one of those scientists from the Andromeda Strain.
Ok, so you, LEO, outlaw cash in the mail. Problem solved? No. There's still dozens of vectors for drug residue to innocently enter the mail system and gum up the works. And even if that was not the case...
3. If our economy is threatened by hyper-aggressive LE action, we will begin the biggest and most organized drug bombing campaign in history.
By drug bombing, I simply mean trivial amounts of cocaine, MDMA, powered weed, all the popular drugs, are ground down to an incredibly fine power, much finer than normally found. This can be done at a centralized location by dispersing hundreds of 'care packages' across the world to friends or just as easily by simply requesting that our army of fellow travelers, which in fact outnumber LE forces thousands to one, follow a procedure with a fractional amount of their personal DOC cache.
1. Grind DOC down to a fine powder or open your care package.
2. Deposit contents at every post box, every letter box in your area.
3. The fine particulate will spread from mail item to mail item, contaminating the entire bag.
4. The sorting machinery becomes contaminated over time, and spreads the residue to previously clean mail from untouched bags.
5. The entire mail network becomes covered in an invisible, fine, layer of drug residues.
6. The drug detection machines and dogs become almost useless. So much cocaine.
Prizes to be awarded for mail stoppages, crazed politicians in your area, and a SR fund for retirement shelter homes for Fido(s) who experience unemployment.
tldr; Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahaha.
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Damn pine, I love you. Gave me hope that my grandkids will use SR as well in the future.
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Don't underestimate the amount of $$ and technology the US government can throw at a perceived problem. After the nutbags in Yemen tried to mail time-bombs to the USA there I heard that the DHS had bought IMS scanners for searching incoming mail for bombs. Don't know any additional details and my web search didn't turn up much.
Anyways, at the very least USPS is was looking into them long before the bomb thing: www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/199048.pdf
Pine is right that there's too much mail to scan everything, but they can certainly focus on incoming international packages. (that's what I'd do)
The most recent models of IMS scanners and now these new micro-sized mass specs work fast enough that you could easily scan the packages coming off a plane or out of a container without causing to much delay. As time goes on these scanners get better & cheaper... and there ARE methods to discriminate between bagged drugs (or explosives) and surface contamination. Surface contamination tends to very quickly loose the outgas products that have the highest vapor pressure while bagged drugs emit them at a near constant rate for weeks on end. So based on the spectra you observe you can likely tell the difference.
Highly crystalline bagging materials can control outgassing of everything to below IMS & Mass-spec detection (they'll pass dog sniffs too) but next-generation X-ray imaging systems can (crudely) characterize materials. These tools can enable many countries to more effectively select packages for further identification.
This all costs $$ though and nobody in congress is hell-bent on spending billions on shutting down the postal drug trade... however, if a package bomb or incendiary device mailed by a terrorist drops a cargo plane (or a passenger plane carrying cargo) you can bet drug interception rates will skyrocket because they'll be looking for explosives much more.
The smartest thing the DEA/Postal Inspectors/FBI can do to impact the mailed drug trade: Increase inspection rates and deploy IMS scanners on all incoming international packages over 1oz. And for domestic: Cameras Cameras Everywhere. Put cameras in mailboxes, put cameras near mailboxes, put cameras in and around every post office, put those automated license reading cameras on roads leading to/from every mailbox or post office. Computers/Software/camera technology is good enough now to make it feasible to get store and process high-res shots of every package and it's sender. Use random inspections, with dogs, imagers, and scanners to hope for random hits. Make a few special investigation teams to specifically target SR sellers and track those packages back to the zips they were mailed from, pull whatever image data you can and mine it against the package image and against every drivers license and mug shot photo in the country. Gather data for a while, build as many cases as you can, get search warrants, then bust bust bust.
It might not be possible to pull that off right now, but with enough determination, $$, technology, and manpower I'm certain they could nab a handful of domestic drug-by-mail sellers.
Over time automated postal security will get better and better, but how difficult it'll be to get past it is anybodys guess.
Anyways, for now just don't be low hanging fruit: Don't use plastic bagging, keep it clean, be discreet, and learn your lessons from whoever does get busted.
Best Regards
Bob
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God I love Pine's "drug bombing" idea. I kind of doubt many people would jump on board and actually do it. Then again, with the help of the internet and social networking, if a movement like that caught on and spread via places like Reddit and elsewhere, maybe it could happen. If people would get as worked up about our cause as they did when we had the internet blackout in protest of SOPA, we could make some serious magic happen and accomplish stage 6 of Pine's vision: The drug detection machines and dogs become almost useless.
Actually, SR could be the start of such a reality. If SR grows enough, maybe we can overwhelm LE with an avalanche of drug molecules flowing throughout every post office in the country. The more people that use SR, the smaller the target each of us becomes - they can't arrest EVERYONE who uses drugs in America, or half of everyone would be in jail. And if you count the LEGAL drugs that people use and abuse, like alcohol, after the cops have arrested everyone and their mothers, they would have to then arrest and incarcerate themselves, and THAT I would love to see.
I am thrilled to see such smart people on SR. I find that very encouraging, especially as a buyer, to know that my seller is not a nincompoop. And btw, I chose my first vender very carefully to make sure of just that, and I think I chose very wisely - FarmerBob sounds intelligent and he knows his shit. I've read many of his posts and what sold me on him among other things, was his use of moister barrier bags, his attention to detail and use of extreme caution, not to mention his friendly vibe.