Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: gCIf9H01Dd7wMu14zpw4 on May 17, 2012, 02:15 pm
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So I cant help shake the feeling of too good to be true regarding SR.
I mean anyone can spend 5 seconds on Google to find out about this place, so I'd assume LEA
would be all over the place here.
How do you know when you're buying something on here, it isn't an LEA selling it using a bunch of dummy
accounts to post comments to appear as legitimate.
They say your address only appears once, but that's all it takes to know exactly who you are and where you live.
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Chance are LE aren't going to waste their resources catching 1gram a week buyers.
Even if they had your address what would they do with it? Break your door down for a gram of coke?
Their efforts are also pretty much useless the other way around, i.e. acting as a buyer. How could they possibly find out who sent them the drugs? There are obviously ways such as noting return address, identifying the return and watching for activity within a specified radius.
Dank
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Chance are LE aren't going to waste their resources catching 1gram a week buyers.
Even if they had your address what would they do with it? Break your door down for a gram of coke?
I don't know, why wouldn't they?
If they had an address and knew it was going there, seems easy enough to notify local LEA for that.
Seems people get arrested for a lot more petty offenses than that.
I don't commit felonies on a daily basis so I'm not totally up to snuff on these subjects.
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I'm by no means an expert in this field!
Just saying I can't see them pumping much of our taxes into catching somebody who's going to receive a maximum of a year for possession so to speak.
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Well said dankungsdun,
The Police have limited resources (20% less if you're in the UK!) and when you add up the amount of controlled drugs available on SR it's a drop in the ocean compared to drugs being sold via SR.
Would you dedicate resources to some convoluted sting all in the interest of obtaining an address which may or may not stand up in court as evidence that someone attempted to buy drugs? When you take into account sellers come from all over the world, you begin to realise how wide ranging such an operation would be!
The dealers on Silk Road do not accidentally kill children in the crossfire when competing for places where they can sell their customers.
Those same customers don't die as a result of mixed quality drugs from the same seller - any user can check a vendor's feedback to make sure that narcotics are consistently of the same purity.
People don't start petitions and protest groups about Silk Road hanging around outside schools and selling drugs to kids.
You can probably see where I'm going with this! Policing resources are dictated by public pressure, not necessarily the severity of the crime. Google "Missing White Woman Syndrome" if you need more proof of this.
As such I think the Police consider drug dealers on here a very small piece of a very large pie.
V.
I'm by no means an expert in this field!
Just saying I can't see them pumping much of our taxes into catching somebody who's going to receive a maximum of a year for possession so to speak.
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Don't let your own beliefs cloud your perception of your enemies beliefs, this is called mirror imaging and it is bad for security. The vibe I get from your post is that you think because you think that the dealers on SR are not anywhere near as what you see as bad as the average street dealer, that LE will focus their resources on the average street dealers. You assume that law enforcement shares two similar beliefs. the definition of what is bad (although all of the evidence shows that they do not agree with your definition of bad), and the extent to which various activities differ in their 'badness'. You also have the premise that the government has the primary desire of ending what they see as bad things from happening, and this is pretty iffy as a lot of them are undoubtedly primarily concerned with obtaining and maintaining power and wealth. Merely by being seen by many as being outside the power of government, SR becomes a target of government, for reasons that have nothing to do with drugs or morality.
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Excellent post kmfkewm
However, given that the previous post seems to be from the UK, I'd like to point out that LE in the UK and Europe generally does not have the same historic ideological commitment to drug prohibition that US LE does...
If you don't believe me then just consider the historic and instiutional differences. In the US we have not one but two major insitutions that are historically very focussed on drug prohibition. The FBI was more or less invented just to enforce prohibition and when alcohol prohibition failed then drug prohibition was the most obvious role for it to adopt. The DEA still only exists to enforce drug prohibition. The officers of these agencies are trained to internalize a balnket anti-drugs ideology from day one.
In the UK there are no equivalents to these institutiutions. Drug enforcement is the job of dedicated teams from within local police forces, the members of which can easily be re-deployed to other duties if drug enforcement becomes a low priority, none of whom having started their careers as specifically-trained anti-drug agents. There is no national anti-drugs agency. Privately, and occasionally publicly, most UK LE at all levels regard drug prohibition as a failed policy which has been foisted on the police by reactive governments who are too scared to face down the prohibition-hysterial lobby in the press. I'm not saying UK LE are nice people. A lot of them are mean, selfish, racist violent thugs who are used as a tool of quasi-military repression by the state during times of political conflict (sorry if this offends any UK LE who are reading, but you know I'm right - you know the TSGs are full of psychos...).
That's not to say a crack-down in the UK is impossible. But it's important for us to understand the nature of the threat. There are two main reasons why it might happen. One would be pressure from the US. The other would be a hysteria campaign from the newspapers. So far the latter has really failed ot materialize depsite the best efforts of the worst sections of the tabloid press.
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SR is only as safe as YOU make it to be. If you take the proper precautions it can be safe. For your instance, worried about law enforcement being vendors, theres an easy way around this one. Most of the negative attention for this website started around june/july 2011, and it would take some time for LEO to get set up on here. It would be safe to say that before this time, there were probably not any LEO vendors. That being said, I personally, would ONLY order from very reputable, LONG time vendors, currently the figure is probably 8-9 months. If they havent been around that long, they are suspect. Sorry new vendors, but you will ALWAYS be suspect on here, no matter what you try to do. It's just not set up for you to prosper in the current situation. Also there have been cases where the vendors keep your address longer than what is stated they do, to answer your second question. So heres a few tips, use PGP ALWAYS, flush your DNS cache often, only order from LONG TIME vendors, and don't order from NL at all. These should take care of most of your concerns. If you're buying bitcoins, id use moneypaks, or bitinstant to email (coinapult). Do NOT use Dwolla/MTGOX for any reason. Do NOT use any bitcoin service where you HAVE to give your real name or other personal information. Do not use your own bank account to transfer funds to bitcoin vendors on SR. DO YOUR HOMEWORK, check reviews, I personally believe if something doesnt show up, you've been selectively scammed. It happens. The vendor gets free money, many NL vendors do this. I would lurk for a couple of weeks to check things out before ordering anything. Be safe at home and never get complacent, always suspect everyone, never trust anyone.
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...and you've been on SR what, 2 days?
Need I remind you that one of the most notorious vendors on SR who took off with everyone's money and address details was also one of the oldest? Or was that before your time too?
As a newer vendor, I have worked hard to help people new to the forum and I resent the implication I am untrustworthy!
V.
SR is only as safe as YOU make it to be. If you take the proper precautions it can be safe. For your instance, worried about law enforcement being vendors, theres an easy way around this one. Most of the negative attention for this website started around june/july 2011, and it would take some time for LEO to get set up on here. It would be safe to say that before this time, there were probably not any LEO vendors. That being said, I personally, would ONLY order from very reputable, LONG time vendors, currently the figure is probably 8-9 months. If they havent been around that long, they are suspect. Sorry new vendors, but you will ALWAYS be suspect on here, no matter what you try to do. It's just not set up for you to prosper in the current situation. Also there have been cases where the vendors keep your address longer than what is stated they do, to answer your second question. So heres a few tips, use PGP ALWAYS, flush your DNS cache often, only order from LONG TIME vendors, and don't order from NL at all. These should take care of most of your concerns. If you're buying bitcoins, id use moneypaks, or bitinstant to email (coinapult). Do NOT use Dwolla/MTGOX for any reason. Do NOT use any bitcoin service where you HAVE to give your real name or other personal information. Do not use your own bank account to transfer funds to bitcoin vendors on SR. DO YOUR HOMEWORK, check reviews, I personally believe if something doesnt show up, you've been selectively scammed. It happens. The vendor gets free money, many NL vendors do this. I would lurk for a couple of weeks to check things out before ordering anything. Be safe at home and never get complacent, always suspect everyone, never trust anyone.