If you were going to the internet to buy drugs, you might have to find a new dealer: <a class="postlink" href="http://gizmodo.com/feds-seize-silk-road-everybodys-favorite-illegal-drug-1440172693" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://gizmodo.com/feds-seize-silk-road ... 1440172693</a> Feds seized the domain for the Silk Road, the largest drug repository on the internet. They sold other, uh, services, but by far the largest was controlled substances -- the indictment suggests that they did the equivalent of 1.2B in business.* Focus: What are your thoughts on TOR(Virtually anonymous web)/Silk Road/etc.? Subfocus: Your thoughts on the ready availability of drugs. *No way it's actually that much because of rapid inflation, but the point is that it's a lot
See people want to be able traffic drugs, illegal pornography, and other contraband without persecution and they wonder why the NSA is monitoring their shit. I'm not a proponent of drugs, never have been and never will be; there just isn't an upside and the downside is much more detrimental than alcohol. Do want you want to do, but stop bitching if the hammer drops. It's illegal, and you know it's illegal. Write your congressman and cry about it or use at will and accept the risk. Either way, shut the fuck up about it.
When I can't even link a youtube video in a message board properly I take a look at sites like silk road and figure I'd be arrested the second a hit the buy button. Like any black market people will figure their way around this. I'll just stick to vouched for super hippies for my illegal drug consumption.
On a broader scale, it's more of the same. The Feds are trying to provide supply-based solution for a demand-based problem. It's the whole reason why the WOD is a colossal failure and has been since the "war" was declared. Of course, it's a fantastic way to limit our civil liberties by decrying that surrendering our rights makes children safe, as well as further militarize local law enforcement. People want drugs. People buy drugs. This will do little to curtail the supply and nothing to slow the demand. On the other hand, take a look at the decline in the number of tobacco smokers over the past fifty years. For all practical purposes, supply stayed the same but demand dropped. A societal switch got thrown and people stopped smoking en masse. Of course, people still smoke but it's a fraction of what it used to be. Duplicate that societal shift and the war on drugs will win itself.
Sure, the drugs are the main item, but you could buy child pornography or literally hire a hitman on Silk Road. They can't exactly be surprised that a site whose entire premise is "Hey, want to do illegal things?" ran afoul of the Feds. The theoretical difference between this and Napster was that theoretically it was shielded by reliance on the Deep Web and Tor, but betting on outsmarting the Feds more than once with technology is a sucker's game. They will always out-tech you.
Too bad. They had good molly. Ah well. Napster died, but then we got kazaa, limewire, and torrenting. The show will go on.
It wasn't an "out-teching" that got the guy caught, it was him being an absolutely stupid idiot. He advertised Silk Road using a message board account tied to his real-name gmail, which got him flagged as a person of interest. All the rest was pretty basic police work and him making really stupid mistakes. Anybody with a willingness to do a little digging could have found this guy. Something similar will come back, run by somebody not quite as dumb. Using Tor and bitcoins properly makes tracking extremely difficult, and with the amount of money made off of it before it was seized it's only a matter of time.
I've never used Silk Road, so I may be missing the question about the Napster difference. Bands legally created music and you could legally buy their CD; Napster was used to (illegally?) share copies of that music, that the Bands (or record labels) claimed they owned, and were being denied profit by missing sales. For the drugs, Silk Road facilitated transactions for illegal products - illegal to produce and illegal to sell and illegal to possess. None of those things apply to the original CDs in the Napster example. (Unless you walked into a store and stole the CD.) Furthermore, after the drug transaction took place, was anyone denied their profit from the product they produced because of that transaction? Napster was set up to share legal music. Silk Road allowed selling of illegal drugs. I don't see anything similar to Napster.
I had a friend use it for fake id's in sophomore year of college with no problems. He showed me all the shit they had on there. Lot of drugs, one guy was selling a full-on british citizenship that included papers and being put into the system electronically through i guess their DMV for like $20k. I agree that there will be another version of this up soon. Too profitable to keep someone from having a go at it. I'm of the opinion that weed will be legal fairly soon, and so having that widely available isn't really a big deal. Stuff like meth/crack/heroin is sketchy enough to keep most people away anyway. I think there should be an emphasis on safety/enforcement for the lab-made/synthetic drugs that young people end up dying from at festivals etc.
The RCIAA doesn't dish out lawsuits for legal music, Napster's "legal" music was a façade. Anyone *ever* use Napster for legitimate reasons? Both are sites setup for illegal activites, but Napster has a cover story. If Silk Road had a cover, using the old "we provide the technology, we're not to blame for what users do with it" type mentality, maybe they'd be entangled in litigation right now as opposed to being shut down.
There are some already <a class="postlink" href="http://www.dailydot.com/crime/deep-web-silk-road-black-market-reloaded-future/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.dailydot.com/crime/deep-web- ... ed-future/</a>
There was a "documents" section that was literally all drivers licenses, passports, birth certificates, social security numbers etc. Most of it was in the couple grand range, the full on citizenship package was one of the more expensive things. Read a news article that said you could buy hitmen on there but I didn't see any of that kind of thing.
He would send PastWife. It was really a win-win: she always offered to go, she always came back with a skip in her step, and Tyquann always forgot to charge her.